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- Hi, aren’t you Natalia Mielczarek? The author of “The dead Syrian refugee boy goes viral: funerary Aylan Kurdi memes as tools of mourning and visual reparation in remix culture”?
- Yes! It’s nice to meet you. Wait a minute, aren’t you THE Meenashki Gigi Durham. I loved reading your article “Resignifying Alan Kurdi: news photographs, memes, and the ethics of embodied vulnerability.”
- Do you want to engage in a scholarly conversation with me?
- I’d love to!
- I completely agree with your statement about how social media can have both positive and negative influence on people’s opinions about social issues. Your view on meme representation is similar to Mette Mortensen’s idea that appropriation is necessary to the production and reception of iconic images, while allowing the possibility for context to get lost in translation.
- Thank you, I love Mortensen’s ideas. I agree with her, it's very similar to my article when I talk about how powerful the manipulation of photos are, like memes. They can create more powerful depictions and messages of single photos and transform the meaning, but that can also be a negative thing. I also noticed that in your article you mentioned how social media images and photojournalism can have an impact on political decisions. That reminds me of the time when German Chancellor Angela Merkel decided to take in refugees in 2015–2016 and former British Prime Minister David Cameron committed to welcoming 4,000 refugees to Britain as a result of memes of Alan Kurdi. Splendid stuff.
- Yes indeed. That reminds me of an article I read recently by my good friend, Laura G.E. Smith. She was detailing how, when humans view a normative conflict, a discrepancy between the way things are and the way people think they should be, they feel motivated to act. In the case of Aylan Kurdi, children being harmed is almost universally seen as unacceptable. This is one explanation for why the photo had such an impact, especially after going viral.
- Oh, what a coincidence, I read that article too! It was fascinating how they analyzed tweets at 3 different time intervals, with the last one being 10 weeks after Aylan Kurdi’s death, when social media was exploding after the terrorist attacks on Paris. The article found that people tweeting about Aylan Kurdi a week after his death were more likely to express solidarity with refugees 10 weeks after his death during the November 2015 Paris attacks.
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