This is a meme I randomly found on twitter. The composer is unknown and that is one of the reasons I chose it as my comparison. My civic artifact was a Boss Tweed political cartoon created by Thomas Nast. Thomas Nast was a notable cartoon artist and coined “Father of the American Cartoon”. The lack of credibility the meme holds is important because it most likely reaches a larger audience even though it holds no significant value. The meme was likely created with no purpose, but a random couch potato felt he needed to voice another Trump opinion.
This meme is persuading people to see the idiotic manner of Donald Trump.
I think this artifact is interesting because it is obviously so meaningless and should have no influence on anyone’s opinions, but I bet someone was influenced by this. Meme’s often go viral just because people thought it was funny. When something is seen by so many people and has a heavy presence on the internet is likely to reach many people and influence them if they don’t have a basis to go off of. In comparison to my civic artifact, I focused on political polarization, media presence, and art quality. The political polarization comes from the credibility of the meme creator and his/her political views they are portraying. The media presence of a twitter meme and political cartoon are so different from the time period and the number of people who have access. The quality of art varies immensely, the meme requires very little effort, on the other hand, the political cartoon required actual talent and thought.
Though both artifacts are satirical pieces on the political atmosphere, I like that you choose such different pieces. It seems like you have lot of different points to address in your essay, and you’re familiar and comfortable with those points. Don’t forget to address the nature of the internet, and especially twitter. When things go viral it’s often because they’re funny, people agree with the message, or both. I also wouldn’t assume that the meme’s author is a useless couch potato, but they are certainly significantly less credible than the artist of the political cartoon.
As great as social media is, the catch is it doesn’t take too much substance to go viral. In this case, you hit the nail on the head, mentioning that the meme lacked credibility, much of an actual message, and didn’t address a specific problem or solution, but still reached thousands of eyes.