Must Fall Meme
In this project we analyzed tweets from the Fees Must Fall and Zuma Must Fall memes in South Africa. We were intrigued by the use of the ‘must fall’ phrase in both movements, yet there very different political, quantitative and qualitative perspectives.
This being the first Culture Hack Lab project, we developed a basic model for analysis. This model has four stages:
- Listening — This phase developed a listening model to search for key insights and heuristics for analysis.
- Framing — Then taking the found insights, we developed a frame that allowed us to develop a ‘point of view’ for cultural change.
- Mapping — Once a frame is created, we mapped communities, networks and memes. This allowed us to articulate key areas of intervention and opportunities for transformation, within the social system.
- Memes — Finally we develop content that share a memetic thread, that supports the transformation of the system.
Listening
A listening model is both a theoretical and practical tool developed to make sense of certain specific narratives.This listening model aims to aid The Rules to analyze worldwide narratives of the “world in transition”. The tool is oriented to the analysis of complex networks or complex systems, which is defined as the analysis of “how relationships between parts give rise to collective behaviors of a system and how said system interacts and forms relationships with its environment” Bar-Yam, Yaneer (2002). What this essentially means is that the tool aims to help understand the relations of narratives, actors, momentum, themes and actions that work within the frame of the world in transition.
Our first hypothesis is that the world is in transition, given this, our first objective is to gather data that may allow us to validate or invalidate that. In our global scan of the world we saw many instance of this transition — South Africa is one of them. Employing a methodology of Critical Discourse Analysis, we developed a second hypothesis — that, in this transitional world, there are communities of ‘just-theres’ and also communities of ‘almost-theres’. We define these two communities as follows:
Just Theres —A community who see oppressions as emerging from a structural oppressive global system.
Almost Theres — A community who question capitalism and are on the verge of connecting local oppressions to a global system.
Further to this, we are interested here in how these communities may be engaged to create cultural transformation — that is, system change towards higher levels of inclusion, equity and syntropy.
Framing
Through this further analysis, we uncovered that this is not a dialectic between two polarized communities but rather a spectrum: from belief in the current system, to those who are questioning the system, the almost theres and finally the just theres.
Using this as a framing, we uncovered some further insights into this spectrum. It is a multilayered spectrum that has four further dimensions:
- Actions — The spectrum of how willing is people to question the system
- Belief in the System —Collective actions and projects that work for, within or against the system
- Ideology — From far left to far right
- Emotions — From optimistic emotionally charged conversations to a pessimist one
Finally, we noticed that these spectrums are interrelated, and show the overall complexity of views towards the ‘system’.
In this example we the green line representing an example where — A community that has an optimistic emotionally charged message, an ideology from center-left, that questions the system but that essentially works within the system. The red line represents a group that is highly pessimistic, from far right, that questions the system but works within it, perhaps the ‘alt-right’ perspective.
Using this as our core framing, we looked for typical cases of this around the world — the South African case was one example of this.
Mapping
The mapping process aims to create a map of a ‘typical case’ of rich discourse between varying perspectives, and then to identify key points of intervention.
Methodology
Our methodology uses Data Science and Data Analytics tools to map core communities, discourses and themes of communities in South Africa, that have adopted the ‘must fall’ meme. To do this we mined 700 000 tweets on both the FMF and ZMF movements, we then parsed the data and finally used network analysis. The FMF data was collected between October to November 2016, at the height of the student movements in South Africa. The ZMF was collected in March 2017, when civil protest reached a head on the streets of South Africa.
Fees Must Fall Results
The FMF had 134,587 mentions in total, with 10,870 mentions on Oct 4 at its peak.
The media did play a substantial role in the conversation, but themain media community didn’t amass more than 11% of the conversation. Two hypothesis can emerge: 1. The media coverage of the protests was decentralized and, or 2. The communities around students and organizations were big enough to communicate their messages without relying on media.
Most actors involved are students and the profile of the accounts most relevant is quite intersectional: queer, feminist, pro-palestine, leftist, and various other related struggles are mentioned immediately in their profiles. It is also not as geographically based as other student communities that appear on the conversation, this probably means that this students represent a national organized community.
The FMF conversation occurred over a wide geographical area, showing that there was a large, grassroots movement around the country.
Zuma Must Fall Results
ZMF, a far smaller conversation had a total of 23 ooo mentions in total, with 9,313 mentions on April 6 at its peak.
The movement began on February 9th, instigated by a constituent of a opponent political party, the EFF. The EFF are seen as a radical-left splinter group of the ANC.
As the main phase of the movement grew in size, we see it was catalyzed by a conversation orchestrated by The Democratic Alliance, a centrist, opponent party to the ANC. As we see below, Mmusi Maimane (leader of the DA) and OurDA dominate the conversation at the height of the protests.
Preliminary Findings
In the FMF and ZMF movements we find two very different perpectives that a both reacting to a ‘world in crisis’.
Fees Must Fall
Actions — this movement is actively looking for alternatives to the current system.
Belief in the System — the sentiment and actions of the movement show little to no faith in the current system
Ideology — although typically this movement shows leftist views, we could say that the movement aimed for a far more radical ideology of change.
Emotions — The movement showed signs of anger, violence and distrust.
Zuma Must Fall
Actions — the movement is looking for change within the current system
Belief in the system — the conversation showed faith in the overall system, an supported incremental changes in the national political dynamics.
Ideology — surprisingly the movement showed two distinct political ideologies : centrist (DA) and left (EFF)
Emotions — the movement showed anger, but this was a somewhat tempered and less violent expression
Taking these two perspectives show that FMF movement is a typical ‘just there’ community, while the ZMF is a typical ‘almost there’ community.Furthermore, as we have seen above, these communities have a multilayered spectrum of expression — validating our initial hypotheses.
Memes
The above mapping process, leads us to a very crucial insight:
At the core of both the FMF and ZMF movements is the problem of economic inequality. In FMF, there is a recognition that the development of an authentic national consciousness will first require a transformation of the underlying socio-economic system. In ZMF, there is a recognition that the current political crises are enabled by economic structures that put power in the hands of the few at the behest of the many. This identification of a common enemy, is perhaps the most beneficial result of the movements so far. In connecting the dots between the legacy of the apartheid regime and the existing extractive capitalist structures, we may find a renewed approach to this shared oppressor — late stage capitalism. The people of South Africa should adopt a new emblem to their shared struggles, “Capitalism Must Fall!”
This core argument has two key objectives:
- To create a unity between these two movements — bringing almost theres and just theres into a deeper conversation.
- To bring insight to the underlying shared struggles, and root causes, of both crises.
The last stage in our process, memes, will seed these meme into the conversations and communities we mapped. The goal of this is to create a cultural shift in the consciousness of both movements — creating solidarity in action towards a common oppressor, Late Stage Capitalism.
Capitalism Must Fall!
