Hashtag Wars: Twitter as a Discursive Space in the 'Battle of Narratives' between pro-Israelis and pro-Palestinians

<p>Traditional forms of media have played a significant role in narrating the military conflict between Israel and Palestine (Said; Aouragh 2; Elmasry). Most recently, the Israeli Defense Forces used their official Twitter account to launch the 2012 Operation Pillar of Cloud in Gaza. This thesis investigates the role played by Twitter in the ‘battle of narratives’ taking place between pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli communities on 14th June, two days after the #BringBackOurBoys hashtag campaign was launched 2014 and 9th July 2014, a day after Operation Protective Edge commenced in Gaza. The thesis argues that Twitter as a microblogging platform acts as an ambivalent discursive protest space for the battle of narratives between pro-Israelis and pro-Palestinians. Drawing on a range of hashtag case studies, such as #BringBackOurBoys, #GazaUnderAttack and #IsraelUnderFire, the thesis offers a content analysis of 300 tweets in relation to emerging concepts in digital media studies. Pablo Gerbaudo’s articulation of ‘choreography of assembly’, for example, illustrates the role of social media in ‘setting the scene’ for protest while William Gamson and Andre Modigliani’s concept of ‘interpretive packages’ allows for an exploration of symbolic devices on Twitter such as metaphors, exemplars, injustice symbols and visual images. This thesis draws on these concepts to examine how Twitter’s affordances work ambivalently to highlight the victimisation of one side of the conflict while erasing the victimisation of the other.</p>

Hashtag Wars: Twitter as a Discursive Space in the 'Battle of Narratives' between pro-Israelis and pro-Palestinians

<p>Traditional forms of media have played a significant role in narrating the military conflict between Israel and Palestine (Said; Aouragh 2; Elmasry). Most recently, the Israeli Defense Forces used their official Twitter account to launch the 2012 Operation Pillar of Cloud in Gaza. This thesis investigates the role played by Twitter in the ‘battle of narratives’ taking place between pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli communities on 14th June, two days after the #BringBackOurBoys hashtag campaign was launched 2014 and 9th July 2014, a day after Operation Protective Edge commenced in Gaza. The thesis argues that Twitter as a microblogging platform acts as an ambivalent discursive protest space for the battle of narratives between pro-Israelis and pro-Palestinians. Drawing on a range of hashtag case studies, such as #BringBackOurBoys, #GazaUnderAttack and #IsraelUnderFire, the thesis offers a content analysis of 300 tweets in relation to emerging concepts in digital media studies. Pablo Gerbaudo’s articulation of ‘choreography of assembly’, for example, illustrates the role of social media in ‘setting the scene’ for protest while William Gamson and Andre Modigliani’s concept of ‘interpretive packages’ allows for an exploration of symbolic devices on Twitter such as metaphors, exemplars, injustice symbols and visual images. This thesis draws on these concepts to examine how Twitter’s affordances work ambivalently to highlight the victimisation of one side of the conflict while erasing the victimisation of the other.</p>

Digital Media Studies Perspectives on Japan Performing Arts on Instagram @performance.jpa

The use of digital media to promote local culture has become a new breakthrough in exposing local culture to international countries. In addition to being able to be immediately recognized in other nations, digital media promotion is also less expensive and quicker to implement. This study aims to determine the perspective of Digital Media Studies in Japan Performing Arts. The method used in this research is Krippendorff content analysis on Instagram @performance.jpa by using Japanese dance indicators which include Kabuki, Kasa Odori, Bon Odori, Noh Mai, Onikenbai, Nanazumai, Wadaiko, Arauma, Nihon Buyo. The conclusion of this study shows that Japan Performing Arts introduces Japanese culture through the collaboration of western culture by promoting the Nihon Buyo dance.

PLAYING AT THE POLLS: VIDEO GAMES IN/AS PLATFORMS OF POLITICAL PARTICIPATION

This panel explores the rise of ludic technologies as both figurative and computational “platforms” for American political participation. As COVID-19 forced many politicians to abandon massive rallies and other in-person engagement into 2020, American politicians turned to video games for alternative means of public outreach, from “Biden Island” in $2 to Twitch streams with Alexandria-Ocasio Cortez and Bernie Sanders. This panel contextualizes these and other “ludopolitical” phenomena from a variety of perspectives, ranging from digital media studies to queer studies and political economy. We attend to the mass re-politicization of games and question the politics of identity, content moderation, and labour that are downloaded onto policy when party communication becomes strategically playful.

Neoliberalism, the Alt-Right and the Intellectual Dark Web

Drawing on research from digital media studies, political theory and rhetoric, this article explores online radical conservative and reactionary ‘ideological entrepreneurs’. It argues that online media are uniting an ‘ideological family’ around concepts of natural inequality and hostility to those who deny them. Placing this phenomenon in context, the article shows how online culture reinvigorates well-established discourses of opposition to bureaucrats, intellectuals and experts of all kinds, rejecting one version of the neoliberal state and of its personnel, a ‘new class’ understood to dominate through discursive, cultural power and imagined through the figures of the ‘Social Justice Warrior’ and the ‘Cultural Marxist’. In competing for a share of the marketplace of ideas, these ideological entrepreneurs promise insights – the revelations of the ‘red pill’ – critiquing ‘actually-existing’ neoliberalism yet insisting on the ‘rationality’ of governance through markets and promising adherents techniques for achieving success as liberated entrepreneurial selves.

“The Boy Who Wasn't Really Killed”: Israeli State Violence in the Age of the Smartphone Witness

Over the course of the first two decades of the twenty-first century, within the occupied Palestinian territories, photographic technologies and image-oriented politics would grow increasingly central as activist and human-rights tools of bearing witness to Israeli state and settler violence. This essay investigates the Israeli right-wing and international Zionist response to these Palestinian visual archives and their perceived threat. In particular, it tracks the rise and normalization of a repudiation script that impugned the veracity of these images, arguing that they were fraudulent or manipulated to produce a damning portrait of Israel. Drawing on post-colonial and settler-colonial studies, as placed into dialogue with digital media studies, the essay focuses on three cases studies of repudiation (2000, 2008, 2014, respectively) to consider how the long colonial history of repudiation in the Israeli context would be progressively updated by right-wing Israelis and their international supporters to meet the challenges posed by the smartphone age. By the second decade of the twenty-first century, the script had become an increasingly standard Zionist response to viral images of Palestinian death or injury at Israeli state or settler hands. Repudiation was thus marshaled as a solution to the viral visibility of Israeli state violence by bringing the otherwise damning images back into line with dominant Israeli ideology, a process of shifting the narrative from Palestinian injury to Israeli victimhood. The story of the “false” image of Palestinian injury endeavors strips the visual field of its Israeli perpetrators and Palestinian victims, thereby exonerating the state. Or such is the nature of this digital fantasy in the Israeli colonial present.

Metaphors in critical Internet and digital media studies

Since its very early days, metaphors have been used by various powerful social actors to try to convey what the Internet is and what it could be used for, now and in the future. In this short essay, I make a plea for critical scholars of the Internet and digital media to be simultaneously careful and imaginative in their own choice of metaphorical language. I revisit some of the early and recurring metaphors, such as frontier, highway and library, to illustrate the evocative power of metaphor. I then examine the more recent metaphors of cloud computing and (big) data flow to justify why it remains important to focus on metaphors. Scholars in critical and digital media studies not only need to deconstruct the metaphors of the powerful but they also need to contribute new metaphors and new ways of describing and thinking about the future.

Affordances of Digital Archives: The Case of the Prozhito Archive of Personal Diaries

With regard to increasing politicization and instrumentalization of history in Russia and the development of digital tools allowing public access to previously non-available historical documents, analysis of digital platforms exhibiting potential for engagement with the past becomes of relevance to Russian and Digital Media Studies. Therefore this chapter focuses on a Russian case study Prozhito, a digital archive of personal diaries created by a community of volunteers. Being an example of public engagement with the past, Prozhito, nevertheless, has a number of constraints that raise ethical, political and techno-methodological questions concerning archival composition and affordances of the platform for participation. Therefore the aim of this chapter is to study Prozhito’s affordances to learn more about the potentials of such platforms for the production of historical knowledge.

Reclaiming HIV/AIDS in digital media studies

This article puts forward an argument for the importance of HIV/AIDS to digital studies, focusing, focusing on the North American context. Tracing conjoined histories and presents makes clear that an HIV-informed approach to digital media studies offers methods for attuning to marginalized media practices that should be central to interrogating the politics, relations, and aesthetics of digital media. Artist Kia LaBeija’s #Undetectable (2016) is closely analyzed in order to explicate some of HIV’s potential resonances for digital studies, including viral media and justice-based responses to surveillance. We then propose a methodological framework for centering HIV in understandings of three key concepts for the field: (1) networks; (2) social media and platforms; and, (3) digital history. We argue that HIV-positive users bring expertise to navigating digital infrastructures that can surveil and harm while also facilitating pleasure and connection. Such tension provides models of response that publics need to insist upon more just digital tools and structures for our unfolding present.

No Grand Pronouncements Here...: Reflections on Cancel Culture and Digital Media Participation

Although there are numerous prominent examples of social media misuse, these cases should not disproportionately characterize the scope or potential of digital media participation as a whole. Using cancel culture as an entry point, this essay discusses how digital practices often follow a trajectory of being initially embraced as empowering to being denounced as emblematic of digital ills. However, while platforms such as Twitter do have characteristics that militate against nuanced debate, scholars can productively direct attention to interactions in other digital spaces, particularly using methods that yield more qualitatively informative data. These spaces include message boards and comment threads, which foster more long-form engagement. It is also important to look beyond the major English-language platforms, both to account for platform-specific features and so that conditions of online discourse routine in many global contexts, such as negotiating censorship, are centrally theorized in digital media studies.