FCJ-165 Obama Trolling: Memes, Salutes and an Agonistic Politics in the 2012 Presidential Election
Item
Title
FCJ-165 Obama Trolling: Memes, Salutes and an Agonistic Politics in the 2012 Presidential Election
Fibreculture Journal
Creator
Benjamin Burroughs
Abstract
During the 2012 presidential campaign an explosion of photo-shopped images circulated that depicted President Obama as unpatriotic. The ‘crotch salute’, ‘left-hand salute’, and ‘Veterans Day non-salute’ serve as case studies for understanding the role of trolling in the public sphere and Internet politics in an era of social networks and circulation. This paper tracks the cultural practices and logics of ‘sharing’ political memes and conceptualises memes as part of an agonistic public sphere and media ecology. Obama trolling is facilitated through the techno-cultural affordances of memes, which can only become public because of their mimetic form and sterilised partial anonymity. The paper seeks to conceptualise trolling as a broader cultural practice, which can be considered political. Normative assumptions about these memes would portray this trafficking as destructive to deliberative democracy but when understood as a generative cultural practice, trolling becomes central to articulating political emotions in social networks. Photo-shopped Obama salutes, in addition to Big Bird, binder, and bayonet memes, express not only political identities but also larger cultural values within networked popular culture.
issue
22
pages
257-276
Date
December 1, 2013
Language
EN English
issn
1449-1443, 1449-1443
short title
FCJ-165 Obama Trolling