Mer-Hagography: The Erasure, Return and Resonance of Splash’s Older Mermaid

The 1984 feature film Splash initially included a scene featuring an embittered, older mermaid (referred to as the “Merhag” or “Sea-Hag” by the production team) that was deleted before the final version premiered. Since that excision, the older mermaid and the scene she appeared in have been recreated by fans and the mer/sea-hag has come to comprise a minor element in contemporary online culture. The term “Merhag,” in particular, has also spread beyond the film, being taken up in fantasy fiction and being used—allusively and often pejoratively—to describe notional and actual female characters. Drawing on Mary Daly’s 1978 exploration of supressed female experiences and perspectives, this essay first examines Splash and associated texts with regard to the general figure of the hag in western culture (and with regard to negative, ageist perceptions of the ageing female), before discussing the use of “Merhag” and “Sea-Hag” as allusive pejoratives and the manner in which their negative connotations have been countered.

Use of online cultural content for mental health and well-being during COVID-19 restrictions: cross-sectional survey

Aims and method To gain a deeper understanding of the use of online culture and its potential benefits to mental health and well-being, sociodemographic characteristics and self-reported data on usage, perceived mental health benefits and health status were collected in an online cross-sectional survey during COVID-19 restrictions in the UK in June–July 2020. Results In total, 1056 people completed the survey. A high proportion of participants reported finding online culture helpful for mental health; all but one of the benefits were associated with regular use and some with age. Reported benefits were wide-ranging and interconnected. Those aged under 25 years were less likely to be regular users of online culture or to have increased their use during lockdown. Clinical implications There may be benefits in targeting cultural resources for mental health to vulnerable groups such as young adults.

INSTAGRAM AND THE MEMED SELF

The irreverent, bizarre and deeply political work of Instagram meme artists serves as a potent rejoinder to the claim that “the left can’t meme” In their commitment to a constantly moving mix of politics and absurdism, IG memers have something in common with the Alt-Right despite their completely opposed politics. Many of these well-followed accounts have developed a signature brand of humor and aesthetics while cultivating loyal fans. These “meme lords” are part of a recent wave in online culture I’m calling “weird Instagram.” Named for Facebook precursor, weird Instagram might best be differentiated by the much greater inclusion of self in meme production. In this paper I’ll discuss this phenomenon in its platform specificity, using the work of two prominent meme artists to exemplify the phenomenon.

SHAPING ONLINE CULTURE AS THE NEW CULTURAL REALITY: PHILOSOPHICAL REFLECTIONS

The purpose of the article is to substantiate the emergence of online culture as a new phenomenon of our time, the development of which was stimulated by the comprehensive approval of the online space as a space of existence of culture in the broad sense of this concept in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic with the reference to the cultural and philosophical ideas of the 20th-century thinkers (on the example of K. Jaspers, J. Ortega y Gasset and W. Benjamin’s ideas) and the 21st-century thinkers (on the example of E. Schmidt, J. Cohen and U. Eco’s ideas). The article outlines the main prerequisites for its rise and argues favouring the concept of “online culture” in its own right. Today, a new cultural phenomenon is being actively formed, which we mean as “online culture”. The impetus for its rapid development was the challenges common to all humanity caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, which stimulated the active search for new forms and opportunities for selfrealisation and communication by the world community. Online culture is a voluminous and multi-component phenomenon, and it has every reason to become a characteristic of contemporary culture and a new cultural form. The study uses elements of methods of hermeneutical reading of texts, comparative historical and cultural analysis of texts, as well as the method of participant observation. Conclusions. The study results show that a new stage of cultural development is currently being formed, which the authors of the study called “online culture”. The emergence of such a new cultural reality is closely linked to the online environment and digital forms of representation of cultural products. It is demonstrated that predictive reasoning about its occurrence took place in cultural and philosophical studios of the 20th and the 21st centuries, overcoming pandemic challenges by humanity; its entry becomes the realities of the present. The concept of “online culture” correlates with other cultural phenomena close to it in content and forms of representation, such as “information culture”, “digital culture”, “virtual culture”, etc. Still, it exists independently and denotes a fundamentally different cultural cross-section of the present. Now online culture is in its infancy, but the pace of its formation, inspired by the exponential development of the online space, is swift.

Metamodernism and Vaporwave: A Study of Web 2.0 Aesthetic Culture

With the advent of Web 2.0, new forms of cultural and aesthetic texts, including memes and user generated content (UGC), have become increasingly popular worldwide as streaming and social media services have become more ubiquitous. In order to acknowledge the relevance and importance of these texts in academia and art, this paper conducts a three-part analysis of Vaporwave—a unique multimedia style that originated within Web 2.0—through the lens of a new cultural philosophy known as metamodernism. Relying upon a breadth of cultural theory and first-hand observations, this paper questions the extent to which Vaporwave is interested in metamodernist constructs and asks whether or not the genre can be classed as a metamodernist text, noting the dichotomy and extrapolation of nostalgia promoted by the genre and the unique instrumentality it offers to its consumers both visually and sonically. This paper ultimately theorizes that online culture will continue to play an important role in cultural production, aesthetic mediation, and even personal expression as media becomes more integrated into our systems of meaning.

Affective politics and online culture: Reserved’s digital marketing campaign in post-hegemonic perspective

The article employs post-hegemonic theory to reframe how power operates within online cultures. To that end, it investigates a digital marketing campaign for a Polish clothing brand, Reserved, and its reception in social media. Examining over one thousand comments on Facebook, it argues that while the initial viral success abruptly turned into public outcry, the actual response was much more varied, encompassing a multiplicity of different feelings and immediate orientations, not necessarily congruent with the backlash. In this sense, the shifting balance of power was not contingent on the emergence of a public consensus that challenged corporate hegemony, but pertained to the arrangement of affective intensities to habituate the multitude to the networked media environment. Consequently, the article approaches Reserved’s campaign and its online reception as involving a series of corporeal attunements that re-territorialized multiple and incongruent affective flows into established networked structures and corresponding relations of power.

CYBER VULNERABILITY IN LIGHT OF ONLINE LEARNING REALITY

Presently, as Covid 19 has caused most of educational processes to move online, cybersecurity and data protection is rapidly gaining importance in all educational institutions, and most of the academia became more vulnerable to cyberattacks. This article sheds some light on how communities of higher education institutions perceive increased online threats, what measures they take to protect themselves against cybercrime, whether they practice good security hygiene. This paper presents and analyses results of a survey conducted at higher education institutions (universities, colleges) into perception of cybersecurity, online culture and hygiene during the present times of remote education.

Characters’ Solution vs. The Playwright’s Dissolution of Online Culture in Lucy Prebble’s The Sugar Syndrome

Digital technology has an impact on transforming the culture of the youths into online. Such an effect has been captured and mirrored in theatre works that have led to emerging a new genre called posthuman drama. In The Sugar Syndrome (2003), Lucy Prebble offers posthuman themes, posthuman landscape, and cyberfriends. She problematizes the concept of online existence with its result of online culture by blurring the lines between actual life and virtual life represented through electronic and actual connections between a teenager, Dani, and the two men, Lewis and Tim, she meets online. Consequently, and drawing on theories of posthumanism, this study provides an analysis of the play regarding the nature of the relationship between humans and digital machines as well as the conflicts between the physical world and the online world. Psychic agonies related to issues like eating disorders, mental instability, pedophilia, incest, and rape are also explored here through examining cyborg as well as physical encounters between the protagonists.