All these things – serious and trivial alike – are s pat out at us in quick succession by algorithms making it difficult, sometimes, to differentiate between meme and reality. We’re consuming tank-driving instruction manuals, slice-of-life portraits, and Politics 101-style explainers. Across multiple devices and apps we can watch airstrikes in Kyiv, laugh at Ukrainian farmers joking with out-of-gas Russian soldiers, and thirst over edits of President Volodymyr Zelenskiy. We’re learning the political complexities of the situation through social media. We saw Facebook posts from soldiers in Iraq, and live streams from the Arab Spring and the London riots, but for most us watching Ukraine, social media has almost entirely replaced news streams. While we’ve seen front-line footage shot by soldiers and civilians for decades now, the way we’re seeing the Ukraine-Russia war play out is different from how we watched other recent conflicts. If the Vietnam War was the “television war”, Ukraine could be the “TikTok war”. Have we always coped with conflict this way? Josie Adams investigates for IRL.
As war broke out in Ukraine last week, so did the memes.
