Digital KOnflict

Based on a well known humorous meme template delineating the three areas affected by headache types, but hijacking it in its descriptions, with Russia being described as the largest brain area affected by the illness.

To represent her we chose a portrait made by Bruni Nikolai Alexandrovich, currently held at the State Russian Museum.
With her, in the context of the Russian invasion, the population found a special medieval role model, who personifies their bravery in the face of hardship.

The GIF has been used and identified in a Telegram channel of radical Putin supporters, sharing in their group ‘thread’ some types of propaganda narratives and imagery about the invasion in Ukraine.

Using a large set of visual data from a popular Russian social media, VK, the authors use computational content analysis to examine how the conflict was represented and interpreted both in pro-Ukrainian and pro-Russian online communities, during the peak of violence of summer 2014.

The author discusses a series of internet-culture objects (above all, memes) investigating their overall impact and proposing memes as new modes of political participation, agents of globalization and forms of grassroots popular imaginary builders.

A few weeks after the beginning of the invasion, Russian TV journalist Marina Ovsyannikova interrupts the live broadcast of her TV channel with a poster “NO WAR”, in english, and below it (in Russian), “don’t believe the propaganda. They’re lying to you here”. Just before interrupting the broadcast, the journalist shared a video on Twitter explaining the intentions behind her action.
Our item is a commentary in English by the British channel of this live action, that stunned the world and illustrated a tension between governmental propaganda by the Russian government and citizen tentatives of counter-propaganda, on national media as well as on social media.

It depicts Moscow with typical USSR icons (red stars and communist imagery, as well as the Aurora ship). It is a clear example of analog and 20th century mediatic forms of propaganda.

Ukrainian Memes Forces, a non-governmental Twitter account launched in February 2022, shared this meme to celebrate the event of having reached more than a hundred thousand followers.

Based on a 2012 US painting called “Madonna Kalashnikov”, this Saint Javelin image alters it by portraying Mary holding an anti-tank weapon (commonly known as “Javelin”), sent in large quantities by Western allies to Ukrainian forces.
Saint Javelin is described as a “concept” or “resistance”, meme from its Wikipedia entry’s description.

This book dates back to 1976 and coined the word and concept of “meme”, marking the start of the cultural studies branch of ‘Memetics’. For the evolutionary biologist, memes can be defined as small bits of culture that act as if they were individual genes. Each artifact carries with it a piece of the culture in which it was created and each gene (or meme), combined together, becomes part of a larger genome (like the DNA) which symbolically represents a social consciousness of a certain culture.