Binders Full of Election Memes: Participatory Culture invades the 2012 U.S. Election 1 Erhardt Graeff MIT Center for Civic Media erhardt@media.mit.edu November 18, 2014 Final Edit Participatory culture handed the 2012 U.S. presidential election season a bumper crop of political memes. These “election memes,” largely in the form of image macros, took sound bites from the candidates’ debates and speeches and turned them into “digital content units” of political satire “circulated, imitated, and/or transformed via the Internet by many users,” to paraphrase Limor Schifman’s definition of “internet meme” (2013, 177). Image macros like the lolcat, feature bold text on top of an image, often a “stock character,” and like all Internet memes are “multi-participant creative expressions through which cultural and political identities are communicated and negotiated” (Ibid.). This case study focuses on three popular image macro-based election memes that came out of the 2012 US presidential election cycle: "Fired Big Bird," "Binders Full of Women," and "You Didn't Build That," and argues that sharing such memes is a valid form of political participation in the style of what Tommie Shelby calls “impure dissent” (forthcoming). Case 1: Fired Big Bird During the televised debate on October 3, 2012, Mitt Romney discussed ways he would reduce the deficit. One of which was the government subsidy to the non- profit public broadcaster PBS. He mentions the beloved character of Big Bird in course. "I'm sorry Jim, I'm gonna stop the subsidy to PBS. [...] I like PBS, I love Big Bird, I actually like you too, but I am not gonna keep spending money on things to borrow money from China to pay for." What emerges immediately is the proliferation of image macro memes, new Twitter parody accounts, and a significant amount of media attention. 1 Citation: Graeff, Erhardt. 2015. “Binders Full of Election Memes: Participatory Culture Invades the 2012 U.S. Election.” Civic Media Project. http://civicmediaproject.org/works/civic-media-project/binders-full-of-election- memes-participatory-culture-invades-the-2012-us-election