Louis-Ferdinand Céline: Trolling For Another Time?

Author(s):  
Luke Warde

This article presents a reading of Louis-Ferdinand Céline through the concept of trolling. A relatively new phenomenon, trolling denotes an attempt to elicit a negative response in a chosen target via deliberate provocation or incitement. While inextricable from the online social media platforms that have facilitated its emergence as a discursive mode, trolling is dependent on rhetorical strategies that are hardly new: irony, self-referentiality, effrontery, aggression, etc. Trolls seek to cultivate a brand around the antipathy they delight in triggering. I contend that Céline attempted to do just this in the postwar period, and more specifically in the series of interviews he conducted at Meudon in the last decade of his life. I thus argue against some recent scholarship that claims that Céline attempted to regain, by expressing contrition, a sympathetic audience following his condemnation for having published a series of egregiously antisemitic pamphlets. Rather, I suggest that he sought to instrumentalize his notoriety for his own advantage; some readers, he likely reasoned, are drawn to him because, not in spite of, his infamy. My argument draws on a body of recent writing on the relationship between humour, new media and far-right politics.

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 205630512110088
Author(s):  
Benjamin N. Jacobsen ◽  
David Beer

As social media platforms have developed over the past decade, they are no longer simply sites for interactions and networked sociality; they also now facilitate backwards glances to previous times, moments, and events. Users’ past content is turned into definable objects that can be scored, rated, and resurfaced as “memories.” There is, then, a need to understand how metrics have come to shape digital and social media memory practices, and how the relationship between memory, data, and metrics can be further understood. This article seeks to outline some of the relations between social media, metrics, and memory. It examines how metrics shape remembrance of the past within social media. Drawing on qualitative interviews as well as focus group data, the article examines the ways in which metrics are implicated in memory making and memory practices. This article explores the effect of social media “likes” on people’s memory attachments and emotional associations with the past. The article then examines how memory features incentivize users to keep remembering through accumulation. It also examines how numerating engagements leads to a sense of competition in how the digital past is approached and experienced. Finally, the article explores the tensions that arise in quantifying people’s engagements with their memories. This article proposes the notion of quantified nostalgia in order to examine how metrics are variously performative in memory making, and how regimes of ordinary measures can figure in the engagement and reconstruction of the digital past in multiple ways.


Author(s):  
Max Z. Li ◽  
Megan S. Ryerson

Community outreach and engagement efforts are critical to an airport’s role as an ever-evolving transportation infrastructure and regional economic driver. As online social media platforms continue to grow in both popularity and influence, a new engagement channel between airports and the public is emerging. However, the motivations behind and effectiveness of these social media channels remain unclear. In this work, we address this knowledge gap by better understanding the advantages, impact, and best practices of this newly emerging engagement channel available to airports. Focusing specifically on airport YouTube channels, we first document quantitative viewership metrics, and examine common content characteristics within airport YouTube videos. We then conduct interviews and site visits with relevant airport stakeholders to identify the motivations and workflow behind these videos. Finally, we facilitate sample focus groups designed to survey public perceptions of the effectiveness and value of these videos. From our four project phases, to maximize content effectiveness and community engagement potential, we synthesize the following framework of action items, recommendations, and best practices: (C) Consistency and community; (O) Organizational structure; (M) Momentum; (B) Branding and buy-in; (A) Activity; (T) Two-way engagement; (E) Enthusiasm; and (D) Depth, or as a convenient initialism, our COMBATED framework.


2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-31
Author(s):  
Esteban A. Ríssola ◽  
David E. Losada ◽  
Fabio Crestani

Mental state assessment by analysing user-generated content is a field that has recently attracted considerable attention. Today, many people are increasingly utilising online social media platforms to share their feelings and moods. This provides a unique opportunity for researchers and health practitioners to proactively identify linguistic markers or patterns that correlate with mental disorders such as depression, schizophrenia or suicide behaviour. This survey describes and reviews the approaches that have been proposed for mental state assessment and identification of disorders using online digital records. The presented studies are organised according to the assessment technology and the feature extraction process conducted. We also present a series of studies which explore different aspects of the language and behaviour of individuals suffering from mental disorders, and discuss various aspects related to the development of experimental frameworks. Furthermore, ethical considerations regarding the treatment of individuals’ data are outlined. The main contributions of this survey are a comprehensive analysis of the proposed approaches for online mental state assessment on social media, a structured categorisation of the methods according to their design principles, lessons learnt over the years and a discussion on possible avenues for future research.


2021 ◽  
pp. 146144482110245
Author(s):  
Greta Jasser ◽  
Jordan McSwiney ◽  
Ed Pertwee ◽  
Savvas Zannettou

With large social media platforms coming under increasing pressure to deplatform far-right users, the Alternative Technology movement (Alt-Tech) emerged as a new digital support infrastructure for the far right. We conduct a qualitative analysis of the prominent Alt-Tech platform Gab, a social networking service primarily modelled on Twitter, to assess the far-right virtual community on the platform. We find Gab’s technological affordances – including its lack of content moderation, culture of anonymity, microblogging architecture and funding model – have fostered an ideologically eclectic far-right community united by fears of persecution at the hands of ‘Big Tech’. We argue that this points to the emergence of a novel techno-social victimology as an axis of far-right virtual community, wherein shared experiences or fears of being deplatformed facilitate a coalescing of assorted far-right tendencies online.


2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (5) ◽  
Author(s):  
Kumaran Kanapathipillaii

<p>Social media such as Facebook has become an essential strategic tool for organisations. Facebook is a platform where a large pool of consumers would use to make purchase decisions. Organisations are designing and maintaining their Facebook account to expand their social networks and build relationships with the public. This research explains current situations regarding the influence of online social media technology with reference to Facebook on employees' work performance in Malaysia. The problem statement focuses on both the public and private sectors in Malaysia. Additionally, various literature was reviewed, indicating the relationship between social media (usage at work, sociability, and trust) and work performance. The mediating role of the organisational framework on the relationship between online social media technology (Facebook) and work performance was also scrutinised to formulate the research hypothesis. The findings of this research established a significant relationship between online social media (Facebook) and organisational framework and work performance. Conclusively, the hypothesis depicted that the organisational framework fully mediates the relationship between online social media technology (Facebook) and employees' work performance in public and private sectors in Malaysia. This study also verifies that both the public and private sector organisations that incorporate Facebook can enhance networking and information sharing, influencing employees' work performance, creating a stable organisational framework, generating value for customers, and improving employee relationships with all stakeholders. In conclusion, work performance can be heightened by a well planned and structured organisational framework. Additionally, through a well planned and implemented online social media technology such as Facebook, an organisation would have a smooth operating organisational framework and a workforce with enhanced performance.</p><p> </p><p><strong> Article visualizations:</strong></p><p><img src="/-counters-/edu_01/0854/a.php" alt="Hit counter" /></p>


2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (44) ◽  
pp. 22-36
Author(s):  
Busra ERTOGRUL ◽  
Gizem KILICSIZ ◽  
Aysun BOZANTA

Social media platforms have become an inevitable part of our daily lives. Companies that noticed the intense use of social media platforms started to use them as a marketing tool. Even ordinary people have become famous by social media and companies have been sending their products to them to try and advertise. Many people have gained a considerable amount of money in this way and today new jobs are emerged like "Youtuber" and "Instagram Influencer". Therefore, ordinary people realized the power of social media and many people started to strength their digital identity over social media. The question raising in people’s mind is that “What is the difference between the influencers and the ordinary people who have also digital identity over social media?”. This study examined Instagram influencers for five categories namely fashion, makeup, photography, travel, and fitness in Turkey. As an exploratory study, the relationship between the influencers’ average number of posts, the number of likes, the number of views, the number of comments, number of followers, and the number of following were examined. As well as the engagement rates of the followers to the influencers were calculated. In addition, the words they mostly used in the captions of the posts were examined.


Author(s):  
Linh Nguyen ◽  
Kim Barbour

This paper explores whether or not our online social media persona is viewed as authentic. The selfie is a fundamental part of the structure of the online identity for young people in today’s digital world. The relationship between an individual’s self-identity in the physical face-to-face environment was analysed and compared to a carefully constructed, modified virtual representation in a selfie posted on social media platforms. Data was obtained through four focus groups at the University of Adelaide. Two key theoretical frameworks provide a basis for this study: Erving Goffman’s concept of the self as a performance, and Charles Horton Cooley’s concept of the looking glass self. In examining the focus group discussions in light of these two frameworks as well as associated literature, we conclude that the authenticity of the selfie as a way of visualising a social media persona is subjective and dependent on the individual posting a selfie. Ultimately, authenticity involves a degree of subjectivity. It was on this basis that focus group participants argued that selfies could be considered authentic expressions of identity.


Author(s):  
Karen Sorensen ◽  
Andrew Mara

In order to understand the relationship between Networked Knowledge Communities (NKCs) and the Networked Knowledge Society (NKS), the chapter authors conduct a genre analysis of a self-titled New Media genre called BookTube. BookTube is a NKC made up of YouTube content creators who use this particular social media channel to celebrate and discuss books, especially young-adult fiction. By examining how BookTube adheres to discourse community features—shared rules, genres, hierarchies, and values—the contours of this particular NKC become clearer. Stylistic patterns, the roles of authors, and author cultural capital all get negotiated within a discernible and definable set of practices that relate participants to other NKCs and the broader NKS. Furthermore, by relating these discourse features to other latent educational possibilities of the NKS, the authors explore how BookTube might be usefully implemented to model NKC practices in more traditional f2f educational settings.


Author(s):  
Shalin Hai-Jew

With the popularization of the Social Web (or Read-Write Web) and millions of participants in these interactive spaces, institutions of higher education have found it necessary to create online presences to promote their university brands, presence, and reputation. An important aspect of that engagement involves being aware of how their brand is represented informally (and formally) on social media platforms. Universities have traditionally maintained thin channels of formalized communications through official media channels, but in this participatory new media age, the user-generated contents and communications are created independent of the formal public relations offices. The university brand is evolving independently of official controls. Ex-post interventions to protect university reputation and brand may be too little, too late, and much of the contents are beyond the purview of the formal university. Various offices and clubs have institutional accounts on Facebook as well as wide representation of their faculty, staff, administrators, and students online. There are various microblogging accounts on Twitter. Various photo and video contents related to the institution may be found on photo- and video-sharing sites, like Flickr, and there are video channels on YouTube. All this digital content is widely available and may serve as points-of-contact for the close-in to more distal stakeholders and publics related to the institution. A recently available open-source tool enhances the capability for crawling (extracting data) these various social media platforms (through their Application Programming Interfaces or “APIs”) and enables the capture, analysis, and social network visualization of broadly available public information. Further, this tool enables the analysis of previously hidden information. This chapter introduces the application of Network Overview, Discovery and Exploration for Excel (NodeXL) to the empirical and multimodal analysis of a university’s electronic presence on various social media platforms and offers some initial ideas for the analytical value of such an approach.


Author(s):  
Pauline Hope Cheong

Beyond the widespread coverage of terrorism-related stories on international news outlets, we are witnessing the swift spread of alternative interpretations of these stories online. These alternative narratives typically involve digital transmediation or the remix, remediation, and viral dissemination of textual, audio, and video material on multiple new and social media platforms. This chapter discusses the role of new(er) media in facilitating the transmediated spread of extremist narratives, rumors, and political parody. Drawing from recent case studies based upon multi-modal analyses of digital texts on social media networks, including blogs, vlogs, Twitter, and Jihadist sites associated with acts of terror in Asia, Middle East, and North America, the chapter illustrates how digital transmediation significantly works oftentimes to construct counter narratives to government counter insurgency operations and mainstream media presentations. In discussing these examples, the chapter demonstrates how the new media points to varied narratives and reifies notions of national security, global politics, terrorism, and the media's role in framing the “War on Terrorism.” Moreover, a critical examination of remix texts and digital mashups of popular artifacts inform a Web 2.0 understanding of how the creative communication practices of online prosumers (hybrid consumers and producers) contest dominant interests in the online ideological battlefield for hearts and minds.


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