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

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.

Using Social Media to Analyze Public Concerns and Policy Responses to COVID-19 in Hong Kong

The outbreak of COVID-19 has caused huge economic and societal disruptions. To fight against the coronavirus, it is critical for policymakers to take swift and effective actions. In this article, we take Hong Kong as a case study, aiming to leverage social media data to support policymakers’ policy-making activities in different phases. First, in the agenda setting phase, we facilitate policymakers to identify key issues to be addressed during COVID-19. In particular, we design a novel epidemic awareness index to continuously monitor public discussion hotness of COVID-19 based on large-scale data collected from social media platforms. Then we identify the key issues by analyzing the posts and comments of the extensively discussed topics. Second, in the policy evaluation phase, we enable policymakers to conduct real-time evaluation of anti-epidemic policies. Specifically, we develop an accurate Cantonese sentiment classification model to measure the public satisfaction with anti-epidemic policies and propose a keyphrase extraction technique to further extract public opinions. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work which conducts a large-scale social media analysis of COVID-19 in Hong Kong. The analytical results reveal some interesting findings: (1) there is a very low correlation between the number of confirmed cases and the public discussion hotness of COVID-19. The major public concern in the early stage is the shortage of anti-epidemic items. (2) The top-3 anti-epidemic measures with the greatest public satisfaction are daily press conference on COVID-19 updates, border closure, and social distancing rules.

New dissidence in contemporary Russia: Students, feminism and new ethics

The essay is devoted to the specifics of the contemporary Russian opposition and civil society. We describe the characteristics of contemporary ‘intellectual activism’ and the growing network of small civil and political groups in today’s Russia. We show that Russian civil society remains fragile and fragmented; the public discussion is not focused on strategies of resistance to arbitrariness but on constructing moral categories such as the wide and vague concept of ‘new ethics’. We also show how outsiders appear among contemporary Russian dissidents, who are not supported by most independent leaders and intellectuals – these are young ‘new leftists’ and feminist activist groups. These political activists find themselves under pressure from both the siloviki and the authorities, and in the focus of criticism of opposition leaders, becoming, in fact, dissidents among dissidents in contemporary Russia.

More learning, less activism: Narratives of childhood in Australian media representations of the School Strike for Climate

The School Strike for Climate campaign led to public discussion about children’s political participation. Children are generally excluded from formal political systems, however this campaign challenges mainstream attitudes that children are not sufficiently competent to participate in politics. This paper presents an analysis of Australian mainstream media representations of adult responses to the School Strike for Climate events held in Australia in March 2019. When analysed against theories of childhood, two primary narratives are reflected in what adults said about children’s participation in the campaign. Anticipatory narratives focus on children appropriately developing into adults, and are represented by the notion that strikers should be in school, be punished for missing school, and are ‘just kids’ who should not be listened to. Protectionist narratives seek to shelter children from adult matters, suggesting strikers were brainwashed and raising welfare concerns. Neither of these narratives regard children as citizens capable of political voice, despite these children acting prefiguratively to create a world in which their civic participation is valued. Social movement theories of prefiguration are also explored in this paper, providing a counter argument to suggestions that children have no political agency and should be excluded from activism and discussions regarding climate change.

Locating oneself and talking past: Journalists’ engagement with Pacific communities on Twitter

This article explores how journalists navigate the tensions between community engagement and professional detachment by tracing how journalists used Twitter during Tonga and Australia's inaugural rugby league test match in 2018. As a high-profile Pacific cultural and sporting event, it provides an opportunity to study how journalists engage with marginalised Pacific communities, and whether that engagement demonstrates the reciprocity needed to build relationships. More than 9000 tweets were analysed using quantitative and qualitative methods to reveal that media organisations and journalists tended more towards broadcasting than interactive approaches on Twitter. Practices differed between subgroups, however: Individual journalists engaged in public discussion more than media organisations, and Pacific journalists engaged more than non-Pacific journalists. In fact, Pacific journalists’ identity work – performed through specific discourses, including emojis – demonstrated a less detached journalism than did non-Pacific journalists, who appeared to talk past the Pacific communities in this Twitter public.

Freedom of the Press and Anti-Corruption

Public discussion of corruption was very important in shaping cultural norms as well as scrutinising and pressing for the reform of Britain’s domestic and imperial administrations. The focus of this chapter is on the debates surrounding the nature and extent of the freedom of Britain’s precociously free press to expose corruption. The chapter argues that there was a close connection between justifications for anti-corruption and ideological defences of a free press: freedom of the press and freedom from corruption often went hand in hand. Some critics argued that the press should not be shackled by those in office whose desire to restrict it was rooted in a concern to screen themselves. But officials (in both domestic and imperial contexts) often had a very different view, seeing the press as seditious, libellous, and destructive of authority. This tension existed both at home and abroad for much of the period.

Policy Implications

This chapter offers a short summary of policy implications raised by the book’s historical research. It comments on the speed and nature of change; the importance of context and state formation; the vital role of public deliberation as well as official compliance; the politics of anti-corruption; and the socio-cultural dimensions that frame what constitutes corruption in office. It is argued that policies should be bottom-up and deliberative as well as top-down and formal; that anti-corruption is a protracted, political and contested process which involves personal, institutional and systemic issues as well as extensive public discussion of ethical questions; that rule-change is easier to achieve than culture-change but reform requires both; that the art of governance is a balance between trust and distrust of office-holders, and between formal and informal modes of accountability; and that history is useful in offering data about the process of anti-corruption and influence of the past.

Age Limitations for Presidential Candidates? Exploring Student Perspectives Using Classroom Debates

Ahead of the 2020 Presidential Election, Donald Trump (age 73) and his primary opponent, Joseph Biden (age 76) received extensive criticism regarding the aptness of their candidacies based upon their current ages. While the United States Constitution requires candidates to have “attained the age of thirty-five years”, no age cap for presidential candidates exists. In response to timely public discussion, undergraduate interprofessional gerontology students worked in assigned groups to prepare to debate either in favor of, or in opposition to a constitutional amendment capping the age of presidential candidates. Following classroom debates, course faculty moderated in-depth conversation examining cogent arguments made throughout the debates. After attending this session, participants will understand the logistics of planning in-class debates, moderating post-debate student discussions, and evaluation methods of student debate performance and on a corresponding reflective writing assignment. Student and faculty takeaways and prospective classroom debate ideas will be provided.

Obscene or Exemplary? Robert Marchand’s Cycling World Hour Record

The cycling world hour record for riders over 105 years old set in 2017 by Robert Marchand was much discussed in France in a context of neoliberal discourses about work and retirement. Within a debate about work characterized by desires to encourage “active aging,” Marchand’s sporting athletic effort was variously perceived as exemplary hard work and productive old age, or as an obscene abuse of athleticism. This article examines the reception of Marchand’s record within the wider context of contemporary neoliberal trends in French politics, culture, and society. It considers Marchand’s working life, active sporting retirement, and left-wing politics. It shows how media coverage and public discussion of the sporting “work” of his “performance” exemplified competing discourses in France’s national discussions about neoliberalism.

The Role of Place-Lore in Environmental Conflict Discourse: The Case of Paluküla Sacred Hill in Estonia

This article is a critical study of how local place-related narratives, i.e. place-lore, is integrated into environmental discussion and how it has significant potential to illustrate local and public, as well as vernacular and institutional, meanings concerned with the environment. Combining the frameworks of ecosemiotics, environmental communication studies, and place-lore research, the article explores how a new storytelling context, ideological selection, and the logic of conflict communication influence the re-contextualisation and interpretation of place-lore. The theory is applied to an empirical examination of public discussion of Paluküla sacred hill in Central Estonia. Tracking references to previous place-lore about Paluküla Hill in the media coverage of the conflict allows a demonstration of how the contextuality and referentiality towards an extra-narrative environment that are originally present in place-lore are often overlooked or ignored in conflict discourse. This, in turn, leads to socially and ecologically disconnected discussion.