Analysis | From Ballads To New-Age Memes On War: How The Mediums Bearing Message Have Evolved
The writer explains the shift from traditional war ballads to digital war memes and how devastation unfolds directly before the public eye.
By Bilal Bhat
Published : March 4, 2026 at 6:31 PM IST
|Updated : March 5, 2026 at 8:03 AM IST
Historically, war ballads and poems served as powerful tools to express and celebrate heroism and honour the patriots who fought for their nations. Similarly, satires were crafted to mock political opponents and condemn oppressors.
As media technology evolves, these expressions have transformed. Today, artificial intelligence, animation and other digital tools are used to glorify the heroism of soldiers, using modern aesthetics to evoke patriotism. Likewise, memes and motion graphics have become the new standard for expressing political opinions and social critique. Social media platforms help these genres of expression reach the audience in no time.
To provide a ‘then and now’ perspective of how political and patriotic expressions have evolved significantly and how the human brain coexists with machine learning, the craft is designed using machines to shape public opinion.
In the past, people directly involved in or affected by wars developed specific coping mechanisms. Artists and writers would give them a place to vent their emotions. Composing and singing ballads to keep the morale of their soldiers going, or turning despair into humour, was an art with some humans. Now, these expressions and coping mechanisms have largely subsumed by technology. People now create memes and express humour during war while devastation unfolds around them, turning melancholy into digital art in the form of shorts or reels to express their mood to their audience. Their audience consumes what they produce on a real-time basis and turns this into a conversation. The thread between creators or those who post and those who comment is an ecosystem that never existed before. In this ecosystem, rivals participate through messages and produce counter-narratives in the form of memes or any other form of art.
Tags like “Humour during war” and “World war III memes” are trending these days as Gen Zs are busy making them and posting them both inside and outside war zones. There are websites like Warmemes which are specifically creating memes about the Russia-Ukraine war while social media platforms are flooded with diverse narratives, in a variety of formats, from war zones across West Asia- some promoting pro-Israel perspectives and others opposing them. Consequently, markets of propaganda are thriving, with rumours spreading through these highly crafted technology-based narratives. People are busy crafting such narratives to either glorify or demonise some actors.
The main difference one can find between the era of heroic ballads and the current technology-based narratives is volume. While creating the narratives then and now, the impulse and emotions remain the same; the output now is a deluge. Reaching an audience is a matter of fractions of a second, which otherwise was once a herculean task. However, the lifespan of a tech-based narrative is short compared to the classic craft, which carried themes of epic heroism in the form of a fiction or a poem for generations. In the past, creators were original as machines hadn't learned the art. Creators were individuals rather than bots, as LLM (Large Language Models) hadn't been fed massive datasets to train them to replicate human expressions.
In the past, the pain and the feeling of loss were real as machines hadn’t taken over. An assailant would see death and destruction firsthand, as wars were not yet operated remotely using artificial intelligence. Today, warring nations control or dominate the air and space as the use of drones and missiles has become the vogue. Wars are no longer restricted to parties directly involved. People using the internet participate passively, often encouraging those in wars to make them stay firm. In this ecosystem, creators and consumers converse easily, irrespective of which side they belong to.
Today, algorithms decide the fate of a narrative, unlike earlier times when the public would be decisive. A lot has changed, then and now, one thing that will always remain constant is the change in technology, which evolves so fast that it is impossible to predict how it unfolds next season.’ Consequently, the pattern of consumption will continue to change; one can only hope these changes eventually bring some sanity and serve humanity in a better way.
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