scholarly journals The Normative World of Memes: Political Communication Strategies in the United States and Ecuador

2022 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 40-51
Author(s):  
Marco López-Paredes ◽  
Andrea Carrillo-Andrade
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Social Media ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
Political Communication ◽  
The United States ◽  
Public Values ◽  
Public Discussion ◽  
Multimodal Analysis ◽  
The Media ◽  
Convergence Model

The media convergence model presents an environment in which everyone produces information without intermediates or filters. A subsequent insight shows that users (prosumers) —gathered in networked communities—also shape messages’ flow. Social media play a substantial role. This information is loaded with public values and ideologies that shape a normative world: social media has become a fundamental platform where users interact and promote public values. Memetics facilitates this phenomenon. Memes have three main characteristics: (1) Diffuse at the micro-level but shape the macrostructure of society; (2) Are based on popular culture; (3) Travel through competition and selection. In this context, this paper examineshow citizens from Ecuador and the United States reappropriate memes during a public discussion? The investigation is based on multimodal analysis and compares the most popular memes among the United States and Ecuador produced during the candidate debate (Trump vs. Biden [2020] and Lasso vs. Arauz [2021]). The findings suggest that, during a public discussion, it is common to use humor based on popular culture to question authority. Furthermore, a message becomes a meme when it evidences the gap between reality and expectations (normativity). Normativity depends on the context: Americans complain about the expectations of a debate; Ecuadorians, about discourtesy and violence.

scholarly journals “Wars” on COVID-19 in Slovakia, Russia, and the United States: Securitized Framing and Reframing of Political and Media Communication Around the Pandemic

2020 ◽  
Vol 5 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marta N. Lukacovic
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Social Media ◽  
Digital Media ◽  
Political Communication ◽  
Research Question ◽  
The United States ◽  
Frame Element ◽  
Political Factions ◽  
Russian Media ◽  
The Government

This study analyzes securitized discourses and counter narratives that surround the COVID-19 pandemic. Controversial cases of security related political communication, salient media enunciations, and social media reframing are explored through the theoretical lenses of securitization and cascading activation of framing in the contexts of Slovakia, Russia, and the United States. The first research question explores whether and how the frame element of moral evaluation factors into the conversations on the securitization of the pandemic. The analysis tracks the framing process through elite, media, and public levels of communication. The second research question focused on fairly controversial actors— “rogue actors” —such as individuals linked to far-leaning political factions or militias. The proliferation of digital media provides various actors with opportunities to join publicly visible conversations. The analysis demonstrates that the widely differing national contexts offer different trends and degrees in securitization of the pandemic during spring and summer of 2020. The studied rogue actors usually have something to say about the pandemic, and frequently make some reframing attempts based on idiosyncratic evaluations of how normatively appropriate is their government's “war” on COVID-19. In Slovakia, the rogue elite actors at first failed to have an impact but eventually managed to partially contest the dominant frame. Powerful Russian media influencers enjoy some conspiracy theories but prudently avoid direct challenges to the government's frame, and so far only marginal rogue actors openly advance dissenting frames. The polarized political and media environment in the US has shown to create a particularly fertile ground for rogue grassroots movements that utilize online platforms and social media, at times going as far as encouragement of violent acts to oppose the government and its pandemic response policy.

scholarly journals Network Propaganda

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yochai Benkler ◽  
Robert Farris ◽  
Hal Roberts
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Political Communication ◽  
Coming Out ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
The United States ◽  
Mainstream Media ◽  
Fox News ◽  
The Media ◽  
Political Media ◽  
Political Spectrum

This book examines the shape, composition, and practices of the United States political media landscape. It explores the roots of the current epistemic crisis in political communication with a focus on the remarkable 2016 U.S. president election culminating in the victory of Donald Trump and the first year of his presidency. The authors present a detailed map of the American political media landscape based on the analysis of millions of stories and social media posts, revealing a highly polarized and asymmetric media ecosystem. Detailed case studies track the emergence and propagation of disinformation in the American public sphere that took advantage of structural weaknesses in the media institutions across the political spectrum. This book describes how the conservative faction led by Steve Bannon and funded by Robert Mercer was able to inject opposition research into the mainstream media agenda that left an unsubstantiated but indelible stain of corruption on the Clinton campaign. The authors also document how Fox News deflects negative coverage of President Trump and has promoted a series of exaggerated and fabricated counter narratives to defend the president against the damaging news coming out of the Mueller investigation. Based on an analysis of the actors that sought to influence political public discourse, this book argues that the current problems of media and democracy are not the result of Russian interference, behavioral microtargeting and algorithms on social media, political clickbait, hackers, sockpuppets, or trolls, but of asymmetric media structures decades in the making. The crisis is political, not technological.

scholarly journals Peculiarities of Modern Nationalist Messages in Online Political Communication: The Analyses of Donald Trump’s and Jair Bolsonaro’s Election Campaigns

2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 350
Author(s):  
Olga V. Novoselova
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Social Media ◽  
Literature Review ◽  
Political Communication ◽  
The United States ◽  
Communication Patterns ◽  
Election Campaigns ◽  
Communication Research ◽  
Political Leaders

As digitalized election campaigns are a new phenomenon, there are almost no studies defining the peculiarities of modern nationalist messages in online political communication research. This article seeks to identify some communication patterns and recent innovations in delivering online nationalist messages. These patterns are regarded in conflation with nationalist and populist approaches by political leaders during their digital election campaigns. The literature review approach to making generalizations is chosen to explore the articulation of nationalist and populist messages during Donald Trump’s (The United States), and Jair Bolsonaro’s (Brazil) election campaigns. Overall, the study boils down to an analysis of the populist and nationalist signifiers in social media posts, and the degree to which their structures of meaning revolve around the vertical down/up or the horizontal in/out axis. As a result, some common traits of modern nationalist messages in online political communication are identified and future areas of research are proposed.

scholarly journals Twitter Discourse Analysis of US President Donald Trump

2020 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 67-75
Author(s):  
Tanase Tasente
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Social Media ◽  
Political Communication ◽  
United States Of America ◽  
Performance Indicators ◽  
Mass Communication ◽  
The United States ◽  
Online Environment ◽  
Donald Trump ◽  
Heads Of State

Twitter has become a very powerful channel of political communication in recent years, many times overtaking, along with Facebook, traditional channels of mass communication, such as: TV, radio or newspapers. More then 500 million tweets are sent every day (5,787 tweets every second), and 326 million people use Twitter every month, even if there are 1.3 billion Twitter accounts. From the perspective of political communication, Twitter is ahead of Facebook, according to a study conducted in 2018 by Twiplomacy, which shows that 187 governments and heads of state maintain an official presence on Twitter. This mechanism of mass communication has benefited the politicians, especially those in the United States of America, who have generated a unique phenomenon in political communication: creating a map on polarization in the online environment.. This study focused on analyzing the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that facilitate Twitter Communication of Donald Trump, the President of United States of America (number of followers, types of tweets, engagement rate and interaction rate etc.) and analyzing Donald Trump's Twitter speech and identify the most commonly used expressions in Social Media during the term of President.  The monitoring period is 22.01.2019 - 16.08.2019.

Last Week Tonight With John Oliver and the Stewart/Colbert Impact on U.S. Political Communication in the Post-Network Era

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Alonso
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Political Communication ◽  
Public Interest ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Political ◽  
Scholarly Work ◽  
Political News ◽  
Mainstream Media ◽  
The Media

Chapter 2 analyzes Last Week Tonight With John Oliver (LWT), the political news satire show aired on HBO since 2014. While TDS satirized TV journalism’s coverage of news and TCR parodied the conservative rhetoric in the media, LWT presents investigations, generating in-depth coverage of national and international public interest issues. Chapter 2 analyzes LWT in relation to the academic debates and scholarly work generated by its successful predecessors. By contextualizing and examining the show in relation to the evolution of political infotainment in the United States, I show how LWT not only fills gaps left by mainstream media, but also takes satire to a more international, activist, and investigative level. Because U.S. political infotainment has been internationally influential, this chapter also serves to illuminate the debates about the genre to be applied to the Latin American cases, which have remained academically unexplored.

scholarly journals Kultura udomowiona a nowe technologie

2021 ◽  
Vol 13(49) (1) ◽  
pp. 51-72
Author(s):  
Stanisław Jędrzejewski
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
Cultural Heritage ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
The United States ◽  
Film Production ◽  
Online Environment ◽  
Heritage Sites ◽  
The Media

Although the restrictions associated with the COVID-19 pandemic significantly reduced or completely eliminated the manifestations of artistic life, human ingenuity and simply necessity made it possible to transfer many offline cultural events and events to the online environment. Free online broadcasts from concerts such as the Berlin Philharmonic, opera performances from the New York Metropolitan, as well as theater and music concerts have gained in popularity worldwide. Film production companies have begun to make films available online. The offer of video or VOD (Netflix, YouTube, Twitch, Showmax, Paramount Play) has increased (Upper, 2020). Because, at least in the first phase of the pandemic, the revenue from the cinemas fell, VOD services could watch hits, e.g. in the United States — Emma, and in Poland — Hejter. Virtual tours were offered by well-known museums, such as the Louvre in Paris and international cultural heritage sites, including the Roman Colosseum. Since the outbreak of the epidemic there has also been a rapid increase in online gaming traffic. Finally, after the total suspension, sports competitions, e.g. football matches, came back, but without the participation of the fans, albeit like stand-ups with played recordings of the stadium’s fans’ reactions. In this way, what we call entertainment or popular culture has been domesticated and is done through the media. In this article I review the possibilities that new technologies now offer for domesticated culture in new circumstances forced by a pandemic COVID-19.

Super aggregators and the media supply chain

2021 ◽  
Vol 180 (1) ◽  
pp. 54-63
Author(s):  
Tom O’Regan ◽  
Mark Balnaves
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Social Media ◽  
Supply Chain ◽  
Search Engines ◽  
The United States ◽  
Third Party ◽  
Media Industries ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Media

Search engines and social media came into their own from 2006. Indeed, when regulators in the United States crafted Section 230 in the 1990s to give immunity to web publishers from third-party content, they did not know that search services would become hypergiant advertising and news vehicles. In this article, the authors argue that the sudden upending of established practices in the media industries has far-reaching consequences for how audiences are represented for businesses and the public.

scholarly journals Zombification

2015 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 66-77
Author(s):  
Winnie Soon
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Social Media ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
The United States ◽  
Global Capitalism ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Living Dead ◽  
Media Communications ◽  
Viral Outbreak

Spam appears everywhere on the Internet, from downloaded emails to server-based blogs, forums and social media communications. This article explores this notion of the living dead in the context of spam culture. How is spam actively and repetitively produced with different identities? I adopt the term ‘zombie’ to describe spam because, notably, the concept of zombies has been used extensively in popular culture and entertainment, such as films, games and literature to describe the phenomenon of mindless slaves. They are usually situated in an environment that has suffered a viral outbreak with contagious effects. Critiques have compared zombies to dead labour, such as the slavery in Haiti and the labour in the United States: that is, the exploitation of labour through the concept of alienation, from Marx’s theory, and labour practices in global capitalism. Within the context of spam production, as datafied phenomenon, this paper uses the figure of the zombie to describe the computational and network processes of spam automation, which I call ‘zombification’ — alluding to the broader topic of datafication and its consequences. The assumption here is that life once datafied is zombification. 

Applying the Devil's Works in a Holy Cause: Working-Class Popular Culture and the Salvation Army in the United States, 1879-1900

1997 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 195-223
Author(s):  
Lillian Taiz
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
York City ◽  
The United States ◽  
Salvation Army ◽  
Public Meeting ◽  
The Many ◽  
Sunday Evening

Forty-eight hours after they landed in New York City in 1880, a small contingent of the Salvation Army held their first public meeting at the infamous Harry Hill's Variety Theater. The enterprising Hill, alerted to the group's arrival from Britain by newspaper reports, contacted their leader, Commissioner George Scott Railton, and offered to pay the group to “do a turn” for “an hour or two on … Sunday evening.” In nineteenth-century New York City, Harry Hill's was one of the best known concert saloons, and reformers considered him “among the disreputable classes” of that city. His saloon, they said, was “nothing more than one of the many gates to hell.”

Liberating Afghan Women

2004 ◽  
Vol 21 (3) ◽  
pp. 70-88 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nancy Gallagher
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Human Rights ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
The United States ◽  
Political Organizations ◽  
Way Of Life ◽  
Afghan Women ◽  
The Media ◽  
Policy Priority

Public opinion in the United States and elsewhere celebrated the liberation of Afghan women following the defeat of the Taliban government. The United States promised to stay in Afghanistan and foster security, economic development, and human rights for all, especially women. After years of funding various anti- Soviet Mujahidin warlords, the United States had agreed to help reconstruct the country once before in 1992, when the Soviet-backed government fell, but had lost interest when the warlords began to fight among themselves. This time, however, it was going to be different. To date, however, conditions have not improved for most Afghan women and reconstruction has barely begun. How did this happen? This article explores media presentations of Afghan women and then compares them with recent reports from human rights organizations and other eyewitness accounts. It argues that the media depictions were built on earlier conceptions of Muslim societies and allowed us to adopt a romantic view that disguised or covered up the more complex historical context of Afghan history and American involvement in it. We allowed ourselves to believe that Afghans were exotic characters who were modernizing or progressing toward a western way of life, despite the temporary setback imposed by the Taliban government. In Afghanistan, however, there was a new trope: the feminist Afghan woman activist. Images of prominent Afghan women sans burqa were much favored by the mass media and American policymakers. The result, however, was not a new focus on funding feminist political organizations or making women’s rights a foreign policy priority; rather, it was an unwillingness to fulfill obligations incurred during decades of American-funded mujahidin warfare, to face the existence of deteriorating conditions for women, resumed opium cultivation, and a resurgent Taliban, or to commit to a multilateral approach that would bring in the funds and expertise needed to sustain a long-term process of reconstruction.

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