PARA-ANTISOCIALITY: HATRED, CELEBRITY, PROJECTION, ATTRACTION, IMPOTENCE, AND CATHARSIS IN LIMINAL SOCIETIES

The last three decades of media expansion and technological innovation, encompassing the 24-hour media news cycle, the original desktop- and later site-based internet, gaming, social media, and the smartphone, have radically altered the means by which citizens of the developed and developing world access information and how they construct and maintain relationships. As the reach, robustness, ubiquity, and engagement potential of the two-dimensional world have expanded, those of the three-dimensional world have diminished (an effect accelerated during the COVID and post-COVID eras). As one world atrophies, a new one rushes in to fill the void. Celebrity culture; neoliberal economic policies; the decline of family, community, and organised religion; and the post-World War II suburbanisation and aesthetic sterilisation of shared spaces have all contributed to the decay and fragilization of the antecedent meat space (in-person) bonds. In their place, has risen the parasocial relationship—that between audience and performer or, in more modern terminology, content creator and content consumer. Why celebrities/content creators are loved is not the question to be posed herein. Notoriety, adulation, status, physical attractiveness, and charm—these all do much to explain why the famous and would-be famous alike are regarded with affection. Why they are hated—as they often are, if only by a portion of their audience—is less clear. This paper will examine the origins and utility of antagonistic parasocial relationships as well as the extent to which para-antisociality is harmful to content creators and consumers and what (if anything) can and should be done to manage hostility in parasocial relationships.  Article visualizations

Limited war, limited enthusiasm: Sexuality, disillusionment, survival, and the changing landscape of war culture in Korean War-era comic books and soldier iconography

This thesis investigates how Korean War-era comic books and soldier-produced iconography between 1950 and 1953 reflected the conflict and helped construct ideal soldier masculinities. Differentiating between romantic, soldier-produced, and realist imagery, this thesis argues that comic books—traditionally treated as low-brow children’s literature—articulated diverse and sophisticated discussions about the nature of warfare and its impact on manhood. Soldiers and artists reflected a war that came on the heels of World War II, and the disillusionment expressed in these sources reflected a broader cultural conflict between representing World War II sentimentalism and the new, limited war in Korea. This struggle resulted in contradictory presentations of soldiers and masculinity in comic books. In particular, realist narratives explored in chapter three invoked an alternative discussion of war that decoupled manhood from warfare. The anti-war rhetoric used by Entertaining Comics’ realist narratives constitutes a new phenomenon during the Korean War, and laid the foundation for subsequent anti-war critiques during the 1960s. Comic books, newspapers, film, and other media anchor this thesis, and allow the following pages to contextualize comic book imagery in broader 1950s war culture

Coping Through Curse: Confronting British Metropolitan Identity Through the "Curse of Tutankhamen" (1923-1933)

This thesis was submitted to the Department of History of the University of Kansas in partial fulfillment of the requirements for departmental honors.This thesis seeks to understand the origins of the curse of Tutankhamen within interwar British society and to explain why the British were willing to believe in the “curse of Tutankhamen” between 1923 and 1933. It argues that the curse served as a method of coping as the British reforged their rational, Enlightened ways with irrational imaginings to deflect feelings of trauma after the First World War and of vulnerability with the loss of Egypt as a protectorate in 1922. Just as the British newspapers evaded discussing the true story of the archaeological dig of the tomb of Tutankhamen, so too did the British use their own imperial ideas of Egyptian Romantic allure to circumvent the reality of Egyptians through the curse of Tutankhamen. I argue that the curse of Tutankhamen was a British-created myth with necessary Egyptian influences that served to preserve British imperial views of the “other” in the wake of World War One (1914-1918) and the British Unilateral Declaration of Egyptian Independence on February 28, 1922. Importantly, this thesis maintains that the veracity of the curse itself is secondary to the cultural effects of the purported curse in the British metropole. The curse of Tutankhamen was a myth born out of the British metropole-favored imagination and threating comparison with the Empire inherent in Orientalism. By analyzing coverage in British newspapers such as The Times and The Daily Mail and the accounts of later historians such as Allegra Fryxell and Roger Luckhurst, this thesis argues that the British authored and perpetuated the “curse of Tutankhamen,” by basing the curse within British perceptions of modern and ancient Egypt. The curse symbolized the mythological arrival of the periphery of the British Empire within British metropolitan identity

The Death Drive Revisited: A Reexamination of Psychoanalytic Drive Theory and its Implications for Critical Theory

This dissertation is a reexamination of Sigmund Freud's mature drive theory, also known as his theory of the death drive, and its relevance for critical social theory, and in particular that of the so-called "Frankfurt school." By tracing the emergence of Freud's theory in his enigmatic Beyond the Pleasure Principle and then its development in the hands of Hans Loewald and Jacques Lacan, I aim, in the first three chapters, to articulate a drive theory centered around the opposition between what Freud calls the death drive and the drive to mastery, as well as the developmental hazards therein. In the last two chapters, I then attempt to integrate this drive theory into the Frankfurt school's analysis of the intrusion of mass media and state institutions on the developmental process with the aim of both providing historical weight to the dialectic of death and mastery articulated in the first part of the dissertation and also strengthening the psychological component of critical theory

Parental Technology Governance: Teenagers’ Understandings and Responses to Parental Digital Mediation

Research on parental mediation of children’s online engagements situate historically longstanding anxieties within the dynamics of present-day information communications technologies (i.e., concerns over new “cyber risks,” as well as opportunities). Yet, there remains a lack of emphasis on children’s reactions to and experiences with parental strategies and responses. In the current article, we highlight research involving semi-structured focus groups (n=35) with Canadian teenagers (n=115). We highlight themes directly related to parental digital mediation, including the role of ICTs in driving addictive behaviors, social connection, differences in parental responses between sons and daughters, and differences concerning age and birth order. Disrupting cultural discourses of young people who lack agency in relation to their use of ICTs, our discussions with teens reveal qualified support, even degrees of sympathy, for parental efforts to restrict access and use of digital technologies, but illuminate multifaceted reasons for resistance: their vital role not only for social connection but access to crucial information and knowledge

America Inc.: The Rise and Fall of a Civil Democracy

The field of Curriculum Studies has thoroughly outlined the detrimental effects of corporate ideology on education in terms of curricular mandates, the corporatization of higher education, rampant privatization, and globalization. Educational mandates have created an atmosphere of control in which students are methodically deprived of exploration and creativity through strict adherence to a prescribed curriculum. This results in the de-skilling of teachers and the loss of Self as students are forced to memorize facts based on educational mandates, with teachers having to constantly redirect outlets for creativity in order to teach to the test. As a result of this study, it is evident that educational mandates are the first step in preparing children to become the unknowing participants in a consumer culture. In addition to curriculum mandates, children are also controlled by a system that advocates the use of psychiatric diagnoses and subsequent medication as a means to suppress disruptive forms of behavior that are deemed to be abnormal, such as a child\u27s propensity to play and normal forms of adolescent rebellion. I propose that a culture of defiance is rising out of the attempts to suppress normal behavior as children and adolescents rebel against the system. I also propose that the Self is methodically detached from its creative core and that Object-Relations Theory plays an integral role in understanding the behavior of postmodern consumers

The necrophile self: contemporary attitudes towards death and its new visibility

Critical voices have long pointed out that contemporary Western civilization has a twisted relationship with death. Many scholars seem to agree on one point: we are living in a culture of death denial, death phobia and death illiteracy. Death has the gravity to break the cultural hypnosis of living a life without limits; thus it plays a central cultural role in the meaning-making and identity-forming processes. However, the argument that a death-phobic culture has removed death from everyday life is not wholly accurate. At the same time that physical death has been removed from everyday life, representations of death have become pervasive in contemporary cultural representation, with seemingly endless depictions of graphic violence and death. This cultural phenomenon of death in the media brings into question the consensus that death denial is a central cultural attitude. Our relationship with death and violence and their interplay points to a schism between the private and public handling of death. Psychoanalytic theories of the death drive — or Thanatos — first introduced by Sigmund Freud and then further developed by scholars such as Herbert Marcuse and Jacques Lacan, offer an explanatory framework for understanding the ambivalent role of death and violence in our culture and how this cultural framework shapes identity. Building on the psychoanalytic theory of the death drive, I argue that this schism in our relationship with death produces a trait within the individual that is constituted by the inability to think about death, coupled with an obsessional relationship with violent death and an excessive materialism. The constant reciprocity of the anxious individual and a death-phobic society creates a status quo in which the absence of mortality contemplation accelerates selves that yearn to generate meaning through materialism and yet are unable to meet the existential limits of life and environment. I argue that consumerism is the prevalent death drive in contemporary culture and that it entails marginalizing authentic awareness of mortality for the sake of symbolic immortality. For Erich Fromm, the death drive is a character trait of malignant aggression, or what he calls necrophilia. In this thesis I put forward the idea of the necrophile self — the cultural trait of death phobia within the individual. I argue that the sense of self in late capitalist society is constituted by the very thing we deny and most fear; death (deadness) becomes us.Thesis (Ph.D.) -- University of Adelaide, School of Humanities, 201

A Matter of Faith: U.S. Cable News Coverage and Definitions of Terrorism

What makes an act of violence an act of terrorism? This qualitative study examines the ways in which three U.S.-based cable news networks--MSNBC, CNN, and Fox News--reported and contextualized four violent events within frameworks of terrorism: the mass shooting at Ft. Hood near Killeen, Texas (2009); the mass shooting near Tucson, Arizona (2011); a suicidal plane crash into an IRS building in Austin, Texas (2010); and the attempted bombing of the Federal Reserve in New York, New York (2012). Although details between these four events seem analogous, the three networks appeared to contextualize only the Ft. Hood rampage and the Federal Reserve plot within frameworks of terrorism (specifically, Islamic terrorism)--as being attacks on the United States rather than isolated incidents. In contrast, the networks appeared to contextualize the Tucson rampage and Austin plane crash as being the consequences of extreme mental illness. Existing literature suggests such disparities in coverage are the result of increasing consolidation and corporatization of news and entertainment media organizations, as well as pre-existing Orientalist portrayals of Arabs and misconceptions held by the American public about Islam and Muslims as both a minority and a religious group. Combined with standard journalism guidelines and suggestions for optimal practice during crisis coverage, this literature was used to establish a coherent code structure to analyze the four events. The code structure was used to review a total of 35 video clips from the aforementioned networks, making note of these references or topics of discussion: the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001; the mental state of the perpetrator; the alleged religious or political affiliation of the suspected perpetrator; and any mention of Al-Qaeda or terms such as terrorist, jihad, infidel, or radical Islam. Although any discussion about news coverage of minorities is nuanced and merits further research, the results of this study indicate there is still much news organizations fail to understand about Islam, Muslims, the Muslim-American identity and the supposed relationship between those entities and terrorism or the root causes of its occurrence. Further, it indicates that news organizations experience a degree of cognitive dissonance when non-Muslims (or individuals affiliated with the dominant hegemonic culture) commit terrorism-like violence

The dark side of narrative empathy : a narrative persuasion perspective on whether fiction reading can lead to antisocial beliefs and attitudes.

Studies about the narrative impact of fiction reading often focus on the benefits of this entertainment experience. These accounts of benefits often involve a mostly positive association of fiction reading with the ethical development of readers through the cultivation of their empathic skills (Nussbaum, 1990). However, the history of novel reading offers a contrary view that emphasises the ‘corrupting powers’ of narrative engagement. While the proposal of benefits has attracted empirical attention, the second is not as equally and systematically assessed. Thereby, the question of whether fiction reading can influence antisocial outcomes on readers remains weakly investigated (Igartua & Barrios, 2012). It is therefore the objective of this dissertation to identify the working mechanisms that may influence beliefs and attitudes such as prejudicial radicalisation and cynicism in readers. By drawing on recent evidence and theories from media psychology and narrative persuasion research, a qualitative analysis based on close reading of three novels was applied. This application offers a new method that is based on literary analysis, new because most studies assess narrative persuasion following quantitative measures. The approach involves applying theories of narrative transportation (Green & Brock, 2000), empathic identification (Keen, 2007; Cohen, 2001), and moral disengagement (Raney, 2004) to demonstrate how the selected novels can reduce readers’ critical and moral scrutiny to minimise resistance to their persuasiveness (Moyer-Gusé, 2008; Ratcliff & Sun, 2020). The main finding that may facilitate the occurrence of antisocial attitudes via these mechanism involves directing readers’ empathy towards immoral protagonists who internally focalize their narratives, obscuring their moral transgressions, and depersonalizing their victims. This also involves the manipulation of textual techniques such as point of view, imagery, and foregrounding style. With these findings, the thesis contributes to the scholarly literature on narrative impact by foregrounding the negative aspects of empathic identification and narrative transportation that are sometimes acknowledged, but not as extensively examined.Studies about the narrative impact of fiction reading often focus on the benefits of this entertainment experience. These accounts of benefits often involve a mostly positive association of fiction reading with the ethical development of readers through the cultivation of their empathic skills (Nussbaum, 1990). However, the history of novel reading offers a contrary view that emphasises the ‘corrupting powers’ of narrative engagement. While the proposal of benefits has attracted empirical attention, the second is not as equally and systematically assessed. Thereby, the question of whether fiction reading can influence antisocial outcomes on readers remains weakly investigated (Igartua & Barrios, 2012). It is therefore the objective of this dissertation to identify the working mechanisms that may influence beliefs and attitudes such as prejudicial radicalisation and cynicism in readers. By drawing on recent evidence and theories from media psychology and narrative persuasion research, a qualitative analysis based on close reading of three novels was applied. This application offers a new method that is based on literary analysis, new because most studies assess narrative persuasion following quantitative measures. The approach involves applying theories of narrative transportation (Green & Brock, 2000), empathic identification (Keen, 2007; Cohen, 2001), and moral disengagement (Raney, 2004) to demonstrate how the selected novels can reduce readers’ critical and moral scrutiny to minimise resistance to their persuasiveness (Moyer-Gusé, 2008; Ratcliff & Sun, 2020). The main finding that may facilitate the occurrence of antisocial attitudes via these mechanism involves directing readers’ empathy towards immoral protagonists who internally focalize their narratives, obscuring their moral transgressions, and depersonalizing their victims. This also involves the manipulation of textual techniques such as point of view, imagery, and foregrounding style. With these findings, the thesis contributes to the scholarly literature on narrative impact by foregrounding the negative aspects of empathic identification and narrative transportation that are sometimes acknowledged, but not as extensively examined