<nettime-ann> OILab @ CIM, Warwick - Public Lecture and Meme War Workshop

[Michael Dieter <mdieter@gmail.com>]

.
Dear Nettimers,

The following two events will take place at CIM Warwick in a couple of
weeks - https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_fac/cim/

All welcome, but if you'd like to attend the workshop in particular,
please get in touch.

- M.

Public lecture: Teh internet is serious business: on anons,
normieification and neo-reactionary memes
OILab - https://oilab.eu/
Monday 11th of February, 17:00-18:30
Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies (CIM), University of Warwick
Room: OC1.06

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 talk 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 will 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 visual network analysis methods that we use take it as
axiomatic that "there is no transport without translation". As such,
this talk aims to describe 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. With case studies of political
memes like "kekistan," "pizzagate," or "(((them)))", we plan to
outline some of the dynamics by which these subcultures constitute
their imagined collective self-identity, sets of issues and
antagonisms. How is it is that these memes travel, and what are the
relationships between their initial anonymous authors, the “normies”
(ourselves included), that give them attention?

Meme War Workshop
Tuesday 12th of February
CIM, University of Warwick
10:00-16:00

Based on a pedagogy developed over the course of several graduate new
media seminars at the University of Amsterdam, this workshop
introduces tools and techniques developed by researchers affiliated
with OILab and Digital Methods for studying what we refer to as “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.
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