Martin Luther's Theses and Pepe the Frog: The Spread of Media Artifacts and Messages Across Community, Culture, and Society

In my blog post I will discuss the two media texts Martin Luther’s 95 theses and “Pepe the Frog” meme in the context of Donald Trump’s 2016 Presidential campaign and how they relate in the third articulation of media ecologies. The third articulation is mainly concerned with how media messages are created and spread throughout a culture and society and how they are manifested in relations of creativity and production, relations of distribution and circulation, and relations of consumption and reception.

Martin Luther’s theses gained momentum through the dissemination of pamphlets being re-published and sold throughout different cities by different merchants. His message became viral when other people were able to disseminate his message to others for him as well, and the more popular it became the higher in demand for production of these pamphlets were. This can be compared similarly to the meme “Pepe the Frog” whose meme became a popular tool in Donald Trump’s political campaign. Originally “Pepe the Frog” was a popular internet symbol that had been around for years known as “Feels Bad Man” because of how sad he looked and has been taken and re-symbolized by others on the internet for different purposes. The dissemination of the Trump version of “Pepe the Frog” became viral when Trump himself re-tweeted it. From their this character lead to “...a mass influx of pro-Trump Pepes” (Williams, 2016). Williams argues that this meme serves as a way for “Trump followers to echo their implicit support for ultraconservative beliefs in public forums” (Williams, 2016).

We can view this similarly to the way in which Martin Luther’s theses were disseminated, people who supported it would buy it, read it and disseminate it to others in support of Luther. The more support both got, the more material was produced and disseminated, in the case of Luther it would be the amount of pamphlets produced and for “Pepe the Frog” the creation of new Trump memes.

Work Cited

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