Propaganda has recently re-emerged as a matter of concern—especially with regard to communication on social media platforms—yet the meaning of the term is often left unstated, or is, alternately, premised on traditions of thought about propaganda in communication and media studies. Such approaches leave to the periphery ambiguities and inadvertent forms of participation that characterize recent concerns about misinformation, disinformation, and manipulation. This article argues that content that has been labeled as “propaganda” or “fake news” can be seen as wicked content: content that, by its circulation, signals the presence of wicked problems. As an implication of wicked content, this article argues for a sensitizing conceptualization of the term “propaganda” as an index of whether an observer considers the power exerted through media over matters of public relevance to be legitimate.
{"title":"Wicked Content","authors":"C. Jack","doi":"10.1093/ccc/tcz043","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/ccc/tcz043","url":null,"abstract":"Propaganda has recently re-emerged as a matter of concern—especially with regard to communication on social media platforms—yet the meaning of the term is often left unstated, or is, alternately, premised on traditions of thought about propaganda in communication and media studies. Such approaches leave to the periphery ambiguities and inadvertent forms of participation that characterize recent concerns about misinformation, disinformation, and manipulation. This article argues that content that has been labeled as “propaganda” or “fake news” can be seen as wicked content: content that, by its circulation, signals the presence of wicked problems. As an implication of wicked content, this article argues for a sensitizing conceptualization of the term “propaganda” as an index of whether an observer considers the power exerted through media over matters of public relevance to be legitimate.","PeriodicalId":300302,"journal":{"name":"Communication, Culture and Critique","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115309627","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In this paper, I use the online app Snapchat as a prism through which I illustrate a “spectacular” power of current informational/communicative capitalism: the ability to subsume and integrate a broad range of practices into a holistic socialization process that operates both at the level of media platform structures and at the level of subjectivization mechanisms. I advance this argument by historicizing Guy Debord’s notion of the Spectacle via Autonomist Marxism and Voloshinov’s materialist semiotics. Shedding light on the tensions inhabiting the post-Fordist labor process its users are involved in—such as autonomy/heteronomy, sociability/alienation, and display/concealment—I show how Snapchat points to a Spectacle that consistently operates through a dialectic of socialization, which enables and compels, consorts and estranges, and deceives and exhibits.
{"title":"Snapchat’s Dialectics of Socialization: Revisiting the Theory of the Spectacle for a Critical Political Economy of Social Media","authors":"Marco Briziarelli","doi":"10.1093/ccc/tcz029","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/ccc/tcz029","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 In this paper, I use the online app Snapchat as a prism through which I illustrate a “spectacular” power of current informational/communicative capitalism: the ability to subsume and integrate a broad range of practices into a holistic socialization process that operates both at the level of media platform structures and at the level of subjectivization mechanisms. I advance this argument by historicizing Guy Debord’s notion of the Spectacle via Autonomist Marxism and Voloshinov’s materialist semiotics. Shedding light on the tensions inhabiting the post-Fordist labor process its users are involved in—such as autonomy/heteronomy, sociability/alienation, and display/concealment—I show how Snapchat points to a Spectacle that consistently operates through a dialectic of socialization, which enables and compels, consorts and estranges, and deceives and exhibits.","PeriodicalId":300302,"journal":{"name":"Communication, Culture and Critique","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122244367","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Since the spring of 2014, the consumer virtual reality (VR) industry has once again been racing to reach the public, providing an opportunity to track an emerging medium’s cultural integration in real time. We examined three sites on the sales chain that stretches from the laboratory to the living room: industry developer conferences, industrial prototypes, and end-user experiences. At each of these sites, marketers renegotiate VR’s novelty in order to sell it to specific constituencies. Paradoxically, these negotiations reveal how VR, typically presented as a disruptive innovation, has been called upon to stabilize and ensure the continuity of the past: that is, of particular cultural forms and of the industrial and technological infrastructures that sustain them. We argue that the enculturation of VR demonstrates that the processes that summon new technologies and construct them as novel also reinforce existing—and often unspoken—agreements about the ways that culture should be organized.
{"title":"The Selling of Virtual Reality: Novelty and Continuity in the Cultural Integration of Technology","authors":"J. Nagy, Frederick Turner","doi":"10.1093/ccc/tcz038","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/ccc/tcz038","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Since the spring of 2014, the consumer virtual reality (VR) industry has once again been racing to reach the public, providing an opportunity to track an emerging medium’s cultural integration in real time. We examined three sites on the sales chain that stretches from the laboratory to the living room: industry developer conferences, industrial prototypes, and end-user experiences. At each of these sites, marketers renegotiate VR’s novelty in order to sell it to specific constituencies. Paradoxically, these negotiations reveal how VR, typically presented as a disruptive innovation, has been called upon to stabilize and ensure the continuity of the past: that is, of particular cultural forms and of the industrial and technological infrastructures that sustain them. We argue that the enculturation of VR demonstrates that the processes that summon new technologies and construct them as novel also reinforce existing—and often unspoken—agreements about the ways that culture should be organized.","PeriodicalId":300302,"journal":{"name":"Communication, Culture and Critique","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-11-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132892086","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article offers a theoretical response to the recent interest in virtual reality (VR) as a technology for enhancing empathy. It argues that the version of empathy envisioned by the champions of the technology—one in which care for the other is a function of being able to collapse the other’s experience into one’s own—runs counter to the very concept of empathy, as originally construed, which preserves otherness in its alterity. The point is not simply to invoke a historical concept of empathy to contrast with the VR version, but to emphasize its enduring salience in response to recent technological developments. There is little doubt regarding the need for empathy, in the sense explored in this article, as we confront the pathologies of political fragmentation and social polarization facilitated by the current iteration of social media. However, this article argues that the VR version is more likely to exacerbate than redress these concerns.
{"title":"Virtual Empathy","authors":"Mark Andrejevic, Zala Volcic","doi":"10.1093/ccc/tcz035","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/ccc/tcz035","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article offers a theoretical response to the recent interest in virtual reality (VR) as a technology for enhancing empathy. It argues that the version of empathy envisioned by the champions of the technology—one in which care for the other is a function of being able to collapse the other’s experience into one’s own—runs counter to the very concept of empathy, as originally construed, which preserves otherness in its alterity. The point is not simply to invoke a historical concept of empathy to contrast with the VR version, but to emphasize its enduring salience in response to recent technological developments. There is little doubt regarding the need for empathy, in the sense explored in this article, as we confront the pathologies of political fragmentation and social polarization facilitated by the current iteration of social media. However, this article argues that the VR version is more likely to exacerbate than redress these concerns.","PeriodicalId":300302,"journal":{"name":"Communication, Culture and Critique","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-11-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131471515","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In recent years, a number of fashion and beauty brands have developed promotional content that circulates an aspirational quality imbued with unstudied “cool” around their product. Despite the appeal of this conceit to tropes of the everyday, authenticity, and belonging, it presents a superficially relatable ideal whilst exploiting digital media’s capacities to foster intimacy and promote a postfeminist subjectivity based on consumption.This article examines three brands that circulate “aspirational realness” around their product: Glossier, Reformation, and Maryam Nassir Zadeh. All remediate the conventions of prior fashion media to communicate discourses of neoliberal femininity to a media-savvy consumer. Aspirational realness is thus read as a means by which consumption is both encouraged and situated as a means of self-realization in the likeness of other aspirational “cool girls.”
{"title":"“Trust Us, We’re You”: Aspirational Realness in the Digital Communication of Contemporary Fashion and Beauty Brands","authors":"Rosie Findlay","doi":"10.1093/CCC/TCZ028","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/CCC/TCZ028","url":null,"abstract":"In recent years, a number of fashion and beauty brands have developed promotional content that circulates an aspirational quality imbued with unstudied “cool” around their product. Despite the appeal of this conceit to tropes of the everyday, authenticity, and belonging, it presents a superficially relatable ideal whilst exploiting digital media’s capacities to foster intimacy and promote a postfeminist subjectivity based on consumption.This article examines three brands that circulate “aspirational realness” around their product: Glossier, Reformation, and Maryam Nassir Zadeh. All remediate the conventions of prior fashion media to communicate discourses of neoliberal femininity to a media-savvy consumer. Aspirational realness is thus read as a means by which consumption is both encouraged and situated as a means of self-realization in the likeness of other aspirational “cool girls.”","PeriodicalId":300302,"journal":{"name":"Communication, Culture and Critique","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-11-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129064719","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Erratum to: “Trust Us, We’re You”: Aspirational Realness in the Digital Communication of Contemporary Fashion and Beauty Brands","authors":"Rosie Findlay","doi":"10.1093/ccc/tcz047","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/ccc/tcz047","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":300302,"journal":{"name":"Communication, Culture and Critique","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-11-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122729352","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In this essay, we analyze how the temporary photographic exhibits of Anna Magnani and Sophia Loren served as artifacts of creating, circulating, and negotiating italianità: the essence of Italian culture and national identity. The photography exhibits in Rome and Sorrento anchor our study, but in order to understand more fully how they invite or reinforce cultural meaning, we evaluated these works in their larger architectural, regional, and urban contexts. We conclude that the exhibits communicate contrasting versions of italianità in order to subvert patriarchic tendencies in society, withstand globalization, challenge pan-European transnationalism, and create a strong sense of shared, yet diverse, identity by Italians, as well as manifest national pride to the visitors of the Belpaese.
{"title":"Exhibiting Italianità: Anna Magnani and Sophia Loren as Madri della Patria","authors":"Julia Khrebtan-Hörhager, C. Burgchardt","doi":"10.1093/ccc/tcz036","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/ccc/tcz036","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 In this essay, we analyze how the temporary photographic exhibits of Anna Magnani and Sophia Loren served as artifacts of creating, circulating, and negotiating italianità: the essence of Italian culture and national identity. The photography exhibits in Rome and Sorrento anchor our study, but in order to understand more fully how they invite or reinforce cultural meaning, we evaluated these works in their larger architectural, regional, and urban contexts. We conclude that the exhibits communicate contrasting versions of italianità in order to subvert patriarchic tendencies in society, withstand globalization, challenge pan-European transnationalism, and create a strong sense of shared, yet diverse, identity by Italians, as well as manifest national pride to the visitors of the Belpaese.","PeriodicalId":300302,"journal":{"name":"Communication, Culture and Critique","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-10-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123507600","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Digital Unhu in Institute of Creative Arts and Progress in Africa Trust: Digital Integration in Zimbabwean Cultural Production","authors":"Caitlin McClune","doi":"10.1093/ccc/tcz034","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/ccc/tcz034","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":300302,"journal":{"name":"Communication, Culture and Critique","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-10-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130576942","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Transgender representations are predominantly negative and represent trans identities in dehumanizing tropes. I analyze the sole Black. transgender character on Orange is the New Black, Sophia Burset, to theorize a framework for transgender subjectivity that interrupts dehumanizing tropes. Sophia’s narrative on the show constructs transgender subjectivity through Sophia’s medical transformation, relationship with a Catholic nun, and lack of community with Black, cisgender women in prison. I employ theory from Black feminism and transgender media studies to analyze Sophia’s medical transition, interpersonal relationships, and political ideologies. Ultimately, Sophia Burset’s narrative functions as a non-threatening trans woman to alleviate transphobia and render Blackness invisible in Laverne Cox’s embodiment of Sophia Burset.
{"title":"Gazing at “It”: An Intersectional Analysis of Transnormativity and Black Womanhood in Orange is the New Black","authors":"Victoria E Thomas","doi":"10.1093/ccc/tcz030","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/ccc/tcz030","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Transgender representations are predominantly negative and represent trans identities in dehumanizing tropes. I analyze the sole Black. transgender character on Orange is the New Black, Sophia Burset, to theorize a framework for transgender subjectivity that interrupts dehumanizing tropes. Sophia’s narrative on the show constructs transgender subjectivity through Sophia’s medical transformation, relationship with a Catholic nun, and lack of community with Black, cisgender women in prison. I employ theory from Black feminism and transgender media studies to analyze Sophia’s medical transition, interpersonal relationships, and political ideologies. Ultimately, Sophia Burset’s narrative functions as a non-threatening trans woman to alleviate transphobia and render Blackness invisible in Laverne Cox’s embodiment of Sophia Burset.","PeriodicalId":300302,"journal":{"name":"Communication, Culture and Critique","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-09-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125173198","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article analyzes two recent works by transgender performance artist Cassils, PISSED and Fountain (2017), which were created in response to the Trump administration's decision to rescind federal protections allowing transgender students to use the restroom of their choice. While Cassils primarily conceptualized PISSED/Fountain as a queering of binary, essentialist understandings of gendered embodiment, I draw on performance, queer, and critical ethnic studies to illustrate that these pieces simultaneously challenge other kinds of oppositional embodiments, particularly health versus disease and citizen versus alien and/or terrorist; conceptualizations the state frequently deploys to surveil and control marginalized populations. PISSED/Fountain offer audiences a new strategy for both exposing and contesting state violence: these pieces can be read as a politically strategic disidentification with the state's classification of certain bodies and their excretions as ``deviant'' and ``toxic'' in order to purposefully ``terrorize'' the state's bio- and necropolitical aims.
{"title":"Piss(ed): The Biopolitics of the Bathroom","authors":"Mia Fischer","doi":"10.1093/ccc/tcz024","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/ccc/tcz024","url":null,"abstract":"This article analyzes two recent works by transgender performance artist Cassils, PISSED and Fountain (2017), which were created in response to the Trump administration's decision to rescind federal protections allowing transgender students to use the restroom of their choice. While Cassils primarily conceptualized PISSED/Fountain as a queering of binary, essentialist understandings of gendered embodiment, I draw on performance, queer, and critical ethnic studies to illustrate that these pieces simultaneously challenge other kinds of oppositional embodiments, particularly health versus disease and citizen versus alien and/or terrorist; conceptualizations the state frequently deploys to surveil and control marginalized populations. PISSED/Fountain offer audiences a new strategy for both exposing and contesting state violence: these pieces can be read as a politically strategic disidentification with the state's classification of certain bodies and their excretions as ``deviant'' and ``toxic'' in order to purposefully ``terrorize'' the state's bio- and necropolitical aims.","PeriodicalId":300302,"journal":{"name":"Communication, Culture and Critique","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131577001","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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