Relationship Between Representation & Power

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What is the relationship between representation & power?
On the 15th of November 2011, the University of California Davis (UC Davis) faced an
outrageous phenomenon whereby students protested nonviolently against the tuition fee increase
by setting up tents and staying overnight. As a result of this action, police Lt. John Pike pepper
sprayed students after refusing to move. The representation of the image portrayed an injustice
police act, Carah and Louw assert on any person that has access to social media platforms and
internet possesses the power at hand to create and modify content based on their point of views
(2015). To further elaborate, representation influences power and hegemonic groups represent
those who hold power. Through this paper, I will analyze if memes do trivialize the issue by
using the concepts of encoding and decoding of memes that emerged after the incident, followed
by how attention is not the only factor. Additionally I will evaluate how intertextuality relates to
the use of student/ chancellor’s power and to conclude, the essay will gather all the information
mentioned in the body text in a summarized way.
Memes are tools to exercise/ express freedom of speech; they are cultural texts that serve as
mediatic vehicles for any situation. The photo below, creators have placed Lt. Pike in the 1819
declaration of independence by John Trumbull, the trend then began expanding including placing
Lt. John Pike in historical events and milestones in civil rights. This claims that the spread of
memes is sought to spread awareness, or it can also mean that it lessened the impact of how
serious the issue is.
Memes are known to compromise the issues from a structural, social and cultural level.
According to Carah and Louw, professional communicators or the sender is held responsible for
getting their message across deliberately in a way that they want the receiver to understand
(2015). This process purposes to translate the information into a message, establishes symbols
that correspond to concepts or ideas (Carah & Louw, 2015). Generating around the idea of how
the constitutional rights of people don’t matter since Lt. John Pike sprayed the nonviolent
students while maintaining a straight face broke outrage between the public.
The meme was published as a form of medium distribution; this depends on the website
published which can represent the targeted audience, the sender targeted students on social media
platforms which assisted in the effectiveness of the message (Carah & Louw, 2015). In order to

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assign meaning to the message, the decoding process initiates when the sender successfully
chooses the appropriate channel/s, then the receiver begins to interpret and make meaning of the
issue from experience this includes the knowledge about the topic, beliefs, attitudes and even the
relationship between the sender and receiver (Carah & Louw, 2015).
The greater public, specifically students, relate to the experiences of students from raising the
institutional money. It appears, after research that the issue got so much publicity as a result of
effective communication, even though receivers responded differently. The receiver’s feedback
compromised of dominant point of view, negotiated and oppositional.
Memes are known to be humorous and mock the situation at hand (Bayerl & Stoynov, 2016).
Bayerl and Stoynov elaborate on how the incident resulted in creating a Twitter account under
the name ‘Pepper-spraying Cop' with a bio of ‘I like pepper-spray. I dislike protestors'. Gained
200 followers from its initial stages, the account posted photo shopped memes, then expanded
the account to compare other incidents of pepper spray used by police, which later gained
approximately 1500 followers this account was inactive from 2013 to 2014 (2016). This
demonstrates the power of memes only last so long until the issue is forgotten about, which leads
to the representation of how memes do trivialize the issue. However, they are used in a sense to
capture the attention of the world, initially (Peck, 2014). In addition to creating a fake account,
users have created movies, theme songs, and video clips got uploaded to YouTube (Bayerl &
Stoynov, 2016).
The question is why this issue specifically gets highlighted amongst other emerging issues.
Answering the question above, experts set different point of views. Johnson argues that “the
meme is sheer surface, and there is nothing to interpret because the meme does not mean
anything, or contain anything” (2007, p.43). Moreover, Johnson clarifies that amongst other
memes one meme stands out because we conduit its replication rather than it gaining our
attention, meaning that attention is not the only significant factor that makes receivers select and
replicate the meme (2007). Social media created a place for the rising meme culture. “The sender
uses visual intertextuality to humorous effect” (Sci & Dare, 2014).
Furthermore, the second photo shopped meme got more attention because Lt. John Pike was
recontextualized into the declaration of independence, as shown in Figure 1. Pike’s use of