Last June, officials in Vietnam's Ministry of Information and Communication canceled the release of an eagerly anticipated film -- Bui Doi Cho Lon or The Street Children of Chinatown -- because it was deemed too violent, and didn't portray the "social realities" of Ho Chi Minh City.
The decision wasn't out of the ordinary; the Vietnamese government has a long history of censoring entertainment. In fact, one year earlier, the same government office banned The Hunger Games. But this time, Bui Doi Cho Lon's banning spurred many online memes and remixed images protesting the decision; they spread like wildfire on Facebook, with commenters on both sides of the argument sharing their opinions.
"The issue stayed alive, as every time someone shared one of these images, another conversation about it started," said technologist Patrick Sharbaugh at the Theorizing the Web conference in Brooklyn on Saturday. "It is unusual, because these very public debates and conversations about this topic -- censorship -- hadn't really existed [in Vietnam] a year before."
Sharbaugh explained that citizens who made and shared these memes didn't write angry blog posts to voice their anger, but instead used remixed images, pop culture and humor. "The tools of remix and meme culture are, by nature, innocuous,” he said. In other words, the social impact is disguised.
Vietnam has an Internet penetration of nearly 40% among its population of 92 million people, and 70% of the population use Facebook (even though the social network has been banned on the DNS level since 2009), according to Sharbaugh. Most media is at least partially state-owned, and many bloggers have been jailed for "anti-state activities."
"In a place where the wrong words can land you in jail, there's a powerful sense of security in being able to express yourself to thousands of people without writing anything," Sharbaugh said.
For example, last year, Vietnam's minister of health failed to visit those affected by recent vaccine-related infant deaths. In response, a variety of memes surfaced, and screenshots of a censored op-ed calling for the minister's resignation circulated the web, further establishing Vietnam's so-called "online public sphere."
"It's often said by way of criticism that these images are amateurish and juvenile and short-lived -- and that's true -- but they seem to be achieving what all the finger-wagging from the distant bloggers and western democracies seem to not; they're changing minds," Sharbaugh said.
Watch his presentation and the overall panel "Gone Viral: All Watched Over by Memes of Loving Grace" in the video, above, for an interesting discussion on hashtag activism, social-media feeds versus "true selves" and how memes can encourage civic engagement.