The Media Assemblage and Ecologies of Luther and Pepe the Frog

The first articulation of media assemblage and ecologies can be easily related to how Luther’s 95 thesis and Pepe the Frog went viral. The third media ecology is described as, “messages, means/medium, agents” (Herman, 2016). More specifically, this is the content of the message, the medium and technologies that mediate the messages and the agents who play a vital role in producing and distributing these messages for consumption. These factors have played a vital role in the popularity of Luther’s 95 thesis and the popularization and re-appropriation of Pepe the Frog.     

            Luther’s 95 thesis is often accredited to the first text to have gone viral. Dissatisfied with the status quo of the 1500s, Luther wrote a letter protesting the Catholic Church and by pointing out instances of corruption that he had witnessed. On October 31, 1517, Luther posted this letter in Latin, “on the door of the castle church in Wittenberg” (Standage, 52). Unexpectedly this letter stirred up much debate and controversy in the surrounding towns. Luther wrote this letter around the same time as Johannes Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press in 1440 (Standage, 52). Luther’s text was then translated, reproduced and distributed in pamphlets. According to Standage, within two weeks, his thesis had spread throughout Germany and within a month, throughout Europe (53). The factors that lead to the success of the 95 thesis can be attributed to the content of the message, the technological affordances of messages of medium and the agents that control the distribution. The first aspect of this is actual message. The content of Luther’s message protested the hegemonic practices enforced by the dominant structure of power during this time, the Catholic Church. The text also encouraged, “ordinary people to weigh the arguments and reach their own conclusions” (Standage, 56). Meaning that he wanted he wanted to spark debate. These opinions were shared by many, and therefore sparked a forum for debate and protest. The next factor was the technology that carried these messages. As mentioned previously, Luther’s thesis was one of the first text to be distributed through the printing press. Instead of reprinting his text in books, they were reprinted on pamphlets. Pamphlets were a lot cheaper to construct than books, so it allowed for its distribution and publication to be more feasible. The final and most important is that lead to the success of Luther’s text were the agents. The agents include but are not limited to, those who controlled the printing press, the people who recommended and orally repeated Luther’s text and the merchants who sold the text in different communities. The publishers that control the printing press had a big impact on the distribution of messages. Although the Catholic Church protested Luther’s message and tried to censoring and ban it, people would still get the text from other towns. The next agent is those who were supporters of Luther. The more they recommended the text, and the more pressure was put on publishers to reproduce that text. It was also important for those who were literate to encourage the distribution of these messages and read it out load to those who were illiterate. Without these agents the spreading of Luther’s message would’ve been impossible.

            Similarly, the popularity and transformation of Pepe the Frog can be attributed to the 3^rd articulation of media ecologies. Since Pepe’s original creation from the comic series Boy’s Club by Matt Furie, the message that Pepe brings has varied (Know Your Meme, n.d.). The message is determined by the different variations and texts that are paired with the meme. The medium used to distribute Pepe and other memes of is social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and etc. Similar to Luther, the most important attribution of Pepe’s understanding is the agents that have chosen to appropriate Pepe. These agents include the Alt-Right movement who have used Pepe as a symbol of, white “ethno-nationalist” (Herman, 2016). By Donald Trump’s son using Pepe the Frog as a political motif, it gained a lot more traction as the public tried to decide the underlying meanings behind the meme. Ultimately, this resulted in Pepe landing in the New York-based Anti-Defamation League's hate symbol database. This verdict is not irreversible and those who support Pepe can still be agents to restore it back to its original meaning.