scholarly journals THE MEMEIFICATION OF #SCHOOLSHOOTINGS IN THE U.S.: YOUTH, TIKTOK, AND PLAYFUL MEDIATED BODIES

Author(s):  
Jacqueline Ryan Vickery

With active shooter drills as a normal part of student experiences in the U.S., the threat of a school shooting has become commonplace and institutionalized. Within a context of cultural trauma, it is no surprise that teens are using digital media to create spaces for sense-making, placemaking, and as a way to respond to the constant threat of violence. Focusing on the mediated memeification of school shootings, there exists an entire genre of #darkhumor videos on TikTok in which young people create and circulate irreverent humorous media texts as a response to the constant threat of – and perceived political inaction to - school shootings in the U.S. Through a content and discursive analysis of 200 #darkhumor #schoolshooting videos on TikTok, this paper asks: what can we learn about how young people understand cultural trauma through an examination of their playful and memetic social media practices? Videos are categorized into three groups: $2 (which address media stereotypes, tropes, and transactional survival), $2 (which address the absurdity of school violence and the failure of neoliberal responses), and $2 (which depict dance and movement as celebratory distractions). While the playful and irreverent videos can be read through a lens of critique, satire, or parody, the memetic, social, corporeal, and performative nature of TikTok affords related yet distinct practices and modes of playful social engagement that I refer to as the mediated playful body.

Author(s):  
Paul Byron ◽  
Alan McKee ◽  
Ash Watson ◽  
Katerina Litsou ◽  
Roger Ingham

AbstractThis paper adds to recent discussions of young people’s porn literacy and argues that researchers must address porn users’ engagements with, and understandings of, different porn genres and practices. As part of a larger interdisciplinary project which consisted of a series of systematic reviews of literature on the relationship between pornography use and healthy sexual development, we reviewed articles addressing the relationship between pornography use and literacy. We found few articles that present empirical data to discuss porn literacies, and those we found commonly frame young people’s porn literacy as their ability to critically read porn as negative and comprising ‘unrealistic’ portrayals of sex. This model of porn literacy tends to be heteronormative, where only conservative ideals of ‘good’, coupled, and vanilla sex are deemed ‘realistic’. Data from the literature we reviewed shows that young people make sophisticated distinctions between different kinds of pornography, some of which could be called ‘realistic’, as per do-it-yourself and amateur porn. We extend this discussion to young people’s understandings of ‘authenticity’ across their broader digital and social media practices. From this focus, we propose the need to incorporate young people’s existing porn literacies into future education and research approaches. This includes engaging with their understandings and experiences of porn genres, digital media practice, and representations of authenticity.


Author(s):  
Jacqueline Ryan Vickery

This chapter asks: how do expectations of youth, technology, and risk shape policies, practices, and lived experiences? Through an analysis of harm-driven and opportunity-driven expectations, the chapter outlines key concerns related to young people’s digital media practices; specifically the ways privileged understandings of risk create unequal opportunities for marginalized youth. It identifies three disconnections that lead to fear. First, young people’s lived experiences with media differ from sensational fear-driven media narratives and policies. Second, the ways young people value media differ from how adults value digital media. Third, harm-driven narratives focus too overtly on the role of technology in young people’s lives, rather than broader social changes. The chapter aims to shift conversations away from harm and toward opportunity.


Author(s):  
Jacqueline Vickery ◽  
Jen Cardenas

This paper examines how young TikTok creators enact strategies of playfulness and absurdity in response to gun violence and trauma. Through a ludic-carnivalesque reading of young people’s irreverent engagement with school shootings, we demonstrate how youth use TikTok to reclaim emotional control of uncontrollable situations. We situate our analysis of playful #schoolshooting videos as part of an imitation public that is constituted through practices of mimesis, replication, and imitation. However, we broaden our focus to consider the latent political potential of the publics that memetic practices create. Within this framework we ask: What discourses and shared practices emerge through playful #schoolshooting memes on TikTok and what are the implications for the everyday politics of youth citizenship? Our methodology consists of two phases conducted over an 18-month period. The first phase of analysis, performed August–December 2019, relies on collated systemic searches for specific hashtags and sounds that young people use to memeify school shootings. In the second phase, we identified two seemingly unrelated events that young people discursively and memetically linked to school shootings: COVID-19 lockdowns from March-May 2020 and the storming of the U.S. Capitol building by radicalized Trump supporters on January 6, 2021. By analyzing these practices through the lens of the ludic-carnivalesque, patterns reveal the ways young people enact strategies to demarcate boundaries, articulate cogent critiques of policies and policymakers that do not prevent school shootings, and to turn painful and traumatic realities into a fun and harmless Bakhtinian carnival.


Author(s):  
Stine Liv Johansen

In contemporary society, there seems to be a conception that children’s play has dramatically changed or that it has been deployed by the massive influence of digital media and technology. Yet, within a framework of mediatization and practice theory, and based on extensive ethnographies in everyday contexts of children, different narratives, genres and communicative patterns occur. In this article, the author draws a broader picture of the current state of play in the lives of children and young people, pointing to relevant dilemmas and nuances in the field. 


1970 ◽  
pp. 247-262
Author(s):  
Ewelina Konieczna

Popular media culture has been a vital resource through which youth generations have defined themselves, their desires, and their hopes and dreams. This continues to be reflected in the dynamic ways that the youth are using digital media to shape their everyday lives. As a result, young people are constantly creative; they acquire new skills and make up groups and communities in the media culture. The purpose of the reflections in the article is a look at the media practices of young people and an attempt to find an answer to the question how the young generation uses social media for communication and participation in culture and how social media change media culture.


2021 ◽  
pp. 205015792098482
Author(s):  
Linus Andersson ◽  
Ebba Sundin

This article addresses the phenomenon of mobile bystanders who use their smartphones to film or take photographs at accident scenes, instead of offering their help to people in need or to assist medical units. This phenomenon has been extensively discussed in Swedish news media in recent years since it has been described as a growing problem for first responders, such as paramedics, police, and firefighters. This article aims to identify theoretical perspectives that are relevant for analyzing mobile media practices and discuss the ethical implications of these perspectives. Our purpose is twofold: we want to develop a theoretical framework for critically approaching mobile media practices, and we want to contribute to discussions concerning well-being in a time marked by mediatization and digitalization. In this pursuit, we combine theory from social psychology about how people behave at traumatic scenes with discussions about witnessing in and through media, as developed in media and communication studies. Both perspectives offer various implications for normative inquiry, and in our discussion, we argue that mobile bystanders must be considered simultaneously as transgressors of social norms and as emphatic witnesses behaving in accordance with the digital media age. The article ends with a discussion regarding the implications for further research.


2021 ◽  
Vol ahead-of-print (ahead-of-print) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jessie Nixon

Purpose This paper aims to demonstrate how teaching the discourse of critique, an integral part of the video production process, can be used to eliminate barriers for young people in gaining new media literacy skills helping more young people become producers rather than consumers of digital media. Design/methodology/approach This paper describes an instrumental qualitative case study (Stake, 2000) in two elective high school video production classrooms in the Midwestern region of the USA. The author conducted observations, video and audio recorded critique sessions, conducted semi-structured interviews and collected artifacts throughout production including storyboards, brainstorms and rough and final cuts of videos. Findings Throughout critique, young video producers used argumentation strategies to cocreate meaning, multiple methods of inquiry and questioning, critically evaluated feedback and synthesized their ideas and those of their peers to achieve their intended artistic vision. Young video producers used feedback in the following ways: incorporated feedback directly into their work, rejected and ignored feedback, or incorporated some element of the feedback in a way not originally intended. Originality/value This paper demonstrates how teaching the discourse of critique can be used to eliminate barriers for young people in gaining new media literacy skills. Educators can teach argumentation and inquiry strategies through using thinking guides that encourage active processing and through engaging near peer mentors. Classroom educators can integrate the arts-based practice of the pitch critique session to maximize the impact of peer-to-peer learning.


1992 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 105-110 ◽  
Author(s):  
Linda M. Petlichkoff

In 1990 the Athletic Footwear Association (AFA) (1) released a report entitled “American Youth and Sports Participation” that examined teenagers’ (ages 10-18 years) feelings about their sport involvement. This report was the culmination of an extensive study of more than 10,000 young people from 11 cities across the U.S. in which issues related to why teenagers participate, why they quit, and their feelings about winning were addressed.1 The results highlighted in the AFA report indicate that (a) participation in organized sports declines sharply as youngsters get older, (b) “fun” is the key reason for involvement and “lack of fun” is one of the primary reasons for discontinuing, (c) winning plays less of a role than most adults would think, and (d) not all athletes have the same motivations for their involvement.


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