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Our article analyses partisan, user-generated Facebook pages and groups to understand the articulation of political identity and party identification. Adapting the concept of scenes usually found in music studies, these Facebook pages and groups act as partisan scenes that maintain identities and sentiments through participatory practices, principa...
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... the pro-Bernier group, party identification with the PPC relied on mocking the Conservative Party as a bad choice (Figure 3). The NDP had a similar approach of mocking Liberal supporters as a way to justify their own party (Figure 2) -a trend especially pronounced at the end of the election campaign when the NDP tried to convince supporters not to strategically support the Liberals to prevent a Conservative party win (a popular trope in Canadian elections). ...
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Social scientists are increasingly using social media to conduct research and to recruit subjects for research studies. Prior research seems to suggest that using social media is particularly helpful when it comes to recruiting participants from hard-to-reach populations such as immigrants. In this study, we examine how social media platforms (i.e....
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... In doing so, shitposting takes on the potential critique of an internet politic described by Sandlin and Milam (2008) in their examination of culture jamming. While these authors root their work in the overt political activism of new media groups Adbusters and Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping, shitposting's reliance on an internet ugly aesthetic still produces a community politic through a shared commitment to do-it-yourself and amateur creative production (McKelvey et al., 2023) in alignment with the parallel practice of culture jamming. Although the details of that politic remain far from defined (being embraced by both neo-fascist and radical leftist groups alike), a communal politic still forms. ...
... By defining shitposting in this way, I expand beyond the primary focus on the use of shitposting by the alt-right and other neo-fascist/ neo-conservative movements and approach shitposts through a holistic lens. This proves vital in understanding how shitposts operate because, as McKelvey et al. (2023) have attested, shitposts can also represent "low-stakes, participatory jokes that keep the scene going, bringing disconnected people together" (p. 14) without intentionally introducing an element of critique at all, thus mirroring the role of memes in maintaining online communities (Knobel, 2006). ...
In response to the growing ubiquity of social media, critical media literacy scholars have increasingly called for the examination of online practices and their embedded pedagogies and curricula. In response, I use this paper to reimagine shitposting, a discursive social media practice, as a form of public pedagogy aligned (at times) with critical media literacy education. I begin by engaging extant research to both define shitposting and position the prac-tice beyond the neofascist ends of the alt-right movement that most scholars focus on. Examining this alignment through the lens of critical media literacy, I argue that shitposting exists as an online pedagogical technology that can potentially reorient the network of relationships within social media spheres and expand the possi-ble range of identities for those involved. To illustrate this argu-ment, I conclude with a close reading of posts from two Twitter accounts: dril, an anonymous user who has managed to inform political discourse through his shitposts, and the corporate account for the Sunny Delight Beverage Corporation. I describe how tweets from these accounts engage shitposts in divergent ways. In doing so, I contend that these tweets reveal shitposting’s potential for contributing to the democratic aims of critical media literacy edu-cation, but the appropriation of that practice by large corporations and individuals imbued with political power jeopardize that already fraught potential.
... In our everyday lives, meme usage has proliferated in many areas. For example, memes are used in political campaigns (Shifman, 2014), since memes' authentic characteristics are useful for expressing candidates' political identity (McKelvey et al., 2021). Michael Bloomberg paid prominent meme makers to support his run in the 2020 American presidential primaries (Lorenz, 2020). ...
... According to Shifman (2013), Internet memes are part of popular culture, and they create a shared cultural experience among Internet users. Correspondingly, in our everyday lives, memes have increased in many areas, including political campaigns and advertising, and they have demonstrated their effectiveness (Alexander, 2019;Gonzalez, 2018;McKelvey et al., 2021;Shifman, 2014). Similarly, the results suggest that using Internet memes to craft PSA messages is effective, particularly in generating emotional experiences among Singaporean millennials. ...
To help solve the diabetes problem in Singapore, we developed humorous and fearful public service announcements (PSAs) based on popular Internet memes and investigated how the emotions derived from PSAs affect Singaporean millennials' perceptions of PSAs' effectiveness. In total, 416 people participated in the study through a Singaporean online survey company. Multivariable linear regression methods with SPSS were used to examine our hypotheses and research questions. According to the results, message manipulation significantly increased participants' perceived emotion (i.e., perceived humor and fear). Moreover, the results showed that perceived humor and fear were positively associated with perceived PSA effectiveness in both models, testing the humor effect and fear effect separately. As per the moderation analysis, the association between the perceived emotion (i.e., humor and fear) and the perceived PSA effectiveness is likely to increase when attitudes toward the organization are less positive. Moreover, the association between perceived fear and perceived PSA effectiveness is likely to increase when participants' involvement with memes is low. Our findings highlight important theoretical and practical implications for future studies investigating the effectiveness of Internet meme-based PSA messages regarding serious health issues.
Keywords: Internet meme, humor appeal, fear appeal, public service announcement, attitude (PSA), perceived message effectiveness
... Recent studies on political movements followed en suite. Meme pages and celebrities, for instance, have been recently characterized to spark instances of political participation in Morocco [34], maintain partisan identity in Canada [35], promote public health behavior [36], or facilitate misinformation [37]. Recent work has focused on the growing role of visuals in protests directly, such as the case of the Hong Kong Protests in 2019 [38]. ...
We present and analyze a database of 1.13 million public Instagram posts during the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, which erupted in response to George Floyd’s public murder by police on May 25. Our aim is to understand the growing role of visual media, focusing on a) the emergent opinion leaders and b) the subsequent press concerns regarding frames of legitimacy. We perform a comprehensive view of the spatial (where) and temporal (when) dynamics, the visual and textual content (what), and the user communities (who) that drove the social movement on Instagram. Results reveal the emergence of non-institutional opinion leaders such as meme groups, independent journalists, and fashion magazines, which contrasts with the institutionally reinforcing nature of Twitter. Visual analysis of 1.69 million photos show symbols of injustice are the most viral coverage, and moreover, actual protest coverage is framed positively, in contrast with combatant frames traditionally found from legacy media. Together, these factors helped facilitate the online movement through three phases, culminating with online international solidarity in #BlackOutTuesday. Through this case study, we demonstrate the precarious nature of protest journalism, and how content creators, journalists, and everyday users co-evolved with social media to shape one of America’s largest-ever human rights movements.
While numerous studies have explored the participatory benefits of social media use for political participation, the empirical literature on the mobilizing role of political memes is nearly absent. In addition, most of the attention has been on Western democratic contexts. By employing survey data from an Asian context—Singapore—this study scrutinizes the impact of exposure to political memes in the interplay between political use of social media and online political participation. In addition, it investigates the contingent role of political cynicism. First, the results show that political social media use is associated with online political participation and that association is mediated by exposure to political memes. Further, moderation analyses indicate that social media use provides participatory gains only for individuals exhibiting low political cynicism. However, when such social media use facilitates exposure to political memes, it primarily mobilizes those with high political cynicism into active online political participation. The results suggest that memes can mobilize disengaged groups into active participation.
Political memes have become a common way for people to be exposed to political content and express their political views online. However, little is known about who shares political memes online or whether exposure to memes is associated with key attitudinal, emotional, and behavioral political outcomes. To address these gaps, this study uses data from a two-wave survey (YouGov) of American adults fielded during the 2020 U.S. presidential election ( N = 1800) to investigate (a) predictors of creating and sharing political memes on Facebook and (b) associated outcomes of exposure to political memes on Facebook. Results reveal that sharing political memes is a form of political expression employed by a variety of people in the United States, including political moderates and people both politically interested and noninterested. The data suggest that people who circulate political memes are motivated to make fun of politicians, but also to persuade and inform others in some cases. Results also highlight potential consequences of exposure to political memes, such as heightened online opinion expression, political participation, and anger toward the opposing presidential candidate. Taken together, the results provide insights into how people engage with memes and their associations with key political outcomes and offer an important foundation for future work on the effects of political memes.
Musicians, scholars, and even reference materials are surprisingly united in the contention that music and politics occupy separate spheres in Canada. However, we suggest that denying the intersection of music and politics in Canada potentially blinds us to the complex ways in which artists, mediators, and audiences—that is, produsers—participate in projects that are undeniably ideological. Indeed, we suggest that appreciating the entwined relationship of music, politics, people, and contexts for circulation is particularly important at a moment when the participatory culture that prevails on social media platforms is increasingly normalised and the authority of established knowledge sources breaks down in the face of “controlless” circulations of content that radically challenge our capacities to communicate across partisan lines. Our analysis takes the form of three case studies: Tony Turner’s “Harperman” (2015), Adrian Sutherland’s “Politician Man” (2019), and Brock Tyler’s “Speaking Moistly” (2020). Our analysis interprets each example according to musical form, lyrics, creator intentions, and genre affiliations but, critically, also addresses how contexts for circulation, curation by produsers, and the affect of musicking illuminates kaleidoscopic meanings that accrue through the complex interactions of music and politics—meanings, notably, that cannot be discerned through a focus on the musical object or political landscape alone.
Background: This article examines to what extent Canadian public libraries participate in civic journalism at a time when news media coverage is declining in many communities. This pilot study was prompted by reports that public libraries in the United States were undertaking civic-minded journalism following the closure of community newspapers.
Analysis: A content analysis of 64 Canadian public library websites found nearly a dozen examples of basic news reporting or civic-minded journalism initiatives (basic reporting, n = 8; civic, n = 3) published during the 2019 and 2021 federal election campaigns. This article also articulates and explains the shared goals and philosophy of the civic journalism movement and the mandate of public libraries.
Conclusions and implications: While the numbers are small, this is the first empirical evidence of Canadian public library participation in journalism work, and the fact that it exists at all has significance. Whether or not public libraries in Canada continue to participate in civic-minded journalism warrants further attention.
This contribution seeks to demonstrate how studying memes as a collection depends on the website or platform where they are sourced. To do so, we compare how memes, specifically internet memes, are conceived in the well – known meme repository (Know Your Meme) with those from a meme host and generator (Imgur), an imageboard (4chan), a short-form video hosting site (TikTok) as well as a marketing data dashboard (CrowdTangle). Building on insights from software studies and our observational analysis, we demonstrate how each site constructs and arranges meme collections in a distinctive manner, thus affecting the conceptualisation of memes by each of these sites. In all, the piece develops the concept of the meme as a technical collection of content, discussing how each collection’s distinctiveness has implications for meme research.
Background: In popular coverage and social media analysis, the alt-right has been described as a popular phenomenon. Following Stuart Hall’s understanding of popular culture, we question the status of the alt-right in Canada as both a political and methodological problem that requires critical attention to social media metrics and critical experimentation in developing new digital methods.
Analysis: Our study developed a novel method to analyse image circulation across major social media platforms. We find that image sharing is marginal, yet the spread of images distinguishes political communities between Twitter hashtags, subreddits, and Facebook pages. We found a distinct alt-right community in our sample, active but isolated from other popular sites.
Conclusion and Implications: While the findings suggest the limited significance of image sharing to conceptualize popularity in cross-platform analysis, our novel method offers a compelling alternative to corporate social media analytics and raises new questions about how popular politics, especially the popularity of the alt-right, may be studied in the future.
