ABSTRACT
Since 2015, more than a million people, mostly from the Middle East, crossed into Europe, fleeing war, persecution and poverty in their home countries and sparking a global media discussion on the migrant and refugee crisis. This chapter explores the increasing political ambiguity of viral meme activism through the capacity of digital memes to mobilise affect. Most definitions of digital memes are derived from Richard Dawkins’ and Susan Blackmore’s memetics, where the meme is discussed as a unit of cultural information that is able to spread analogous to the genetic principles of fidelity, fecundity and longevity. The chapter draws on Tony Sampson’s critique of the deterministic neo-Darwinian logic that is attached to this tradition, suggesting instead to explore the affective and performative conditions of social relationality behind the viral workings of the memes.
