therewasthuscontestationaroundtherightwaytousehashtags.

“octothorpe”

Hiscontrastbetweenthe@onTwitterandGoogleChat(“GChat”)isimportant.

Thisgavethe@symbolbothlocativeandcommunicativeproperties,specifyingwhereamessageshouldgo,andalsoforwhomitwasmeant

Love, Simon’s (2018) sugary-sweet, queer coming-of-age narrative can evidence that there is more to queer media politics than representa-tion.

The word‘brand’is derived from the Old Norse wordbrandr, meaning‘to burn’, andreferred to the practice whereby livestock owners would burn a unique and differentiat-ing symbol into their animals’skins.

viral dissemina-tion

One of Berger and Milkman’s key findings is that people are more likely to share positive than negative stories. In ad-dition, they prefer sharing items that are perceived as sur-prising, interesting, or practically useful.

I define an Internet meme as:(a) a group of digital items sharing common characteristics of content, form, and/or stance, which (b) were created with awareness of each other, and (c) were circulated, imitated, and/or transformed via the Internet by many users.

The term “meme” was coined by Richard Dawkins in 1976 to describe small units of culture that spread from person to person by copying or imitation.

propagation

destinationviewing

,weusetermssuchas“spread,”"spreadable,”or“spreadability”todescribetheseincreasinglypervasiveformsofmediacirculation.“Spreadability”referstothepotential—bothtechni-calandcultural—foraudiencestosharecontentfortheirownpurposes,sometimeswiththepermissionofrightsholders,sometimesagainsttheirwishes.Asweh

Ourmessageissimpleanddirect:ifitdoesn’tspread,it’sdead

Theprincipleoftranscod-ingisonewaytostartthinkingaboutsoftwaretheory.

NewmediacallsforanewstageinmediatheorywhosebeginningsbetracedbacktotherevolutionaryworksofHaroldInnisinthe1950sandMarshallMcLuhaninthe1960s.Tounderstandthelogicofnewmedia,weneedtoturntocomputerscience.

semioticians

Digitization

The GIF shares many qualities with optical toys, the 19th century devices that begin mosthistories of the moving image, though this does not imply causality between the two. Optical toys were educational, focusing attentionon the devices and the physiologicalphenomenon, called ‘persistence of vision’,they revealed. But they share similar‘limitations of storage’ with the GIF, so itis useful to compare the similarities born of these affordances.Both the electric kinetoscope (1894) and the hand-crankedmutosocope (1895) offered short, silent, photographed movingimages as objects of entertainment. Early subjects includedactualities (documentary-like footage of people and events) and loose, often sexually charged narratives. Kinetoscope andmutoscope viewership was both a personal and collectiveexperience: machines were found in social environments like parlors and pleasure piers but only accommodated a single viewer at a time.The GIF began as a data format, certainly: theGraphics Interchange Format is a standard forencoding and decoding a string of 1s and 0s

I agree that satire has the potential to shape beliefs, attitudes, and values; however, like any other rhetorical strategy for persuasion, satire has its complications.One of the complications is that stand-up comedy delivers its humor through stories, often experiences and observations based on real life. What information and which emotions are omitted from jokes in the service of satire’s form?

People have not misunderstood the gravity of Gadsby’s indictment of homophobia and sexism, though her rule breaking in the stand-up medium has prompted some to question whether Nanette counts as comedy at all.Satire, what Rachel Caulfield calls “artful political critique” and James Caron describes as “an act of judgment” couched in humor

The ensuing, masterfully crafted show described by reviewers as “totally tran-scendent” and “an angry, risk-taking, painfully personal show of extraordinary wit, breadth and intensity” belies her claims of ineptitude.2

For this reason, stereotypes are also more rigid than social types. The latter are open-ended, more provisional, more flexible, to create the sense of freedom, choice, self-definition for those within the boundaries of normalcy. These boundaries themselves, however, must be clearly delineated, and so stereotypes, one of the mechanisms of boundary maintenance, are characteristically fixed, clear-cut, unalterable. You appear to choose your social type in some measure, whereas you are condemned to a stereotype

Thus I may walk down the street and see a road-sweeper, a house-wife, a child, an OAP, a milkman. I know from what they are doing what their social role is, and I know, because I live in this society, that that role is defined by wb:a sociologists call "variables" of occupation, gender, age and kinship.

There is plenty of evidence1 to suggest that stereotypes are not just put out in books and films, but are widely agreed upon and believed to be right.

Rather than rely on any kindof policy expertise, celebrities invite audiences to engage in their activist and politicalcauses by feeling what the celebrity feels.

n an analysis of Brad Pitt’sactivist work to rebuild homes in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, Fuqua (2011)argues“Pitt functions as an affective proxy through which other citizens may feel thatthey are making a difference simply by feeling”(p. 193). Chouliaraki (2012) explainsthat this kind of celebrity activism mixed with humanitarianism“prioritizes the‘authentic’emotions of the celebrity and our own connectivity towards her”

Celebrity activism has a long history. Since at least the development of radio and television(Turner,2002/2014), Hollywood stars like Clint Eastwood and Jane Fonda have taken onactivist roles in social movements and electoral politics (West & Orman,2003). Recently,celebrity activism has become remarkably common (Brockington & Henson,2014; Thrallet al.,2008).

Stars are also embodiments of the social categories in which people are placed and through which they have to make sense of their lives, and indeed through which we make our lives -categories of class, gender, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, and so on. And all of these typical, common ideas, that have the feeling of being the air that you breathe, just the way things are, have their own histories, their own peculiarities of social construction.

The complex way in which we produce andreproduce the world in technologically developed societies involves the ways in which we separate ourselves into public and private persons, producing and consuming persons and so on, and the ways in which we as people negotiate and cope with those divisions.

capitalist s

oung people are increasingly getting their political informationfrom these satirical and humorous news programs (s

While I argue that this fluidity makes fan-based citizenship performances easierthan ever for citizens to enact, this does not necessarily mean that fan-based citizen-ship performances have not existed historically—only that they were more difficultand likely existed in smaller numbers.1

ethical modality