Politics

The next speaker in this ICA 2018 session is Chenjerai Kumanyika, who notes his growing scepticism about the effectiveness of visual protest media. We must pay more attention to the changes that are occurring at this time, and to what new interventions still work.

There is a particular need to the visual ways in which media activism reproduces existing media tropes, and how else such activism may be presented. There are elements in such videos that may work against the analyses that are now required: the videos constantly tether us to the present; they do not enable us to reflect …

The next speaker at ICA 2018 is Sarah Banet-Weiser, who begins by highlighting the popular Trump masks now available for purchase. What does it mean to see through Trump in such a way – more generally, what is the authenticity of Trump’s persona?

Trump is a serial misogynist, who has serially attacked, abused, and insulted women, in public and apparently without sanction; we appear to have got used to such misogyny and barely even respond to it any more. His abuse circulates in the mainstream and social media, and enables the routine dismissal of such misogyny as ‘locker room talk’ …

The next speaker in this very fast-paced ICA 2018 session is Jayson Harsin, whose interest is in the emergence of post-truth or emo-truth in the context of the Trump Presidency. Post-truth appeals to emotion and personal belief rather than facts; this is a periodising term that refers to a widespread culture of distrust in an era of channel fragmentation and the emergence of micro-truthtellers who dine out on such emotional appeals.

This is powerfully connected to cynicism and distrust in a new, hypercapitalist, neo-liberal environment and builds on aggressive, strategic, political communication apparatuses. Distrust is now at a record high …

The next speaker in this ICA 2018 session is Jack Bratich, who introduces the concept of necro-populism as a description of the Trump Presidency. Hardcore Trump supporters present a particular form of fan culture: they engage in adolescent military play-acting, and can be described as fanboys of tyranny engaging in a form of militant cosplay.

This acknowledges the artificiality of this display; it takes an ironic stance and reuses the visual symbols of ruined empires (Sparta, Rome, the Southern Confederacy, the Third Reich) or uses those of mythical empires (Kekistan). It also displayed an indifference to one’s own survival in …

Up next in this ICA 2018 session is Roopali Mukherjee, who begins by noting the #TrumpArtworks campaign that repurposed famous art by placing Trump in the scene. Such alterations focussed especially on Trump’s counterfactual boasts about the size of his inauguration crowd, and were part of a larger social and mainstream media storm that sought to fact-check and correct the President’s obviously incorrect claims.

This is in fact part of a much wider effort to fact-check the Trump Presidency and document the effects of its policies – from mapping hate crimes to assessing public opinion – that seeks to drown …

The next session I’m seeing at ICA 2018 is on the U.S. national trauma that is the Trump Presidency. We start with Laurie Ouellette, and she begins with the (fake) story of Trump signing on to a reality TV show based around the Trump White House. This actually confused some readers given that the premise of the show seemed uncannily familiar; reality TV or not, the Trump Presidency is a media spectacle whose political logics cannot be fully separated from those of reality TV and social media. The Presidency is a hyperreal Trump Show.

Understanding the Presidency as a TV …

The next speaker in this session at ICA 2018 is Marco Toledo Bastos, whose interest is in the presence of echo chambers in the debate leading up to the Brexit vote. Echo chambers, especially on social media, have been blamed for the unexpected results of that referendum and a variety of other elections, but recent research has also challenged such perspectives.

In Britain, the referendum was also decided strongly along geographic lines (city vs. country, England vs. Scotland) – so is there a geographic element to any echo chamber patterns that may exist here? The present study captured pro- and …

The next paper in this ICA 2018 session is Dam Hee Kim, whose focus is on what effects exposure to diverse political viewpoints has on partisan views. Such exposure has always been seen as important for a healthy democracy, but this poses two major challenges: audiences do not necessarily actively seek out diverse viewpoints, and such diverse exposure does not necessarily bring about the democratic benefits that theory would expect.

First, audiences tend to expose themselves to news that is in line with their established personal views. Today, they might see a variety of news also via Facebook and other …

The first ICA 2018 session I’m seeing this Monday morning is on echo chambers, and starts with Kelley Cotter and Mel Medeiros, who outlines the processes by which social media platforms generate algorithmic identities for their users. These identities determine what kind of content users encounter in their (algorithmically curated) newsfeed.

The project then examined how this works in practice: it conducted a survey of Facebook users and asked participants to provide their downloaded Facebook data for comparison. The Facebook data include aspects such as the pages they’ve liked, and the interests inferred (correctly or incorrectly) from these pages. From …

The final speaker in this ICA 2018 session is Juho Vesa, whose interest is whether social media activity serves to empower traditionally weaker political groups, such as NGOs. Media success for such groups may simply mean media access, or also a greater involvement in agenda-building through their media presence.

Larger groups can use their digital presences as a platform to feed directly into journalistic processes. Smaller groups, however, might need to generate broader interest on social media first, which may then attract media coverage; this follows a networked media logic and may mean that the status of the group initiating …