Martin Luther's 95 Theses and "Pepe The Frog" Spread Through Culture, Community and Society

As stated in the outline for this week’s blog post, “media ecology is an assemblage of media forms and communicative practices which creates a specific media environment. These media assemblages and ecologies are constituted by several distinctive sets of articulations.” I will be examining two media texts, Martin Luther’s 95 theses as well as the “Pepe the Frog” meme in the context of Donald Trump’s 2016 Presidential campaign, through the the third articulation. This articulation is concerned with “how media artifacts and messages are brought into being and spread through a culture, community, or society, and is manifested in the spatio-temporal dynamics of relations of creativity and production, relations of distribution and circulation, and relations of consumption and reception.”

Martin Luther’s messages became viral once he lost control over where his messages went. The circulation of his message was made possible when it was spread though and by people and their sharing; when there is demand, there is more production. The pamphlet with Luther’s message literally went from one individual who had to make a copy of the original, to another individual whom had to repeat this.

Luther’s messages also created the belief that literacy gave you power. This was because, as printed texts became more important in the everyday social and political culture of the time, if a person was able to read, this gave them more power. Alongside this, not everyone is able to afford the pamphlet that Luther’s message was circulated on. If one was in possession of the pamphlet, it was a marker of your social status, material means, and level of literacy. Within Luther’s 95 theses, he had three main points, including “selling indulgences to finance the building of St. Peter’s is wrong, The pope has no power over purgatory, and Buying indulgences give people a false sense of security and endangers their salvation” (Standage 2013). Through these, we are able to see that the belief and solidarity against catholics and the catholic church was created.

The “Pepe the Frog” meme “did not become political until Donald Trump endorsed it by retweeting a Trump version of the character”, which led to his supporters retweeting the same image by a simple click of a button (Williams 2016). This, in turn, led to the large increase of Trump themed Pepe memes. “Pepe the Frog” then became a symbol of social outcasts which is exactly what Trump’s audience consists of. What led to an even higher level of virality for, what began as pro-Trump memes and emerged into memes making reference to Nazis and other offensive topics, was that Hillary Clinton denounced the meme (Williams 2016). 

In a way, Pepe serves as a way for Trump supporters to share their “support of ultraconservative beliefs” on media assemblages without an invitation for backlash (Williams 2016).

Works Cited

Standage, T. (2013). Writing on the wall: Social media -- the first 2,000 years. New York: Bloomsbury.

Williams, A. (2016). How Pepe the Frog and Nasty Woman Are Shaping the Election. The New York Times.