Final Blog

Part One:

For my case study, I am examining how the Islam religion is portrayed in memes. Based off of data gathered, Islam is portrayed in a negative way. To make my point more clear, memes are depicting Muslims as evil and violent beings, and the religion of Islam is a hateful and vicious religion. One meme that I found has a picture of Obama saying "No God condones violence" while the bottom picture shows a bloody Muslim with a sword with a piece of scripture from the Koran saying to "strike terror in the hearts of your enemies of Allah and enemies." Based on the outsider perspective, this somehow proves that Islam is a religion of violence. Based off of simple internet searches, it was easy to find memes portraying muslims is a negative manner. For my twelve memes, I focused on the ones that were particularly offensive and outrageous. Many commonalities I found between them was the conveying of Islamophobia. Many outsiders who created these memes held the belief that Islam is crazy and blood thirsty and every Muslim has been influenced by ISIS to kill Americans and non-believers. These memes are so disconnected from anything remotely true about Islam.

Part Two:

Offline religious standards are set by those who have clear authority in that religious group. For example, trusting an Imam over some random person on the internet is easy to do. An Imam is the leader of the Mosque and leads the spiritual lectures. Online makes it difficult to see the structure of authority and authenticity, Dr. Campbell states "Users' comments on the online informing the offline could point to a potential shift in how members define religious community, as understandings of community are shaped by some members' online involvement.." (Campbell, 2007) This further reinforces that belief that online culture is beginning to challenge the structure and integrity of the offline culture. For the online culture It is easy for someone to make a meme or blog post that spreads the hate and falsehood of the Islam religion. There are thousands of memes that portray Muslims as violent, intolerant, and hateful. Unfortunately there are Muslims who use Islam to justify their hate and malicious murdering of others. Because of this I would argue that the online and offline culture are bridging. The online and offline both preach what they believe to be true; Online believes Islam is hateful and homicidal and the offline believes Islam is peaceful and loving. Both are firm beliefs, but two very different positions.

Campbell, H. (2007), Who’s Got the Power? Religious Authority and the Internet. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication