Momina Areej is currently pursuing an MPhil in Clinical Pharmacy Practice. With a passion for writing, she covers diverse topics including world issues, literature reviews, and poetry, bringing insightful perspectives to each subject. Her writing blends critical analysis with creative expression, reflecting her broad interests and academic background.

The digital class consciousness in Pakistan is undergoing a remarkable shift due to new levels of informational access, memetic culture, and global political conversations. Using a narrative ethnographical approach through postcolonial theory, media studies, and cultural studies, this analysis investigates how everyday digital productive acts, and memes more specifically, function as informal ideological apparatuses. Drawing from over twenty hours of participant observation online from Twitter, Facebook groups, and WhatsApp networks, and a sample of over 300 memes and viral images relating to class, the paper argues that these cultural texts are not only channels of class anxiety, but they are also performative mediated acts that reshape collective imagination and interpellate subjects into emerging class identities.

The analysis is approached through three interconnected registers. First, the analysis contextualizes memes within the conduit of digital production; platform affordances, algorithmic curation, and attention’s political economy before assessing how memes capitalized on pre-established patterns of visibility and/or marginalization. Second, it considers the affective dimensions of online communities and traces how humor, irony, and parody emerged as forms of articulating aspirations, resentments, and alliances across social class. Thirdly, it engages with the twin promises of digital liberation and the algorithmic containment of difference or dissent, while illustrating that platform capitalism is an audacious site of both amplification and disciplining of class narratives.

By rethinking engagements with class today, as narrative, mood, and aesthetics, curated, contested, and performed moment-to-moment on Telcom-Pakistani timelines, this research furthers our understanding of the dialectics of digital culture and social stratification. In doing so, it contributes to postcolonial digital scholarship through framing everyday memes as contested ideological sites of struggle for meaning, with both grassroots and top-down potential for enabling change and resistance to surveillance. Ultimately, it calls for a better understanding of how platformed publics mediate with and change class configurations in the Global South.

The historical class fabric of Pakistan, based as it is on the structures of feudal landholding, military capitalism, and patronage systems, has been produced for decades through a hegemonic combination of state-sponsored school curricula, state-controlled media, and elite institutions that shape the national imaginary. In doing so, these institutions consolidated and structured concepts of class, social categories, and hierarchies through representations of meritocracy, religiosity, and, to a lesser degree, national salvation. Over the past decade, however, concatenations of developments in technology have begun to shake and ultimately displace that monopoly. With the ubiquity of smartphones, affordable mobile data, and the prevalence of social media over traditional forms of media, we are witnessing a digital turn in how class is articulated, represented, and critiqued. Historically relegated to drawing rooms, campuses, or political rallies, the conversation about class is increasingly taking place in fluid and asynchronous digital spaces, like Twitter timelines, Instagram reels, TikTok parodies, and YouTube explainers. The classroom no longer monopolizes the language of critique, now, digital spaces have displaced the hegemony of privileged spaces by democratizing access to discourses about inflation, job precarity, and structural violence. The historically excluded or baited are now able to articulate, perform, and negotiate their social positions in the modern world.

This paper asks:

The study situates digital culture in three overlapping analytical frameworks: postcoloniality, cultural production, and platform capitalism, and utilizes some of Raymond William’s conceptualization of culture as “a whole way of life” (Williams, 1983) and Antonio Gramsci’s theory of cultural hegemony to consider how dominant class narratives are consolidated, resisted, or remixed in the digital public sphere.

Walter Benjamin’s (Benjamin, 2018)  theoretical insights on mechanical reproduction are strategic when thinking about the political implications of how amplification and circulation are viral, while Jean Baudrillard’s hyperreality enables an investigation of how forms of class identity are mediated through elements of ironic distance and parody. Gayatri Spivak’s (Spivak, 1988) interrogation regarding the speech of the subaltern asks, can the meme-posting subaltern speak – and if yes, who hears them and under what conditions?

The study employs a narrative-ethnographic method as a way to address the affective, performative, and aesthetic aspects of online class discourse. The author conducted interviews with 20 Pakistani digital content creators, ranging from viral TikTok performers to educators on YouTube to meme page administrators. These conversations were enhanced by participant observation in virtual communities, including meme-sharing WhatsApp groups, Twitter subcultures, and Facebook communities.

A corpus of 500 differently categorized digital artifacts, memes, short-form videos, text posts, infographics, and trending hashtags was gathered and thematically coded. The analysis wishes to focus less on reductive metrics of activity, such as engagement and follower counts, and instead is committed to mushy text, thick description, and interpretive richness, to begin to show how humor, irony, nostalgia, and absurdity come together in classed experiences, frustrations, and aspirations.

The paper centralizes the expressiveness of everyday media users and makers. It presents digital media not as a neutral medium, but rather as a contested site of ideological struggle. The paper hopes to illustrate how ordinary Pakistanis are producing class discourse as much as they are consuming it, often through ways of making sense of the world that do not produce conventional political grammar. In the end, the paper would like to re-conceptualize class consciousness in Pakistan as an emotional, affective, and aesthetically mediated, rather than purely discursive, process, which is shaped as much by memes and moods as it is by material conditions.

In order to make sense of the development of new class imaginaries in Pakistan’s digital ecology, it is necessary to start with the theoretical framing of Karl Marx and Antonio Gramsci, two of the seminal theorists whose work continues to energize current discussions of ideology, culture, and power. Marx gives us the structural explanation of class as a function of material relations and production, while Gramsci follows Marx into a cultural and political analysis that emphasizes the maintenance of power, not just through coercion, in the base sense of violence as a relation of conflict, but also through consent (that is not to say, though, that Marx did not also recognize the role of hegemony). Gramsci gestured towards the notion of ‘cultural hegemony’ as embedded in and supported through everyday routine habits and the cultural institutions that ensure dominance, thus permitting variation and difference as long as social safety budgets are not depleted.

At the heart of Marx’s argument is the notion of class struggle: our history is defined by the struggle between owners of the means of production (the bourgeoisie) and laborers whose sole means of survival relies on the sale of their labor (the proletariat). Marx argues that the ruling ideas of any given epoch are those of the ruling class. We might refer to this today as the........

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