[Commlist] OILab @ CIM, Warwick UK - Meme War Workshop

The following event  with the Open Intelligence Lab
(https://oilab.eu/) and CIM Warwick
(https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_fac/cim/) might be of interest to
you.

Open Intelligence Lab @ Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies
Meme War Workshop
University of Warwick, UK
11th-12th of February

At the fringes of an increasingly hegemonic platform economy, there
exists another anarchic web of anonymous and pseudonymous forums that
plays host to subcultures whose mantra that "teh internet is serious
business” harkens back to 90’s cyber-culture when it was said that
"online nobody knows you're a dog”. Whilst supposedly devoted to an
ironic spirit of play, in recent years forums such as 4chan have
become entangled the growing movement of reactionary right culture
online.

This workshop considers the emergence of these serious political
movements out of this milieu. As memetic antagonisms and other forms
of extreme vernacular speech have seemingly become normalized on
various social media platforms, our aim is to trace their origins out
of what we call “the deep vernacular web” through capturing, analyzing
and interpret the changing and ephemeral artifacts of these
subcultures. To this end, we focus in particular on a process of what
we call "normiefication", whereby these artifacts are translated from
the subcultural milieus of 4chan, for example, into the mainstream of
the Platformized web of social media.

While the success of a "meme" has traditionally been seen as a
function of its diffusion, the data-driven and visual network analysis
methods that we will experiment with take it as axiomatic that "there
is no transport without translation". As such, this event aims to
explore empirically the changing contexts within which the artifacts
(and ideas) of reactionary right-wing political subcultures develop
and travel as a means by which to hopefully begin to assess their
serious political significance.

Based on a pedagogy developed over the course of several graduate new
media seminars at the University of Amsterdam, we will introduce
participants to tools and techniques developed by researchers
affiliated with OILab and the Digital Methods Initiative for studying
the deep vernacular web of anonymous and pseudonymous web forums. In
the course of the workshop participants will have the opportunity to
contribute to some basic original research specifically focussing on
4chan and on Reddit. Together we will look at how online subcultures
use in-group slang as well as “ironic” memes as a means by which
constitute themselves as issue publics, focussing in particular on how
it is that they imagine their antagonists as well as themselves as
political collectives.

All welcome, but if you would like to attend, please get in touch to
register: (m.j.dieter /at/ warwick.ac.uk)

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