Sorted for Memes and Gifs: Visual Media and Everyday Digital Politics
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Political Science and the Problem of Social Media
- While few political scientists would doubt the importance of social media, their discipline's capacity to capture the feel and character of socially mediated forms of political participation is hindered, I argue, by three sets of assumptions about the nature, scope and purpose of political science research, as well as an implicit self-representation of the figure of the political scientist.
- Social media is seen as a medium through which political campaigns are directed, or as something that may have consequences for politics, but it is tacitly framed as not, in and of itself, constitutive of the texture and practice of politics.
- The third problem is to do with a certain squeamishness towards the affective and emotional dynamics of politics.
- This is mostly manifest as an absence, i.e. a discussion of politics in terms of public opinion, party policy programmes etc. without consideration of the feelings and affects that underpin them (see Hayton, 2018) .
- None of this is to say that political scientists have not made valuable contributions to the study of digital politics, also known as To reiterate.
Visual Culture and the 'Memeification' of Politics
- My answer here is indicative rather then exhaustive.
- Memes, a portmanteau of mimesis and genes, originally coined by Richard Dawkins in 1976, refer to 'digital objects that riff on a given visual, textual or auditory form and are then appropriated, re-coded, and slotted back into the internet infrastructures they came from' (Nooney and Portwood-Stacer, 2014: 249) .
- Finally, perhaps the most widely-shared Corbyn tweet of the election season consisted of a short video of Corbyn walking down a flight of steps towards the House of Commons a few days after the election, during which he claps his hands and says "we're back and we're ready for it all over again".
Re-Orienting the Study of Digital Politics
- But if the authors accepted that the "memeification" of politics is a development that requires scholarly attention, the question arises of what kinds of conceptual and methodological tools they can turn to in order to capture these processes.
- That being said, media and communication studies is of course not a homogenous field.
- While wide ranging, this literature is concerned with mapping the changing character of political and civic information, focussing on interactions between "traditional" and digital media, and the impact of these interactions on political discourses and institutions.
- Citizens are breathing new life into the party form, remaking parties in their own changed participatory image, and doing so via digital means' (Chadwick and Stromer-Galley, 2016, p. 285) .
- While the politicised online spaces that Beyer and, especially, Massanri analyse are in many respects deeply concerning, their analyses are nonetheless highly instructive.
The Pleasures and Passions of Socially Mediated Politics: Towards a Research Agenda
- My argument so far has been that we, as political analysts, would benefit from a thicker, more textured sense of the ways in which politically engaged citizens inhabit a range of online spaces, and engage in, for instance, the everyday production and exchange of forms of visual media such as memes and gifs.
- This is not because larger scale analyses of the dynamics of online networks are unimportant.
- A further avenue of enquiry relates to the relationship between online and offline participation.
- Finally, I want to respond to a possible objection, namely that in stressing the pleasure and humour of digitally-mediated engagement I am might 'naively advancing a dubious kind of populism', as Leisbet van Zoonen (2005: 147) put it in her description of the sceptical responses that greeted her affirmative account of the politics/pop culture relation.
- Whether the authors "like" them or not, political scientists can thus ill afford to bypass these kinds of everyday citizen engagements if they are serious about properly coming to terms with the texture and character of political participation in a digital age.
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Cites background from "Sorted for Memes and Gifs: Visual M..."
...This article is only a first step towards studying of what can be called a ‘memeification’ (Dean, 2019) of the Soviet past: a fresh dimension that brings together the subjects of digital aesthetics, creative media practices, contemporary Russian visual culture and postSoviet studies....
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18 citations
References
3,692 citations
"Sorted for Memes and Gifs: Visual M..." refers background in this paper
...Such approaches can include, for example, the application of the sociological traditional of social network analysis to online networks (Scott, 2017), semantic analysis of large volumes of social media content (Bontcheva and Rout, 2014; Maynard et al., 2017), and/or sentiment analysis of online…...
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1,532 citations
660 citations
"Sorted for Memes and Gifs: Visual M..." refers background in this paper
...Indeed, this toxicity is even more apparent in the work of Adrienne Massanari (2015, 2017) who, like Beyer, conducted an immersive ethnographic study of Reddit (a large, open-sourced news and discussion site); drawing on actor-network theory, Massanari’s analysis offers an extremely rich, textured account of the ways in which the Reddit’s cultural norms interact with its algorithms to sustained particular kinds of political and affective sensibilities....
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...Indeed, this toxicity is even more apparent in the work of Adrienne Massanari (2015, 2017) who, like Beyer, conducted an immersive ethnographic study of Reddit (a large, open-sourced news and discussion site); drawing on actor-network theory, Massanari’s analysis offers an extremely rich, textured…...
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...While acknowledging the multiplicity of conceptual and methodological approaches to the study of politicised digital media, I suggest that the recent turn to virtual immersive ethnographies pursued by the likes of Jessica Beyer and Adrienne Massanari could provide useful methodological insights....
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...In particular, she discusses how Reddit plays host to a range of what she calls ‘toxic technocultures’, in which certain kinds of ‘geek’ masculinity feed into broader cultural and political mobilisations against feminism and anti-racism (Massanari, 2017)....
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657 citations
422 citations
"Sorted for Memes and Gifs: Visual M..." refers background in this paper
...…hold of political elites (Stomer and-Galley, 2014), and some highlights the capacity of new media to weaken traditional media’s grip on political agenda-setting (Meraz, 2009, 2011); most of this literature stresses the hybrid, intertwined character of traditional and new media (Chadwick, 2017)....
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