Communication
Permanent URI for this communityhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2223
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Item DIGITAL PLACE-MAKING AND PLATFORM POLITICS: HOW USERS TRANSFORMED AND RECODED THEIR LIVES ONLINE IN THE WAKE OF COVID-19(2024) Phipps, Elizabeth Brooke; Pfister, Damien S.; Communication; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Digital Place-making and Platform Politics: How Users Transformed and Recoded their Lives Online in the Wake of COVID-19 examines the political & cultural turmoil at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, where daily life for millions around the world shifted to digital platforms. Digital users turned to the unique affordances of these platforms for civic activism through what I term “digital place-making,” the rhetorical activity involved in cultivating digital places through specific technologies and practices. Drawing from an ecological rhetorical approach and an understanding of digital experiences as transplatform, Digital Place-making and Platform Politics utilizes a methodology that incorporates rhetorical space & place theory, textual analysis, visual analysis, digital ethnographic work, and “in situ” field work to capture the overlapping and simultaneous nature of place-making for digital users. How does digital place-making impact the relations between users, platforms, and political culture? To render digital place-making as a concept, this dissertation navigates through three case studies between 2020-2022. The first chapter looks at the video game platform Animal Crossing: New Horizons, and how users experiencing lockdown conditions in 2020 repurposed the platform as a site for political expression. This first study establishes the foundational relationship between infrastructure, user practices, and their engagement with broader political discourse through place-making. The second chapter builds upon this role of infrastructure and user practice creating place by looking at how the platform Twitch trains streamers on their platform to create places for community, and then how streamers leveraged these places for resistance and activism on the platform itself throughout 2021-2022. This second study illuminates the way rhetorical place is constructed through both discourse and infrastructure, and how digital place possesses vulnerabilities unique to the condition of digitality. The third chapter addresses Epic Games’ fraught commemoration of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the 1963 March on Washington, held in 2021 on the popular video game platform Fortnite. This final study serves as a capstone illustration of the unique vulnerabilities that digital place-making poses for public memory and political discourse.Item DISINFORMATION THAT ENTERTAINS: THE ALT-RIGHT’S USE OF POPULAR AND POLITICAL CULTURE STRATEGIES(2024) Montgomery, Fielding Edmund; Parry-Giles, Shawn J.; Communication; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This project takes seriously the nested relationship of popular culture and political culture, highlighting how that relationship has promulgated alt-right disinformation in the long Trump era. Throughout this study, strategies of conspiracy, horror, and dog whistles are examined, as well as considering audiovisual concepts like realism and mimesis. Such alt-right disinformation establishes reactionary frames of racism, misogyny, and anti-governance. This work looks at both sides of the popular/political culture relationship, examining cinematic films, political campaign advertisements, and social media posts. I conclude by offering satire as one potential counterstrategy against alt-right disinformation that also resides in the nested relationship between popular and political culture.Item Living a Participatory Life: Reformatting Rhetoric for Demanding, Digital Times(2023) Salzano, Matthew; Pfister, Damien S; Communication; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Living a Participatory Life explores how people navigate demanding, digital times where social movements and digital media meet, in the context of what media scholars refer to as the participatory condition. The participatory condition describes how participation is an inherent, inescapable condition of digitality with its always-on and always-prompting media; it is distinctly different from the participatory cultures theorized of the blogosphere and Web 2.0. In the participatory condition, the digital is demanding, and our demands are digitized. What does it mean to live a participatory life in the participatory condition? How should we practice rhetoric (as a productive and critical art) during demanding, digital times? To aid in answering these questions, this dissertation offers a format theory of participation. I theorize four key concepts—parameters, imperatives, trans-situations, and sensibilities—to define participation as a formatted rhetorical practice that modulates affect and sensibilities within a formatted ecology. In the following three chapters, I locate three participatory sensibilities from advocates for social change across intersectional issues: Disparticipants, offering participatory dissent at the Women’s March; Fictocritics, generating criticism of the YouTube manosphere; and Installectuals, transforming Instagram during the Summer 2020 resurgence of Black Lives Matter activism. Each illustrates the ramifications of the participatory condition and how advocates for social change navigate it. The dissertation concludes with a provocation to learn from these sensibilities and begin reformatting our own participatory lives.Item No Tangle So Hopeless: Toward a Relational Cluster Analysis(2018) Nichols, Annie Laurie; Pfister, Damien S; Communication; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)How does a semi-nomadic shepherd people on the border of Russia and Azerbaijan place themselves? How do twitter users challenge and transform institutional versions of events? How can citizens resist then narrow confines of reductive algorithmic assumptions on the internet? Questions such as these are not readily answered with traditional rhetorical methods, yet they recommend a rhetorical approach to their focus on meaning-making, constitutive community, and identity creation. This project argues that Kenneth Burke’s method of cluster analysis can be profitably revived to meet rhetoric’s growing need for an approach that focuses on relationships, listens to vernacular voices, engages multiple texts, and considers the world from other viewpoints. The most commonly used approach to cluster analysis is a reductive equational form that is primarily concerned with the dissective, analytic half of cluster analysis. Reconstituting Burke’s more constructive, drawing-together form, this project develops a relational cluster analysis that centers in connections, community, and the relationships between words, people, and ideologies. Relational cluster analysis’ effectiveness is demonstrated by use with ethnographic fieldnotes, a database of 5 million tweets, and the algorithmic infrastructure of Web 2.0. These exemplars demonstrate that, when applied at several layers of meaning, such as individual, community, dominant culture, and cross-cultural, this relational method is particularly generative in working with vernacular voices, community meanings, networked arguments, and digital cultures. Inductively listening to meaning-making foregrounds the subject, leading to substantial insight into not just individual but also community and cultural values and orientations. The elastic nature of a relationally-focused, multilevel cluster analysis affords the opportunity to gaze, engrossed, from others’ points of view.