“Read the room Sweden”: Memes, trust, and vulnerability in pandemic engagement

This chapter offers a theoretical approach to the study of humorous digital memes. Using vaccination and pandemic policy memes on Reddit as examples, the chapter’s main contribution is an understanding of memes as forms of symbolic levelling that reflect and construct civic trust or distrust. Arguing for a theoretically informed methodological approach sensitive to memes’ polysemic ambiguity, several readings are identified making memes an ironic space, wherein the uncertainty characterising the pandemic context is expressed through humour. Beyond establishing varying opinions, identities, perspectives, emotions, and knowledge beliefs, ironic space encourages oscillation between analytical distance and myopia; in this case, relating especially to the deviation ascribed to Swedish pandemic policy. Hence, ironic space allows for safe negotiation of civic pandemic vulnerability, balancing the interactive foundation of democratic trust. Additionally, the chapter argues that the study of memes must include platform infrastructures and culture, as memes are both contained within and move across digital platforms - impacting processes of inclusion and exclusion characteristic of humorous expression and interaction.