ICYMI: RT and Youth-Oriented International Broadcasting as (Geo)Political Culture Jamming

Research in political communication has recently begun to explore the role of non-Western English-language state-funded international broadcasters (NEIBs) in influencing international audiences. Despite this, there has been little attention given to understanding how NEIBs engage and influence young people in ‘Western’ democracies. Our article addresses this gap by providing a detailed analysis of RT's English-language, youth-orientated news product ICYMI. Launched in 2018, ICYMI is a social media-based news brand that consists of a series of 2–3-min videos that deliver satirical takes on recent global events including military conflict, financial scandals, and culture clashes. Our findings, which examine the first year of the platform's activity, show that ICYMI is a novel form of engagement, one that is not easily categorised as either public diplomacy or propaganda, nor can it be described as traditional journalism. Instead, we label this approach as geopolitical culture jamming. In this article, we conduct a discourse analysis of 45 videos published on YouTube by ICYMI over its first year to examine how the platform attempts to influence how young people relate to traditional foreign policy discourses. Our empirical analysis centres on how viewers engage with and interpret ICYMI's videos with the aim of addressing how RT may be influencing younger audiences, particularly its core demographic of Anglophone white males whose comments reflect an attachment to ICYMI's populist, anti-elite worldview.

Discordant storytelling, ‘honest fakery’, identity peddling: How uncanny CGI characters are jamming public relations and influencer practices

This article critically explores whether and how computer-generated imagery (CGI) characters are jamming public relations and influencer practices. We use Miquela, a virtual character with 3 million Instagram followers as a case study. We examine Miquela’s (and her creators’) communication strategies to identify what makes her so appealing to postmillennial audiences, luxury and indie brands, and civil rights activists alike. Valued at USD125 million, Miquela is algorithmically moulded as a fashionista, singer and civil rights warrior to maximise visibility, influence and emotional release. ‘Her’ discordant, uncanny human/nonhuman ethos simultaneously attracts, intrigues and defies. To study Miquela’s case we built a four-tiered theoretical framework (parasocial relations, identity influence, culture jamming, and algorithmic branding) using the Freudian concept of ‘the uncanny’ as connecting thread; and a mixed method that includes digital ethnography, textual and sentiment analysis. We aim to make a contribution to studies on the use of digital media in PR.

‘What I’m not gonna buy’: Algorithmic culture jamming and anti-consumer politics on YouTube

This article is based on an analysis of ‘anti-haul’ videos on YouTube, where a vlogger explains which beauty products they plan not to buy. Anti-haul vloggers have much in common with ‘culture jamming’ movements, which use the communicative practices and materials of promotional culture against itself to spread an anti-consumerist agenda. The article argues that anti-hauls should be understood as the reinvention of ‘culture jamming’ techniques for a contemporary promotional culture that is platform based, algorithmically governed, and mobilised through the affective, authentic performance of the ‘influencer’. I refer to this manipulation of the platform’s visibility mechanisms to spread anti-consumer messages as ‘algorithmic culture jamming’. The anti-consumer politics of anti-hauls are contradictory and ambivalent. At the same time, I argue that anti-hauls also offer important possibilities for political learning, personal and collective transformation, and alternative creative pleasures outside of continual consumer accumulation.

Fixing the World

What kind of remedy or redress can literature and other forms of counterfactual imagining offer in the face of environmental injustice? This epilogue draws together from the book’s previous chapters insights about consumerism, citizenship, enclosure, and exposure in order to contemplate this question. Pivoting from The Yes Men Fix the World (a 2009 documentary about the culture-jamming pranksters, the Yes Men) to Chinua Achebe’s reflections on the difference between “beneficent” and “malignant” fiction, the epilogue argues that we should understand all such fictions as risky: unpredictable in how their causes and effects work themselves out across time and space. Such risks entail not only exposure to the possibility of harm, but also leaps of faith into the unknown and the as-yet unrealized, as well as the prospect that the innocence we tend to imagine about ourselves might be countered with a newfound sense of complicity, entanglement, or even self-reflexive solidarity.

Encouraging Activism Through Art: Preservice Teachers Challenge Censorship

According to the American Library Association, book censorship is on the rise. While many censored books are adolescent novels, some titles for younger children are challenged as well. Books dealing with difficult social issues have been targets for censors historically, but recent attacks have focused on books portraying members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, questioning, and other sexual identities (LGBTQ+) community. The goal of this qualitative study was to build prospective teachers’ (PTs’) knowledge of censorship while also providing an opportunity for them to take a sociopolitical stance. Students in a children’s literature course read source materials and reacted by creating a transmediation that used some form of art. Lenses for data analysis included qualitative research, critical discourse analysis, and visual discourse analysis. The first major theme focused on freedom and democracy and the threat censorship poses. Within this category, two subthemes were identified: (1) children having freedom to learn about real-world issues and (2) children having freedom to read books that meet their personal needs. A second major theme focused on how PTs thought people should respond to censorship. Responses expressing fear and/or confusion about censorship were coded as demonstrating a teacher dilemma, while examples showing a challenge to censorship were coded as demonstrating resistance. Findings indicate that PTs were shocked by what they learned about censorship, and many of them engaged in culture jamming, which involves using the arts to challenge oppressive systems. Many used art to critique censorship and advocate for children’s rights. This study challenges the common cultural assumption that teaching is an apolitical or neutral activity.

Culture Jamming & Climate Change

While much of the fi eld of architecture claims to be concerned with the mounting effects of climate change, its tools for combating it are limited. Important gains have been made in raising minimum performance standards, developing alternative materials, and voicing support of progressive policies, but these gains are insufficient. In the face of unprecedented warming and its demonstrated spillover effects, architecture must leverage every possible angle in pursuit of a viable future, including those that capture the imagination. This project seeks to forge new relationships between architecture and climate change by using activist techniques collected under the umbrella of culture jamming.