Make Lulz Not War: How online remix and meme culture are empowering civic engagement in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam

8/13/2019 Make Lulz Not War: How online remix and meme culture are empowering civic engagement in the Socialist Repub

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AbstractAlthough social media platforms have garnered much attention in recent years for their

putative role in dramatic social and political movements around the world, scholars such asClay Shirky and Ethan Zuckerman have suggested that the real potential of such tools forchange exists in the way they empower citizens to publicly articulate and debate a welter ofconflicting views throughout society. In this view, social media matters most not in the streetsand squares but in the social commons that Jurgen Habermas termed the public sphere. Newimage-based social media platforms and creative practices in Vietnam are emerging as

powerful tools in this regard, offering a voice to a citizenry who since 1975 have lived underan authoritarian, and not clearly delineated, legal order restricting the opinions and viewseligible for public expression.

In the past year, Vietnamese netizens have turned to the digital techniques of remix andmemetic culture to indirectly express and debate sentiment on issues of often sensitive socialand political relevance. Using several recent case studies, we argue that this widespread

practice constitutes a culturally-specific form of civic and political engagement that appearsto be exerting a subtle but real influence upon state policy in this rapidly developingSoutheast Asian nation.

Keywords:Vietnam, social media, memes, Asia, public sphere, Internet, Facebook, remixculture


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IntroductionMuch has been written in recent years about the capacity of the Internet and social media

platforms to mobilize political action. Many have attributed the remarkable string ofgrassroots-led uprisings across the Middle East in 2011, for example, collectively known as

the Arab Spring, to the unique capabilities of social media platforms such as text messaging,Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook in inciting, publicizing, and coordinating those populist-ledmovements.

Other commentators have been less sanguine about the usefulness of social media ineffecting political change, especially in authoritarian states with strict controls over onlinecommunications and assembly (Zuckerman 2013, Pearce 2012, Morozov 2012, Gladwell2011). They note that social media-fueled protests have failed at least as often as they havesucceeded, and that just as social media empower individuals, they also empower states tosurveil and control their citizens to unprecedented degrees.

Numerous observers have even suggested that Internet-based social media platforms mayundermine realpolitical engagement, nurturing instead a generation of slacktivists moreconcerned with self-gratification and social presentation than with actually addressingimportant political and social matters via substantive action (Morozov 2012, Christensen1, Hindman 2009, Shulman 2005, Skoric

For an increasing number of researchers and observers, however, all of these ways ofthinking about the impact of online social platforms and digital culture are missing the main

point. Netizens around the world are using these new tools and technologies to develop newparticipatory cultures of creative practice as a means of increasingly sophisticated civicengagement. A new generation of digital natives, fluent in the language of popular cultureand the rapidly shifting semiotics of 21st-century communication flows, are creating powerfulnew forms of social activism and ad hoc civil society movements online. Remix culture is

evolving from a bottom-up production of mere entertainment artefacts into a source ofinfluential social and political commentary (Shifman 2007, Lessig 2008, Knobel &Lankshear 2007). And very often their most influential expressions are appearing in the formof humor, satire, bricolage, parody, and pastiche, and are woven into the networked fabric ofonline pop culture.

In the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, where one of the th centurys bloodiest conflictsraged just over a generation ago and where, today, some 70% of the population is under theage of 35, most citizens are more interested in taking advantage of recent economic reformsto build individual prosperity than they are in fomenting revolution. Yet increased prosperityis cultivating a growing hunger for political agency in the single-party Communist state. Inthe face of severe restrictions on both traditional and online expression, netizens in Vietnam

are deploying the creativity of remix culture and the easy dissemination of memetic content,which propagate swiftly and encourage user participation, to engage in a new form of publicdiscourse regarding government policies and decisions, individual public officials, andinstitutionalized processes. In doing so, they appear to operate outside of both legal andnormative restrictions against expressions critical of the state and against displays of evenloosely organized civil society. Despite this, the creation and propagation of such contentgrew exponentially in 2013 and has become a popular form of online expression there.

We examine two distinct case studies to describe the emerging remix-based and memeticspaces and practices in Vietnams online communities We also suggest that these new spacesand practices appear to be exerting a subtle but real influence upon the state in a mannerconsistent with that presupposed by Habermas theory of a public sphere

Both case studies are close examinations of a selection of the many memes and creativeremix artefacts that have been (and continue to be) generated and disseminated online


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regarding two well-publicized news events in Vietnam in 2013. The first case relates to theperceived missteps of Vietnams Minister of Health throughout the latter half of as herdepartment has struggled through a series of public health setbacks and scandals. The secondis the flurry of online memetic activity critical of a last-minute ban by the Ministry ofCommunication of a locally-produced action film entitledBui Doi Cho Lon(The Street

Children of Cho Lon) in mid-

Social Media and the Public SphereIn his seminal 1962 work The Transformation of the Public Sphere, Habermas articulated thenotion of the public sphere as a broad variety of discursive arenas in which news and mattersof common concern could be freely exchanged and discussed by ordinary citizensa realmof social life in which public opinion can be formed and thereby influence political actionand matters of state (Asan 1999, Habermas 1991).

Although traditional mass media may be considered part of the public sphere, even inostensibly free societies they are also a powerfully regulated forum of low-participatory

communication which systematically privileges powerful and institutionalized actors whileexcluding smaller institutions and civil society, all of which essentially circumvents publicdebate: a primary point of Habermas writing on the subject (Habermas 1991). This appearsto be especially true in authoritarian states such as the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, wherethe party centrally controls all traditional media channels.

Scholars and Internet commentators such as Manuel Castells and Clay Shirky haveasserted that the true significance of the Internet and social media for political change is to beseen in the way these open, networked tools empower people and organizations to privatelyand publicly articulate and debate a welter of conflicting views throughout society.According to this view, social media matters most not in the streets but in the myriad spacesof Habermas public sphere (Castells 997, Shirky

The Internet would seem to provide for a significantly more effective public sphere thantraditional mass media, returning to ordinary citizens the power of wide public debate and thesubsequent formation of public opinion. Pacharissi (2002), for example, finds that theInternet and related technologies have managed to create a new public sphere for politicaldiscussion, particularly insofar as it provides a participatory space for myriad counterpublicsthat have been excluded from mainstream political discourse. In societies where thetraditional media is in partial or total thrall to state control, the Internet and social media

platforms can become powerful arenas in the process of allowing public opinion to form fromthe bottom up, rather than from the top down, thereby exerting a measurable if indirectinfluence upon affairs of state.

Although theories of the public sphere are most often associated with democratic political

participation and traditions of state legitimacy, which derive from an enfranchised citizenryand a free and open marketplace of ideas, numerous scholars and observers have identified

public spheres in operation within distinctly non-democratic states.In examining the nature of the political impact of Chinas estimated million blogs, for

example, Xiao (2011) has pointed to the role of bloggers there in the emergence of a quasi-public sphere in which state control is criticized and collective action can be mobilized. Otherresearchers have found the Internet, and in particular the explosive popularity of Twitter-likeweibo (ie microblog platforms there, have made it more difficult for the Chinese state tocontrol the free flow of information and is thus creating an open, democratic forum thatchallenges state-supported views of power and authority (Xiao 2011, Yang 2009, Zheng

Etling (2010) has observed that the Internet accommodates the rise of a new public sphereeven in authoritarian nations by reducing the influence of gatekeepers and by making it


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possible for citizen journalists to engage in previously expensive journalistic, transparency, orfact-checking endeavors.Once in the public forum, it is easier for mainstream reporters tocover those events for their news organizations, and even to use them to push a differentagenda.

Magistad (2012) observes that weibo platforms have created a vigorous virtual public

square since it was launched by the Chinese Internet company Sina in 2009, with anestimated 500 million Chinese currently using some version of a microblog to discuss mattersof social and political significance. Those conversations, she notes, are now driving thenational dialogue Weibo has become a battleground between the official voices and thevoices of civil society

Liu and McCormick (2011) find that the commercialization of media in China has createda seemingly apolitical consumption-oriented discourse, but a more openly participatory onewhich replaces a Leninist public sphere in which individuals were compelled to participatein a relatively monolithic official discourse. Qian and Bandursky (2011) analyze the trends ofmedia commercialization, rising professionalism and the Internet in China and how they aredriving the emergence of more independent voices in that nations media landscape, resultingin a stronger influence of civil society-like voices on state policy.

Wang and Bates (2008) maintain that Chinese online space is acting as a public sphere thatallows ordinary citizens to discuss public affairs, though in a limited fashion, and that whenthe online public opinion is strong enough, it can influence public policies such that theyreflect and match public interests.

The Communist-controlled government in Vietnam takes a similar position as the ChineseCommunist Party toward the free flow of information online, though the mechanisms it has in

place to control content are less sophisticated and ubiquitous than in China. The fine-grained,nearly instantaneous oversight that characterizes Chinas so-called Great Firewall does notexist in Vietnam. Instead, there is a watchful and often heavy-handed PropagandaDepartment, the chilling effect instilled by periodic arrests and imprisonments of outspokencommentators, andperhaps most powerful of alla carefully nurtured collectivist, deeply-Confucian ideology among citizens that places national development, political stability, andsocial harmony above most individual interests and concerns. In practice, this has meantrestrictive regulations, overt or covert, on Internet use. Examples include the sporadic ban ofFacebook, Wordpress and Twitter in the country,1and the intermittent availability ofinternational news sites such as the BBC and Voice of America. Recent new laws such asthose contained in the sweeping Decree 72, which went into effect in September 2013, appearto be aimed at stifling the ability of Vietnamese citizens to share and comment upon news viasocial media platforms. Another new slate of regulations were announced in November, whenthe National Assembly declared that citizens using the Internet to criticize the government or

the state would face fines of up to USD $5,000 -- a clear response to the explosive growth ofInternet penetration in the countrys urban areas and to netizens growing interest in makinguse of the newest tools and platforms available to them there to engage in discussion anddebate.2

1Facebook has been blocked at the DNS level in Vietnam since November 2009. The government has taken

pains never to directly acknowledge any responsibility for the sites inaccessibility, but neither has it disavowedinvolvement with much enthusiasm. Despite this, the social network currently has more than 22 million

members, which translates to more than 70% of Vietnams online population (Do, Internet users beganexperiencing blockages of sites running on the Wordpress platform in mid-2012, and of Twitter in late 2013.2As of January 2014, no Vietnamese citizen has been charged under either of the new laws.


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Remix Culture, Memes, and the InternetThe concept of the replication of ideas, knowledge and practices through identifiable culturalunits has long appeared in the social sciences, stretching back at least 90 years to biologicalstudies of memory persistence in organisms (Semon 1924) and later as a grounding for

diffusion of innovations theory in the 1960s (Rogers 1962). But the contemporary origins ofthe term meme, as well as the related field of study popularly known as memetics, arewidely viewed as originating in biologist Richard Dawkins bookThe Selfish Gene(1976). Init, Dawkins used the term to describe contagious or inheritable units of cultural information,analogous to genes, which can diffuse and propagate themselves throughout communities ofculture via replication or imitation (Knobel & Lankshear 2007, Rintel 2011, Shifman 2007).Like genes, memes are understood to be subject to the evolutionary forces of variation,mutation, competition, and inheritance. As with genes, only memes well suited to their socio-cultural environment will spread successfully; those not so suited will fail to replicate and

become extinct.In The Selfish Gene, Dawkins (1976) identified three key characteristics of successful

memes: fidelity, fecundity, and longevity. Fidelity refers to the innate qualities of a givenmeme that enable it to be replicated easily and passed from mind to mind Its not so much ameasure of literal truth but of memorability; ideas that make intuitive sense are more likely to

be passed along. Longevity refers to how long the meme survives; the longer its existence,the greater chance it has of being copied and passed on to fresh minds. A fecund meme,according to Dawkins (1976), is one that is copied at a high rate and therefore spreads veryquickly; the more quickly it is replicated and distributed, the more likely it is to captureattention. To fecundity, Knobel and Lankshear append an additional dimension, which theyrefer to as susceptibility, which is the timing or location of a meme with respect to

peoples openness to the meme and their propensity to be infected by it (7:

Susceptibility is thus enhanced by the memes relevance to current events, local culturalvalues and norms, and the like.As with much else in the Internet age, the concept of a meme has itself undergone some

slight memetic variation, often finding itself conflated with such terms as viral content orused to denote any kind of idea, symbol, or practice that assumes rapid popularity online. AsBurgess notes, in contemporary popular usage an internet meme is a faddish joke or

practice ... that becomes widely imitated. In this popular understanding, Internet memes doappear to spread and replicate virallythat is, they appear to spread and mutate viadistributed networks in ways that the original producers cannot determine and control(Burgess 2008: 101). Researchers such as Knobel and Lankshear (2007) and Shifman (2007)have made an effort to distinguish between memetic content online and viral content. Viral

content, in their view, is any media that propagates to large numbers of people online viadigital technologieswithout significant change. The viral metaphor, they note, focuses mainlyon the vehicle of delivery and the size of the audience, without taking into account culturaland social factors.

This is in contrast to memetic content, which involves a different structure of participationand transmissionone that invites extensive user engagement in the form of bricolage,

pastiche, remix, mashup, or other derivative work (Shifman 2007). Memetic online content,more so than viral content, highlights the Internet as a communications medium characterizedchiefly by its participatory creative culture.

The specific kinds of media content that can take on memetic qualities in thischaracterization are not limited to the range of popular current digital media formats image

macros, animated gifs, video clips, audio clips in the form of ringtones and alertsbut can


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manifest in unexpected new textual forms as well: emoticons, chat app stickers, and twitterhashtags, for example.

The many characteristics of the Internet and its various applications are well suited forlarge-scale creation and dissemination of such remixed and memetic images. The digitizationof mediaeasily copied, modified, and sharedenables users to alter and disseminate

existing artefacts both quickly and accurately (Heylighen 1996) and the many-to-manynetworked structure of the Internet allows a nearly instantaneous global diffusion of suchcontent The ubiquity and accessibility of todays Internet, together with online and offlineapplications for editing even large files using techniques until recently available only tomedia professionals (Lessig 2008), enables the creation and recreation of digital content inthe new participatory media culture by a producer base of hundreds of millions.

Rintel notes that what he calls templatability lies at the heart of most online memes, bywhich he means most visual memes derive from one of a limited number of pre-existingimage bases to which successive creators can make small changes, yielding differentmeanings (2013: 256).

Such is the current ease of creating simple templatable image memes that the past several

years have seen the rise of myriad sites providing both the raw materials and editing tools torapidly produce new versions of common memes. QuickMeme.com, MemeGenerator.net,Rage Comic Builder, Meme Centerall provide simple tools for instantly creating the samekind of memetic content traditionally emerging from prolific meme-generating forums suchas Reddit, 9GAG, and 4chan. Sites such asKnow Your Memeactively track, research andreport on the provenance and popularity of thousands of examples.

As a result, these participatory and highly intertextual artefacts are moving throughinternet culture at lightning speed. Indeed, they are permeating the boundary of the virtualworld and slipping into mainstream culture and real-world settings as well (Mina 2012).

The new virtual spaces and practices, therefore, have widely been credited with enablingthe rise of entirely new forms of public expression. Considered in this light, a study of onlinememes and remix culture has potential for understanding new forms of power and social

processes, new forms of social participation and activism, and new distributed networks ofcommunication (Blackmore 1999, Knobel & Lankshear 7 Knobel and Lankshears(2007) study, for example, concluded that one of the commonest reasons users engage in suchactivity is for social commentary.

Rintel (2013) observes that the kinds of memes that achieve the greatest success online arean important manifestation of civil society, despite that their actual civility might bequestionable Citing Bruns concept of produsage ( and Lessig ( on remixculture, Rintel claims that Internet memes represent a reinvigorated, active, andunconstrained public voice that sidesteps the constraints of traditional media opinion

generation and distribution (: , echoing Pacharissis ( observations regardingnew agency for counterpublics that have been excluded from mainstream political discourse.Ethan Zuckerman of Harvards Berkman Center for Internet and Society has written of a

cute cat theory of digital activism ( to describe such new forms of creative onlinecivic engagement. This theory suggests that Internet tools designed to let ordinary users

publish non-political content can be quite useful for activism for a number of reasons. First,they are difficult for governments to censor without censoring innocuous content (e.g. cutecats), thus alerting citizens to the fact of censorship and risking radicalizing otherwise contentcitizens [as Shirky (2011) has noted]. Zuckerman also maintains that popular consumer toolscan tap the latent capacity of non-activist users to create and disseminate activist content(

Examining online memes that circulated around blind Chinese activist Chen Guangchengin China, An-Xiao Mina has observed that a variety of creative, sophisticated, oft-remixed


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memes can be distributed across even the most tightly censored network on earth unimpeded.This is, she notes, largely due to the fact that the artefacts themselves appear innocuous atfirst glance and require considerable pop culture savvy and insider knowledge to make senseof ( Researchers are finding that the participatory creative culture of memes makes fortrue community building These bonds can be quite strong for silly cat images; theyd only be

more so for issues that touch on deep concerns (Rintel (2012) examined the value of online activism as viewed through the prism of

s highly visible Human Rights Campaign marriage equality campaign in the US,which urged Facebook users to replace their profile photographs with a stylized red equalsign He found that such campaigns, often derided as slacktivism (Morozov , Gladwell2011) because of their low rate of traditional political participation, are in fact powerfulmanifestations of civil society. Meme comment culture is, he suggests, a reinvigoration of anactive public sphere, combining popular culture and folk culture, appropriating and mashingtogether objects and ideas from media industries and objects and ideas created from wholecloth (: 7

In the past year, Vietnams online landscape has witnessed a remarkable increase in suchcreative online artifacts. Participation on social media platforms has long been a big part ofthose users experience With the exception of Facebook and YouTube, however, the greatmajority of online participation has until now been limited to personal blogs and discussionforums3, and creative participatory user-generated content has been likewise limited. Thatchanged in 2013 with two developments.

The first was a new feature from Facebook that debuted in June 2013 allowing users toadd photos and image files to comment threads (Van Grove 2013). The second was theemergence in early 2013 of an image-based Vietnamese social media website, known ashaiVL, based around user-uploaded humorous images. The site, whose name is a lewd

portmanteau of Vietnamese words referring to both fun and the sexual act, is a virtual cloneof the hugely popular American-based site 9GAG. By mid-2013, haiVL was receiving in

excess of two million unique visits per day, making it one of Vietnams most visited websites(Do 2013). Images from the sitemany of them image macro memes and original remixes are regularly shared across Vietnams social media ecosystem, especially on populardiscussion forums, blogs, and the social networking site Facebook.

In as well, possibly as a result of haiVLs popularity, numerous additional user-created image sites sprang up. Doremon.che, for example, is a freestanding site thatspecializes in mashed-up, remixed versions of the Japanese mangaDoraemon, oftenincluding other images, in which the original Japanese language has been removed andreplaced with Vietnamese-language dialogue. Other popular standalone sources includeEpic.vn, Ubox, xemVL, cuoi.VL, Yah.vn, and numerous facsimiles. While nearly all of these

sites have accompanying Facebook pages, a number of popular sites make Facebook theirprimary platform.As with 9GAG, many of these sites trade on images, videos, and gifs whose appeals is

juvenile at best, and in which crass sexual innuendo is commonplace. However, amongst thechaff are remixed images and memes bearing commentary that is thoughtful and insightfulenough for traditionally conservative and self-censorship prone Vietnamese to share them onother social media platforms. This gives themin Dawkins formulation levels of bothfecundity and fidelity (if not longevity) that assure their rapid spread through the spectrum of

3While Twitter was fully accessible in the country until late 2013, and a variety of similarly functioning

Vietnamese clones have been introduced over the past four to five years, microblogs remain a negligible force in

Vietnams social media ecosystem Where an estimated 7% of Chinas Internet population uses one or moreweibo platforms there, Vietnam netizens have not yet fastened themselves to microblogs as a conversationalplatform.


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Vietnamese online communities. This in turn, elevates the susceptibility of those that aremost successful, and makes it more likely that each may be again shared or modified in some

participatory fashion.

Study QuestionHow does the Vietnamese online community employ techniques of remix and memetic

culture in response to social and political issues occurring offline?

MethodologyThis paper examines two descriptive case studies (Berg & Lune 2012) related to two

events that generated heated online discussions and generated significant online creativeactivity in 2013. For the purpose of this paper, the first such event is characterized aspolitical and the second is framed under a social point of view Utilizing case studies as amethod of inquiry is not new. Bromley (1990), for example, refers to case study method as aninvestigation of events with an aim to describe and understand these phenomena. Stake

(, on the other hand, refers to case studies not as a method, but a choice on the subjectof investigation. Either way, a case study seems to be able to fulfill two things: insights into asignificant event of some description (the intrinsic view), and depending on how the event isunderstood, insights into a more holistic phenomenon of which the event is onedemonstration (the instrumental view).

The distinction between these two views need not always be clear-cut, however. Anyphenomenon that is interesting enough to study for its own sake will simultaneously provideinsights into a bigger picture of the context in which it exists. This proves to be particularlyrelevant to an investigation into a virtual environment such as the Internet, as the context andthe phenomenon itself are not easily separable. Indeed, Yin (2003) recommends case studyresearch for instances where the researcher wishes to cover the contextual conditions of the

phenomenon, especially when the researcher cannot easily manipulate the behaviors of thoseinvolved. More specifically, Yin (2003) also stresses the competitive edge of case studyresearch in answering questions concerning the how and the why, whose need for depthcan be compromised in techniques such as surveys.

The unit of analysis for this study is visual memes as social artifacts and as representativesof a wide variety of user-generated content that emerged in response to the two selectedevents. Memes are gathered from multiple meme-hosting websites as discussed previously.

No detailed circulation measurement strategy was assigned for the purpose of this paper. Thispaper aims at analyzing the content and richness of visual memes in an exploratory effort tounderstand remix culture in Vietnam; therefore, it is our intention to capture as diverse aselection of memes as possible.

Data is presented in a narrative fashion by critically reporting on the two eventsdevelopment as portrayed by mainstream media. Remixed images and memes are presentedalongside each phase of development.

Case study: Vietnamese Health Minister

and Hepatitis B Vaccination Infant DeathsOn July 20, three newborn infants in Vietnams Quang Tri Province died just minutes

after receiving standard Hepatitis B vaccinations. The next day the Minister of Health,Nguyen Thi Kim Tien, traveled to Quang Tri. She was there, however, for a groundbreakingceremony, and she chose to ignore the opportunity to pay the families a visit. On being

questioned by reporters, the Minister excused herself by claiming a full schedule, anddeclined to provide a statement about the childrens deaths, claiming a commission had been


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assigned to speak to the media on the matter. On July 21, another infant in Binh Thuanprovince died following yet another Hepatitis B vaccination. Still, the Ministry offered nocondolences to the grief-stricken parents and no explanation to the nation for why the infantshad died.

Vietnams Internet exploded with recriminations over the deaths and the Ministers

responses. The outcry ranged across hugely popular discussion forums like the motherhood-relatedWebTreThoand the technology-focusedTinhTe.It swept over countless blogs andvideoblogs Facebook was awash in discussions of the vaccinations and the Health Ministrysresponse. The comments sections of news articles on the topic were swampedand regularlycleansed by administrators of commentary deemed too critical, as were the public forums.

Across many of these platforms, one of the most visible and effective forms of speakingout on the topic was the tsunami of remixed images that poured across the Vietnamese Webcreated using simple, now-ubiquitous software tools and easily shared and re-shared inclassic meme fashion via social media. Some few were relatively sophisticated: images of afaux new national stamp (Figure 1), for example, supposedly created to honor the Minister ofHealth for her service, which for some reason wouldnt stick Thousands of netizens who

shared the meme delighted in explaining thats because people insisted on spitting on thefront of the stamp instead of the back.

Figure

Most, however, were of humbler provenance. Quite a number took the form of unflatteringphotographs of the Minister over which mock captions and quotations, imagined or real, hadbeen overlaid. Figure 2is one example. Superimposed across a photograph of the Minister inan awkward moment with reporters one user has written a mock caption that translates as,

Let me ask you this: without me, how would funeral services thrive?A common technique among creators of such content in Vietnam, as elsewhere, is theclever combination of two or more recent subjects of public discussion into a single image.The resulting artefact requires a canny understanding of current events in Vietnam and, often,a razor-sharp pop culture sensibility as well.
http://www.webtretho.com/http://www.webtretho.com/http://www.webtretho.com/http://www.tinhte.vn/http://www.tinhte.vn/http://www.tinhte.vn/http://www.tinhte.vn/http://www.webtretho.com/


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Figure

Figure

Figure 3, for example, is a crude bricolage that plays on the much-discussed view amongVietnamese that the Health Minister is unattractive, as well as her resistance to calls in theonline community for her to resign in the wake of the Ministrys missteps during the summer

of 2013. Using as its base one of the many unflattering photos of the Minister that netizensdelight in using as a template for their purposes, the creator dropped crude cutout images intothe upper left panel over her head: a jar of facial cream and a vial of Super Glue next to itsretail package. I use this anti-shame cream every day on my face and 502 Super Glue on myass, so dont you dream that Id ever leave my [Ministers]chair.

Nor was the taxonomy of widely circulated remixed images related to the Health Ministrylimited to photographs. They included hand-illustrated comics and repurposed manga panels.Figure 4references the summers vaccination scandal as well as another news item that wasin wide discussion at that time. In July 2011 Vietnam switched from firing squads to lethalinjections for carrying out inmate executions, but was forced to temporarily halt allexecutions after the EU banned European companies from selling the necessary chemicals to

Vietnam as part of an effort to pressure the country into abolishing the death penalty. Thedialogue panels read:

Prisoner: Officer when will I get to be injected?Unseen guard: Poisons not yet available!!Prisoner: Still not available? Then please give me a vaccine shot Itd be just the same


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Figure

Figure

A fifth example originates from a Facebook page that first appeared in August 2013 and

rapidly became one of Vietnams most popular (non-celebrity) pages on the social network.Entitled the Tuyt Bitch Collection, the sites two administrators specialize in remixingDisney animated film stills with Vietnamese text that creates humorous new juxtapositions,commentary, and critique on current social issues in Vietnam. Like most of the producers ofsuch content in Vietnam currently, the remixers behind Tuyt Bitch appear to have littleinterest in sophisticated graphic design techniques or showing off advanced Photoshop skills,and the film stills tend to be those that can be collected from a simple Google Image search,downloaded to a laptop, and manipulated using stock image-editing software.4

Tuyt Bitch rarelyposts artefacts that engage in overt political commentary; they are,however, a canny producer of commentary that encompasses multiple phenomena in theVietnamese pop cultural and social ecosystem.

Figure 5, dating from a January 7, 2014 post, is a typical example. Its base image is aframe of Cinderellas evil stepmother from Disneys eponymous 9 animated film, arecurring character in the Tuyt Bitch Collection The content of the artefact takes the formofa call to action (in the form of tagging and sharing from the creators to their manyfollowers on Facebook. In a large font at the images bottom is the declaration, Only threemore weeks until Tet.5Tag any [expletive] who still owes you money to remind them theyd

better pay up The stepmother is surrounded by dropped-in portraits of three people who areall quite familiar to Vietnamese citizens in 2014. One (at bottom left) is the Minister of

4As with many of the remix and meme creators presented here, Tuyt Bitch appears indifferent to or unaware of

the existing copyright on the materials they use. Yet they are meticulous about placing their own watermarkedlogo on the resulting remixes.5Tet is the lunar New Year, traditionally recognized Vietnamslargest annual holiday.


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Health A second (on the panels right side is an (unlicensed) Hanoi cosmetic surgeon wholast year was found to have allowed a patient to die in his (unlicensed) clinic during breast-enhancement surgery, and who later dumped the dead patients corpse into Hanois RedRiver in an attempt to surreptitiously dispose of it. The scandal once again ignited publicanger toward the Health Ministry and its chief official. In a dialogue bubble above the

stepmother, she issues an order to her ersatz gang members, who are each presented in thiscontext as a deadly debt collector specializing in a unique form of intimidation.

The Minister of Health is identified as Head of the Veterinary Department Her owndialogue bubble frames a threat that debtors should pay up or youll get an injection in yourass To her right, the disgraced doctor, dubbed Dr Death, menaces, Hand it over oryoull take a trip on the Red River A third character references a scandal from late 2013 inwhich several private nursemaids were found to have been physically abusing many of theyoung children in their care.

It should also be noted that the simplistic translations presented here do not captureadditional levels of nuance in the Vietnamese language nor of subtle cultural allusions thatany local viewer would appreciate in this image at a glance.

A popular visual meme in the fall of 2013 (Figure 6), especially in the context of onlinecomments regarding the Health Ministers refusal to resign her post, was one dubbed a GetOut of Trouble Free card for government officials The image used neither photographs norany illustration except for the Vietnam state seal, a generic commercial barcode, and a

popular version of the trollface.6Use in dangerous situations to avoid penalties of allkinds, it reads Unlimited usage

Figure

Many of these images either first appeared on or were reproduced at a Facebook page(Figure 7 that appeared shortly after the original incidents in July Entitled Resign,Minister of Health, the page quickly evolved into a clearinghouse of information andcommentary regarding the vaccination deaths and, more generally, the perceived

inadequacies of the Health Minister Today, the pages Vietnamese administrators havemanaged to avoid identification by local officials and have earned a considerable followingamong Vietnamese netizens: more than 105,000 Likes and, at any given moment, adiscussing this ranking of between 7-10,000 people.

6

Trollface is a rage comic character wearing a mischievous smile that is meant to represent the facial expressionof an Internet troll. The image is most commonly used to portray a character as a troll in rage comics, oralternatively, to identify oneself or another participant as such in online discussions (KnowYourMeme 2013).


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Figure

All of this would be perfectly normal, even expected, in the EU or most any developeddemocratic society today. But everything about this is unprecedented in the SocialistRepublic of Vietnamthe tools, the network, the availability of information, and especiallythe impulse for citizens to engage so openly. Moreover, it has become clear that the online

discussion regarding last summers events (including but not limited to the visual remixesthat were so widely shared) exerted a very real pressure on the Minister of Health and thestate apparatus.

On October 25, for example, in the wake of yet another spate of missteps and scandals forthe Health Ministry,Petro Times, an online mainstream newspaper, published The HealthMinister Should Resign, an opinion piece calling for the Health Ministers abdication of heroffice. Within hours, the article had been removed. Even so, captured screenshots of thecensored article were widely shared around the web, providing generous fodder for furtherdebate and discussion. It appears to have been the first time in the history of modern Vietnamthat a news outlet has openly called for the resignation of a senior Ministry official (Voice ofAmerica During a monthly press conference the following day, then Minister and

Chairman of Government Office Vu Duc Dam faced questions from the press on whether theHealth Minister should resign under the pressure of Vietnams online public sphere (To Ha (He replied in the negative And during Novembers meeting of the NationalAssembly, the Health Minister was reportedly excused from a scheduled question-and-answer session to prevent a feared loss of face for her over the ongoing crises (VTC News

Case Study: Government Censorship of Bui Doi Cho LonBui Doi Cho Lon(Street Children of Chinatown was a Vietnamese film produced in earlyby Saigon-based Galaxy Studios, written and directed by Vietnamese-American Charlie

Nguyen. Galaxy Cinemas promoted the film heavily in the weeks leading up to its early June

13 release date with posters and trailers on YouTube and local advertising media. Aformulaic, gangster-style action film set in the Chinatown (Cho Lon) neighborhood of Ho ChiMinh City, the movie had generated considerable excitement prior to its opening not only

because of the A-List names behind it but because it was a relatively rare Vietnameseproduction rather than a foreign import. Just days before the opening date, however, thefilms release was unexpectedly halted by officials in the Ministry of Information andCommunication, who claimed to object to the films bloodshed as well as to its portrayal ofHo Chi Minhs Chinatown neighborhood as a lawless gangland Despite that the violence inthe film was unexceptional by the standards of Hollywood action films (which make up the

bulk of Vietnam cinemas revenues, officials said the film did not reflect the social reality

of Vietnam.


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The response was massive, immediate, and overwhelmingly negative. Again, remixerstook out their frustration with officials and the decision online. In contrast to the bulk ofimages relating to the Health Minister, however, participatory creative content in this casehewed more closely to the creation and recreation of memetic content rather than thetechniques of remix. One of the most popular methods involved using the films promotional

poster (Figure 8) as a memetic template for an ever-changing series of commentaries on thecensorship decision.

Figure

One of the first such images to gain widespread popularity was a version (Figure ) thatplaced cleaning tools and cooking utensils into the hands of the five grim-faced maincharacters on the poster and altered the films title to Five Well-Behaved Cho Lon Youth,subtly mocking public officials statements that the film would havebeen morally corruptingto the Vietnamese youth who viewed it.

Figure

Another that was shared widely altered the actors appearances so that all of the charactersappeared to be dressed as young schoolchildren carrying toys (Figure The films namewas changed to Cho Lon Kindergarten a satirical reference conveying frustration with theunwillingness of the Censorship Committee to treat Vietnamese citizens as adults capable ofmaking informed, intelligent decisions for themselves. Yet another placed the actors in adifferent setting altogether: the grounds of Hogwarts Castle as seen in the original poster for

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince(Figure 11). In this mashup, a Photoshop-savvynetizen has placed the faces of four of the main characters ofBui Doi Cho Lon onto the

bodies of Harry, Ron, Hermione, and Albus Dumbledore The new film title was TheWizards of Cho Lon The reimagined slug line: Sometimes you need to cast a spell on the

Censorship Committee


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Figure

Figure

Figure 12is a typical example of another popular technique, where instead of using thefilm poster as a template remixers captured and manipulated a still image from the filmsonline video trailer. Juxtaposing the image against itself, the modified file presents twodifferent captions of dialogue for the same scene The first, dubbed Before censorship,

presents the original dialogue from the scene, which is one of conflict between two rivalgangs over territory: Get the f**king hell out of this place. Cho Lon is my territory. Thosewho disrespect me will be stabbed, anyone who approaches will be killed Juxtaposed

beneath this is a modified version, dubbed After censorship: Why do all of you gatherhere and make this living area not well-organized anymore? It really influences the beauty ofthe cultural street community Please go home!

Figure


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7

Figure

Figure 13takes a similar approach, but eschews use of the film altogether. In it, ananonymous group of remixers who operate a Vietnamese site called Doremon.che haveappropriated two panels of the popular Japanese mangaDoraemon and repurposed them into

the context of the film. As with Figure 11, the remixed format now presents before and aftercensorship versions of the same scene portrayed in Figure 11. The new dialogue reads (fromtop left to bottom right):

Before Censorship: We own Cho Lon Whoever comes in here without our permission isasking for a stab in the stomach

Who f**king died and made you king of this place? Let's settle this once and for all!After Censorship: Why are you folks gathering around here? It does not really follow the

rules laid out by the government for a civilized neighborhood like oursWe stand corrected We will withdraw immediatelySuch satirical bowdlerizations of the films original dialogue appear designed to seem

ridiculous and risible, even insultingly so, to most young Vietnamese people, who are broadlyfamiliar with the genre conventions and dialogue of non-Vietnamese action films. Not onlydoes the new dialogue appear childlike and incongruous to the action, but it drains the sceneof any real conflict and, therefore, any narrative interest. The implication is that governmentminders have no grasp of film as an artistic or dramatic medium nor of the social realities ofVietnamese street vernacular or, indeed, life. In other words, they are out of touch with theday-to-day existences of ordinary Vietnamese.

Figure


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A final example can be seen in Figure 14. Its creator based the image on a preexistingposter design illustrated in the style (often described as Soviet Constructivism) of classicNorth Vietnamese wartime propaganda posters. Such posters were ubiquitous during whatsknown as the American War and so have a special resonance for Vietnamese citizens,especially older citizens who were alive during that conflict. They communicated powerful

appeals to nationalism, patriotism, independence, and a collective resistance to forces thatwere believed to be intent on subjugating the Vietnamese people against their will. They alsoremain very much a part of modern-day Vietnam, as many official state posters and

billboards continue to use a similar design style to promote literacy, family planning, anti-drug campaigns, and other such socially upright messages. In Figure 14, the creator has takena prototypical propaganda-style poster and skillfully replaced the faces of the three charactersin it with the faces of the three main characters fromBui Doi Cho Lon. With similar attentionto detail, the original words have been replaced with the following: New changing Cho LonYouth! Weve changed! How about you, Censorship Committee?

Firm evidence that online memetic commentary surrounding the banning ofBui Doi ChoLonimpacted Ministry policy is elusive, largely due to the lack of transparency in

government decision-making processes in Vietnam. Yet there are anecdotal signs that it hashad some effect. In March 2012, a week before its scheduled release in Vietnam, theCensorship Committee banned all in-country screenings of Lionsgates The Hunger Gamesdue to stated concerns over the films levels of violence A year later, on November five months after the online contraction over the censorship of Bui Doi Cho Lonthe sequelto The Hunger Games, entitled Catching Fire, opened without incident in hundreds ofVietnamese cinemas. As with the first film in the series, Catching Firefeatures numerousscenes of child-on-child violence. It additionally includes a prominent subplot concerning aviolent revolution of poor, oppressed citizens against a repressive autocratic government ofself-serving elites.7It seems unlikely that Vietnamese government officials found sCatching Firesignificantly less objectionable than s The Hunger Games. A more likelyexplanation is that they found themselves less willing to tempt another massive onlinefirestorm as had happened withBui Doi Cho Lona few months earlier.

DiscussionOf Vietnams 9 million citizens, roughly million are Internet users, representing a

penetration of 34% a similar proportion as neighboring China, Thailand, and Philippines(Cimigo 2012). Importantly, nearly all of these netizens have appeared in just over a decade;Vietnams Internetpenetration growth has been 12,000% since 2000 (Miniwatts MarketingGroup 2013). Facebook presently has approximately 22 million active members inside thecountry using technical workarounds to access the partially blocked service, up from just 2.9

million in 2011 (WeAreSocial 2012). There are also 129 million mobile subscriptions in thecountry, making for a penetration of 139%, and 19 million mobile Internet users, equating toa penetration of around 21% (Cimigo 2012, WeAreSocial 2012).

The rapid rise of Internet penetration in Vietnam and the subsequent growth of socialmedia platforms have made possible a vast extension technically, if not legally of therange of public debate and discussion available to citizens there. On blogs, in personal video

posts, on discussion forums, in the comments sections of online news articles, and on thepartially-blocked social network Facebook, netizens are cautiously testing the limits of what

7

Although officials did not halt the release of Catching Firein Vietnam in , its interesting to note thatin the Vietnamese subtitles of the film, all mentions of the English word revolution were translated as thisstuff


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9

can be spoken of. This is especially true in online spaces where anonymity can be assuredthrough the use of non-identifying usernames and pseudonyms.

But these (mainly textual) forms of commentary are fraught for Vietnamese netizens, aslegal restrictions prohibiting anti-state expression are vague and capriciously enforced.Vietnam regularly arrests and imprisons citizens it deems guilty of abusing democratic

freedoms, a charge that has been used to jail scores of outspoken online commentators. Theline between legitimate commentary and reactionary content is all but invisible, may movewithout warning, and the penalties for crossing it can be severe indeed. Furthermore,longstanding cultural norms in the country operate as powerful dampers on overt commentarythat might be perceived by other citizens as critical of the Communist Party in Vietnam or ofthe state apparatus.

Vietnamese therefore tend to tread with particular care when expressing themselves online(and offline, for that matter) on any topic even remotely related to the state or the manner inwhich the CPV governs it; self-censorship is ubiquitous and online discourse is, with rareexceptions, limited to innocuous topics and expressions. Even in cases where bolder netizensspeak out on popular discussion forums in ways that might be perceived as critical,

administrators generally delete such comments quickly.These two case studies, however, reveal that new practices of participatory online culture

such as the creation and dissemination of remix and visual memes are providing cover forpolitical discourse and social commentary in Vietnam that may be unflattering or even subtlycritical. In 2013, new image-based social media sites, personal blogs, discussion forums, andFacebook became fashionable spaces for the posting of remixed and memetic content thatdiscreetly satirize or otherwise critically comment upon a wide variety of Vietnamese socialand political issues. The recent surge in popularity and accessibility of such content appearsto allow many netizens to publicly share opinions that might otherwise be seen as crossing aline if expressed in a more explicit verbal fashion.

Further, these artefacts allow many netizens, who might be disinclined to openly expressan opinion themselves, to do so in indirect fashion simply by sharing a remixed image ormeme created by others in a social media space More than 7% of Vietnams online

population has a Facebook page and, as of June 2013, is now making use of that socialnetworks new function allowing users to comment on posts via the posting of images in lieuof text, exponentially increasing the reach and significance of these images and theircommentary.

Zuckermans cute cat theory( maintains that restrictive governments are oftenunwilling to censor popular online tools (at least without state-sanctioned alternatives in

place) because such blunt measures risk creating more dissent and activism rather than less.Zuckermans theory also suggests that such tools can make even non-activist users

comfortable with the creation and dissemination of what may be perceived as activist content.Both observations would seem to be valid in Vietnam at the moment. While sites such asFacebook and other social media sites may be somewhat inconvenient to reach, they remainaccessible and are openly used, as much by local commercial interests as by privateindividuals. Image-based sites that specialize in the generation and distribution of remixed,memetic content, such as haiVL and others, remain similarly unblocked. This is likely

because the majority of their content is the equivalent of cute cats silly and juvenile butnot overtly political. It may also be a direct result of their popularity; shuttering them(especially at a volatile time such as during Vietnams current economic crisis may riskradicalizing a large, youthful, highly incentivized population.

Our observations therefore suggest an ancillary clause to Zuckermans cute cat theory: By

using the seemingly innocuous tools, spaces and practices of remix and meme culture,citizens in an authoritarian state like Vietnam are able to create and participate in an ersatz


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public sphere of indirect political commentary and debate that may appear on the surface, andat the level of the individual post, to be little more than harmless fun. The humor and seemingtriviality of such remixed and widely shared images camouflage the significance and thestrength of their social commentary and assure that they are shared and viewed more widelythan more direct social critique.

We suggest these rapidly proliferating online remixed and memetic forms are enablingnew forms of public conversation in Vietnams online communities and are contributing tothe emergence of a civil society that appears to be exerting an influence, however slight, uponmatters of state in the vein of Habermas theory of a public sphere.

Taken as a whole, the new ecosystem of remix culture, rampant propagation of memeticcontent, and the broad circulation of embedded ideas via new image-based social media

platforms in Vietnam is cultivating a level of civic engagement that is unprecedented for anation in which traditional civil society has long been proscribed. This infusion of powerfulnew conversational capabilities for a growing populationone thats increasinglycomfortable with dialogue and debateportends a fundamental shift in the relationship

between individuals and the state as Vietnam moves into the 21stcentury.

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