Infectious Ideas and Viral Images: Questioning Immunological Metaphors in Digital Communications

Abstract

Why are images and imaginations of ‘infections’ and virality so appealing for digital communications? This article problematizes immunological metaphors by discussing a research report submitted to the United States (U.S.) Department of Defense entitled Exploring the Utility of Memes for U.S. Government Influence Campaigns (Zakem / McBride / Hammerberg 2018), in which the authors develop an epidemiological model to analyze and engage memes to ‘inoculate’, ‘infect’, and ‘treat’ the effects of adversarial messaging for influence campaigns. As work pursued in feminist/gender and critical disability studies shows, these framings of communications as ‘infectious’ resonate with immunology’s historical framing of the body as a bounded object at war with the outside world, the immune system as a normative cognitive system, and the ableist idea that sickness, disability, and queerness result from and lead to moral failures. Images of viruses and infections are present in the recent memetic alt-right trope of the Social Justice Warrior (SJW), and they echo with National Socialist (NS) propaganda posters that equated social groups with infectious diseases. Following ‘infectiousness’ as part of the basic aesthetic vocabulary of racist, anti-Semitic, and ableist ideologies, this article offers an analysis of selected alt-right memes and NS visual propaganda materials by incorporating the crip method of image descriptions into a method for analyzing contemporary memes offered by Nowotny and Reidy (2022). By critically following immunological metaphors through both textual and visual depictions I hope to show some of the concerns that arise when understanding images as ‘infectious’.