Introduction
- Flip side of Internet meme joy culture
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[Media studies] How to understand audiences, broadly
- Marxism: set of conditions when capitalism would rot from the inside; later Marxists have to wrangle with the fact that this never happened
- Then look at culture; oppression begins to live inside us, we believe in the power of markets
- Media is as much as any other outlet interested in producing hegemony, forms that support capital
- Frankfurt school: culture industry churns out material for passive audiences; hypodermic needle model, couch potato, content comes in and inculcates worldviews
- This mode of analysis has fallen out of favor, but we often use it casually to describe media products we dislike: denigrating boy bands, pop music, etc as inauthentic, superficial
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Birmingham school, cultural studies, informed by working class, people thinking about by race: audiences are not as passive
- Stuart Hall: media has encoded messages in them, audiences decode and recode based on their own context
- Henry Jenkins mud wrestlting with wife (heads of house) at Senior House
- 1992: participatory culture entering the conversation; rise of the Internet
- https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence embodied an ethos that scholars traced, Silicon Valley techno-utopia ambitions, we (not a major media company) are creating — uncritical version of scholarly "on the Internet nobody knows you're a dog", no race/gender/etc.
- Wikipedia was founded 1/15/01
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What happens when we take Jenkins' ideas seriously?
- Baym: soap opera fans on Usenet
- "TikTokers romanticizing 2014 Tumblr teens" micro-generational
Readings
- "Thinking about how to parse [what you said] to move the discussion"
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Mejia et al. outlier; the problem(s) they're trying to push against:
- Understanding post-truth as a novel phenomenon
- Analyses that lack material (in Marxist sense) understand
- Quandt kicked off dark participation, seemed to be personal (mentions buying into Jenkins)
- Democracy, elitism, etc. not defined in any of the pieces
- (History monographs)
- I struggle to see anything but continuity in history
- Our country has always ignored important truths
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Whiteness is ontology, not epistemology; it's the whole system, doesn't matter if people think whatever
- White people have become victim to the collateral damage of whiteness (e.g. gun violence)
- Can't argue a racist out of white privilege; arguing on truth claims is misunderstanding where the problem actually sits
- Episteme: philosophical term that refers to a principled system of understanding
- Interesting social change provocation; what does it look like to work on ontology?
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You could say the same thing (socially constructed) for class, imperialism, pretty much everything
- Many U.S. scholars insist on race as a fundamental thing without which you can't understand class
- Europeans insist on class, imperialism
- Adolph Reed, Cedric Robinson, Sylvia Winter, intersectionality
- Marxism has historically (of course, maybe) been less atuned to things other than class
- Partin visiting next week
- How did 20th century yellow journalism fizzle out?
- Do people in dark participation have bad intentions?