Dissonant Fabulation: Subverting Online Genres to Effect Socio-Cognitive Dissonance

“Dissonant fabulation” describes an emerging genre of fictional narratives in online spaces whose generic conventions construct expectations of realism. This genre is defined not as a form but as a mode of written communication that uses its genre’s conventions and expectations even while subverting them to inspire social and political questions and discourse. Two case studies are analyzed for their creation of socio-cognitive dissonance leading to social discourse: Amazon.com reviews of BIC Cristal For Her pens and the faux Target customer service Facebook profile “Ask ForHelp”. The genre of dissonant fabulations is discussed and contextualized within critical digital intertextual discourse and fictional narratives

Visual Pollution and Social Asymmetry. The Origin of Dientenegro

Expressions such as “cultural sabotage” or “cultural interference” identify a movement called Culture Jamming that aims to react creatively to the manipulation that advertising communication has been carrying out on consumers’ consciences for decades. The interesting challenge of the movement is to use the same tools used by mass communication, but in a subversive way, in order to stimulate the reaction of individuals and provoke a real “consumer revolution”, i.e. an awareness and a capacity for critical action in relation to the dynamics of consumption in contemporary society. The paper aims to investigate the phenomenon of Culture Jamming by framing it in the context of the dissident cultures of the 20th century and through the stories, actions and logics of some ‘cultural sabotage workshops’, such as the magazine Adbusters, or the experience of the Billboard Banditry, in whose work it is possible to re- think the 20th century “as the century of the work mentalisation and as the century of an uninterrupted battle on the question of the collective mind” (Berardi 2003, p.24). In particular, the paper aims to narrate the actions of cultural sabotage produced by the Dientenegro collective, in the political and social context of Buenos Aires in the early 2000s

Are They for Real? Activism and Ironic Identities

A new breed of political activist has begun to appear on the streets and in the news. They are no longer trying to out-shout their opponents, but are agreeing with them instead, enthusiastically taking their adversary’s position to exaggerated extremes. It is a practice here termed “identity-nabbing,” in which participants pretend to be someone they are not, appearing in public as exaggerated caricatures of their opponents or ambiguously co-opting some of their power. This paper focuses on three groups in particular: The Billionaires for Bush, Reverend Billy, and the Yes Men. Each group stages elaborate, ironically humorous stunts as a means of attracting public attention to particular political/social issues. The ironic frame not only provides entertainment value, but also contains its own community-building function, as it requires the participation of the audience to actively read it ironically. Banking on the pre-existence of communities that share their assumptions and get the joke, these groups attempt to turn what Linda Hutcheon refers to as “discursive communities” into political communities (or counterpublics), urging people to actively identify with the importance of the issue at hand, and to continue circulating the critique. They rely on the co-participatory workings of irony to spur people into viewing themselves as a collective with collective power. None of these groups are aiming for revolutionary change, but by turning laughter over a shared joke into anger and engagement they work to attract attention, get others involved, and slowly shift debate

“If I Can’t Bake, I Don’t Want To Be Part of Your Revolution”: CODEPINK’s Activist Literacies of Peace and Pie

By focusing on the cookbook Peace Never Tasted So Sweet, this article argues that CODEPINK strategically combines peace activist and food literacies to engage audiences in their antiwar efforts, strategies that take on benefits and drawbacks. Although feminist scholars from a variety of disciplines have studied cookbooks, researchers have yet to fully analyze the intersections of gendered activist literacies and cookbooks. Expanding upon arguments promoting food literacies as well as feminist analyses of cookbooks, this article illuminates CODEPINK’s efforts to teach readers how to critique military action, recruit peace-workers, build a movement, and bake pie

Metalinguistic tactics in the Hong Kong protest movement

This paper explores the metalinguistic tactics used by Hong Kong protesters in 2014 and 2019 and how they reflected and exploited a range of dominant ideologies about language in the city. These tactics are considered both in terms of their rhetorical utility in the “message war” between protesters and authorities, and their significance in the broader sociolinguistic context of Hong Kong. The analysis reveals how such tactics entailed both opportunities and risks, allowing protesters to create shareable discursive artifacts that spread quickly over social media and to promote in-group solidarity and distrust of their political opponents, but also limiting their ability to broaden the appeal of their messages to certain segments of the population and implicating them in upholding language ideologies that promote exclusion and marginalization

Subvertising - Conceptualization, Motivation, and Outcomes

There is an exponential increase in events involving subvertising both online and in the real world. Though popular media are increasingly discussing the topic, there are gaps in the academic literature on subvertising, as it is very limited. The purpose of this study was therefore to close these gaps by investigating the conceptualization of subvertising, the motivation for engaging in subvertising, and the outcomes of it, both for subvertisers themselves and for those that are targeted. The study was carried out using a qualitative inductive approach, in which grounded theory was used to obtain and interpret data. The data was gathered from secondary data, as news articles and YouTube videos were collected from popular media. A thematic narrative analysis was used to get an understanding of “what” rather than “how”, and to focus on the themes around which articles are told (Riessman, 2008). The data collected was coded according to Gioia’s methodology. This helped the authors generate categories and subcategories that were used to answer the research questions. The findings of the study revealed that the conceptualization of subvertising can be explained by the definition, target, type, defense, and evolution. The motivation for engaging in subvertising can be explained by the environment, inclusion and diversity, capitalism, and social. Lastly, the public, government, and corporate helped explain the outcomes of subvertising. The intergenerational justice theory was used to support these findings, as it can be linked to the underlying reasons for subvertising. The study presents five theoretical implications where the authors discuss how they are contributing to the literature on the topic, and consider five practical implications they are providing to subvertisers and other activists, corporations, governments, and the public in general. This study is of great novelty because it is filling the gaps in the existing literature on subvertising because of its comprehensiveness that looks at the conceptualization, the motives, and outcomes. It provides a clear definition that separates subvertising from other similar concepts by specifying its boundary conditions, which have previously been vague

Subvertising - Conceptualization, Motivation, and Outcomes

There is an exponential increase in events involving subvertising both online and in the real world. Though popular media are increasingly discussing the topic, there are gaps in the academic literature on subvertising, as it is very limited. The purpose of this study was therefore to close these gaps by investigating the conceptualization of subvertising, the motivation for engaging in subvertising, and the outcomes of it, both for subvertisers themselves and for those that are targeted. The study was carried out using a qualitative inductive approach, in which grounded theory was used to obtain and interpret data. The data was gathered from secondary data, as news articles and YouTube videos were collected from popular media. A thematic narrative analysis was used to get an understanding of “what” rather than “how”, and to focus on the themes around which articles are told (Reissman, 2008). The data collected was coded according to Gioia’s methodology. This helped the authors generate categories and subcategories that were used to answer the research questions. The findings of the study revealed that the conceptualization of subvertising can be explained by the definition, target, type, defense, and evolution. The motivation for engaging in subvertising can be explained by the environment, inclusion and diversity, capitalism, and social. Lastly, the public, government, and corporate helped explain the outcomes of subvertising. The intergenerational justice theory was used to support these findings, as it can be linked to the underlying reasons for subvertising. The study presents five theoretical implications where the authors discuss how they are contributing to the literature on the topic, and consider five practical implications they are providing to subvertisers and other activists, corporations, governments, and the public in general. This study is of great novelty because it is filling the gaps in the existing literature on subvertising because of its comprehensiveness that looks at the conceptualization, the motives, and outcomes. It provides a clear definition that separates subvertising from other similar concepts by specifying its boundary conditions, which have previously been vague

Voices of Dissent: Activists’ Engagements in the Creation of Alternative, Autonomous, Radical and Independent Media

In her seminal work on citizens’ media in Latin America, Clemencia Rodriguez points out the pivotal role that alternative media practices have in empowering citizens to develop new understandings and images of themselves outside the corporate space of mediation created by mainstream media channels and outlets. The expression “citizen media”, however, is only one of the many labels employed to speak about alternative media at large. For many years a marginal field of investigation, in recent decades many monographs, special journal issues and edited volumes have been devoted to alternative media. The emancipation of this subject, which is today considered a respectable academic topic across many disciplines, has gone hand in hand with the flourishing of terms and expressions related to those media messages, outlets and channels which are created and diffused outside commercial informational circuits (Atton 2007). In the academic literature, various labels are used to name the grassroots creation of channels and/or contents outside commercial media and/or opposing the dominant system of meanings. These range from “radical media” (Downing 2001) to “citizens media” (Rodriguez 2001) and from “critical media” (Fuchs 2010) to “social movement media” (Atton 2003). Hadl (2007) has addressed the epistemological reasons for such diversity and richness in the academic field. Each expression, obviously, has different connotations and implies a different explanation of the main qualities characterizing alternative media. Without dismissing these important differences and the theoretical debates revolving around them, here we employ the broad and encompassing label “alternative media”, which signals the existence of media that are alternative to corporate media in terms both of their production and their diffusion processes (Atton 2002)

COVID-19 nationalism and the visual construction of sovereignty during China’s coronavirus crisis

This article explores how competing actors established, spread, and challenged visual representations of the Chinese nation during the COVID-19 pandemic. It asks: how do official gatekeepers of meaning in China imbue their visual construction of a crisis-hit nation with pathos?; and what happens when their critics utilize the resulting repertoire of visual cues for their own ends? To answer these questions, the article first examines the visual libraries of nationalism and national crisis from which Chinese propaganda drew during the COVID-19 outbreak. It then analyses the struggles that ensued over such representations, specifically the use of national flags and the sentiments they elicit. The analysis traces representations of the flag of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) from an initial satirical portrayal in a Danish broadsheet to the angry Chinese backlashes that followed on social media, and it shows how the tensions over such portrayals became part of a meme war over the sovereignty of Hong Kong. The analysis shows how representations of the nation can become a matter of existential anxieties during a time of crisis, especially in highly networked communication environments where authoritative official actors and their supporters are no longer in control of the symbols they established as part of their ‘emotional governance’. Asian Studie