Looking at, through, and with YouTube

This review essay will first examine the commonly accepted history of YouTube and how people have defined it. It will then turn to studies of YouTube itself, then to studies of some of the main uses for YouTube, ending with a particularly apt research use: to employ YouTube as a source of data

Parody: Affective Registers, Amateur Aesthetics and Intellectual Property

If contemporary media platforms transform and conflate the relations between professional and amateur creative workers, what might we say about the specificity of their vernacular? This article argues that parody is a key site for the articulation of amateur labour enabled by new patterns of networked production and consumption. Despite its utopian promise of free speech, however, the parodic form is tempered by economic and legal exigencies. Therefore, the essay particularly investigates legislative and policy frameworks that constrain parody discourse. Amendments in 2006 to the Australian Copyright Act 1968 (Cth), for example, introduced parody and satire defences allowing greater scope for social critique. Yet recent US legislation preventing online impersonation (such as mock twitter accounts) raises crucial questions about the public domain

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

Haul, Parody, Remix: Mobilizing Feminist Rhetorical Criticism With Video

Video composing can subvert, or critically remix, the power dynamics of mainstream popular culture as well as facilitate students’ desires to write against sexism and enact intersectional feminist identities. We feature six video projects created for a fall 2015 undergraduate class on the analysis of popular culture. As models, these videos encourage writing and rhetoric instructors to invite students to communicate their own intersectional identities and values through multimodal assignments. Doing so remixes the possibilities for how and where students’ ideas can take shape. Organized into the two thematic categories of 1. media misrepresentation and rape culture and 2. anticapitalist criticism and feminist parody, this article shows how students’ videos that adapt such genres as the consumerism-based haul video and musical video parody mobilize feminist rhetorical criticism

Fandubbing across time and space. From dubbing ‘by fans for fans’ to cyberdubbing

This chapter investigates a phenomenon that has received scant academic attention so far: fandubbing. To understand the extent and impact of this participatory practice in the current landscape, the chapter examines fandubbing origins and reflects on the needs met by fandubs at different times and contexts. The plethora of uses and motivations behind this phenomenon question the suitability of the term fandubbing. Against this backdrop, and drawing on Díaz-Cintas’s (2018) conception of “cybersubtitles”, the chapter advocates using the term cyberdubbing to reflect the wide range of non-traditional online dubbing practices so prevalent nowadays, including parodic and serious dubbings undertaken by fans, Internet users and digital influencers, be them professionals or amateurs

POLITICS AND PERFORMATIVE AGENCY IN NIGERIAN SOCIAL MEDIA

In this dissertation, I examine the ways in which social media in Nigeria functions through online signifying practices as a strategy of demarginalization and subaltern resistance. I engage with this perspective by framing Web 2.0 platforms as enablers of citizens’ right to public and performative speech. Interested in the ways in which netizens imagine the nation and perform political selves and identities through viral and popular images on social media, my dissertation underpins a reading of social media that is grounded in an expanded conception of speech, visual and/or verbal. This approach enables me to take cognizance of the voices and perspectives secured by the decentralized capacity of digital media for everyday citizens with access to the Internet. Engaging with how social media re-centers alternative perspectives to prevailing orthodoxies, I explore the ways in which marginal groups, mostly relegated to the periphery of governmental power, emerge in performative spaces of public discourses through digital cultural signifiers such as the selfie, viral Internet memes, and humorous political cartoons posted online. I show that despite the limitations of cyberspace and the uneven access to internet technologies in some parts of Nigeria, social media is a discursive, if not contested, space of cultural production from which postcolonial subjects ‘author’ media narratives that revise, resist, and challenge exclusion and marginality. By analyzing the significations of user-generated cultural forms, mostly fictional images (Internet memes) and actual performative representations (the selfie) produced as vectors of digital activism and resistance, the dissertation highlights the varied ways in which social media functions as a rearticulating mechanism for a more inclusive appearance of young people and women in Nigeria’s public sphere. I analyze the production and circulation of these images within a framework that positions them as supplemental performative strategies to digital activism. Extrapolating the economy of meanings inherent in these images begins, for me, by unsettling the postmodern assumption that mediatized culture is futile for resistance. The refutation of such arguments is necessary to consolidate the claim that the capacity for agency and representation, which social media affords excluded or oppressed populations is more pertinent than the positivist and teleological expectations some scholars have of digital articulations of dissent

If We\u27re Mocking Anything, It\u27s Organized Religion: The Queer Holy Fool Style of The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence

Asking questions in and about the often rough terrain at the intersection of sexuality/gender and religion/spirituality, this dissertation seeks to excavate the concept of queer holy fool style as a fitting response to dominant Judeo-Christian narratives that marginalize LGBTQ individuals. To do so, I utilize the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence (SPI), a drag performing community of “21st Century Nuns,” as a synechdoche; pulling examples of their communication and performances as evidence of queer holy fool style. In exploring three facets of stylistic study (embodied, textual/hypertextual, and sociological), I blend queer theoretical concepts (like camp, performativity, and disciplining) with rhetorical methodological frameworks (such as Burke’s [1969] four master tropes and parody). At the end of the analysis, I uncover counter narratives within the SPI’s communication featuring themes of sexual freedom, spirituality, and safety in coalescence. Throughout the dissertation, I continually ask questions regarding queer holy fool style – some I answer, others I do not – as an attempt to engage the reader with the work. In this way, I perform the playful, yet disruptive nature of queer theoretical work. I conclude with suggestions to extend the study of queer holy fool style; primarily, the inclusion of oral histories to identify intricacies within the style as well as an autoethnographic approach that would track the creation of an individual’s performance of the style. Advisors: Damien Smith Pfister and Carly S. Wood