REDDIT ON BREXIT: MEME-OLOGY AND HUMOUR IN LEAVE/REMAIN DISCOURSES

Dr Robert Lawson @rob_lawson1 www.academia.edu/RobertLawson 28th November 2019 REDDIT ON BREXIT: MEME-OLOGY AND HUMOUR IN LEAVE/REMAIN DISCOURSES Download these slides at www.academia.edu/robertlawson/talks BACKGROUND ➤ In recent years, social media has become a multi-issue battleground, particularly in terms of gender, class, ethnicity, and more (Lutzky & Lawson 2019). ➤ Of particular interest is the extent to which party political affiliations and allegiances play out in social media, where the new multi-modal and multi-semiotic affordances of social media offer innovative ways of engaging with the political economy (Halupka 2014). ➤ In terms of Brexit, social media has played a central role in disseminating pro and leave discourses and in constructing difference, opposition, and affiliation (Dean 2018; Jaworkska & Sogomonian 2019; Zappavigna 2019). BREXIT AND SOCIAL MEDIA ➤ That said, critical analyses of social media as a locus of socio-political activity has tended to be elided in favour of more instrumentalist analyses where, for example, social media is treated as a variable in the success/failure of a political campaign. ➤ “Consider, for example, a recent special issue of British Politics on the politics of Brexit. Despite the importance of social media in shaping the wider discursive and affective contours of the Brexit referendum and its aftermath, the articles tend to either totally forego any mention of the role of social media or mention it in passing without subjecting it to sustained analysis” (Dean 2019: 3). BREXIT AND SOCIAL MEDIA ➤ One reason for this lack of academic attention is that social media is seen in some quarters as a frivolous political activity with no real social impact. BREXIT AND SOCIAL MEDIA ➤ One of the hallmarks of online social media discourse is the deployment of humour inspired by current events and a creative industry centred on memes, mash-ups, comics, videos and other formal expressions of comedy. ➤ While it might be argued that humour is part of the growing influence of 'slacktivism' - a superficial engagement with political discourse and a lack of committed political action - it can also be seen as a new form of activism which draws on the advantages of digital media (reach, connectivity, virality, etc). ➤ “New technologies have simplified the process of acting upon politics which has led to critics condemning online activism as a simpler, lazy and convenient alternative to the legitimate and arduous tradition of political engagement” (Wutz 2018). BREXIT AND SOCIAL MEDIA ➤ We don’t know much about the deployment of humour on social media sites in relation to contemporary socio-political movements like Brexit (see Wutz 2018 and Sobande 2019 for some exceptions). ➤ “Online comments should therefore not be seen [just] as a presentation of ‘the public opinion’, but should [also] be investigated as part of a political-ideological battle; as potential manipulations aimed at the public opinion and the views of journalists” (Wutz 2018). ➤ Answers Dean’s (2019: 2) call to see “socially mediated cultural production and exchange not as some frivolous activity on the margins of politics, but as increasingly central to how large numbers of predominantly young citizens experience politics.” WHY HUMOUR? ➤ Humour plays an important community building role in social media, providing a means through which community members resist, align, or challenge the message of the post. ➤ “Visual media such as memes and gifs serve what, following Althusser (2014), we might call an interpellative function, that is they ‘hail’ the viewer into identifying with them, either by agreeing with the political sentiments expressed therein, or by finding them funny (or not). This in turn means that the circulation of digital visual media often serves to shore up political identities, affiliations, and the antagonisms associated with them” (Dean 2019: 6). subreddits site search upvote/downvote post title number of comments advertising WHY REDDIT? ➤ Reddit is one of the world’s largest news aggregator sites and social media platforms. ➤ ➤ ➤ ➤ ➤ 330 million monthly active users 21 billion page views per month 138,000 active communities $3 billion valuation 3rd most visited site in America ➤ Communities known as ‘subreddits’ are dedicated to almost every hobby, activity, sport, event, political party, and profession under the sun. ➤ Site-wide ‘up-vote/down-vote’ system which is intended to promote and make more visible relevant content and comments to other users. /R/BREXIT ➤ Founded in 2015, prior to the referendum being held, as a space for Brexit discussion. ➤ Relatively small subreddit, only 32,000 to date (compared with 800,000 membership of /r/The_Donald and 275,000 of /r/unitedkingdom). Subscribers /R/BREXIT ➤ The subreddit has a clear anti-brexit and pro-EU stance, potentially a reflection of its younger demographic. ➤ Content varies between serious discussion of Brexit-related issues to memes and jokes about the impact of Brexit, pro-leave MPs/MEPs, leave voters, media representations and so on. ➤ “Nope, [the sub] been strongly remain for the past 3 years. New gets slammed a lot because it's a big sub, but the overwhelming majority are remain voters there.” THE PROJECT ➤ Analysis of Reddit posts from /r/Brexit, drawing on corpus-assisted discourse approaches (cf. Baker & Levon 2015; Vessey 2015; Hardacker & McGlashan 2016), using #LancsBox (Brezina, Timperley & McEnery 2018). ➤ 100 top voted posts of all time in the subreddit (so, not searching for a particular lexical item or phrase). ➤ Data cleaning and preparation - deleting usernames, links, bot comments, etc. ➤ i) To what extent is humour deployed in the sub and ii) how does linguistic practice vary across the top 100 posts? WAYS OF GETTING AT REDDIT DATA ➤ Reddit search function ➤ Search ➤ Using existing datasets ➤ Reddit data dump ➤ Using webscrapers ➤ Beautiful Soup ➤ Google Scripts ➤ Using third party tools ➤ Google BigQuery PRAW https://praw.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ PRAW PRAW ➤ Python Reddit API Wrapper (Boes 2019) ➤ Accesses Reddit through online API (need to have a Reddit account for API authentication), allowing users to perform a variety of tasks (e.g. upvote/downvote, post comments, PM users, subscribe to subreddits, download data). ➤ Benefits ➤ ➤ ➤ ➤ ➤ Generates a lot of data for corpus analysis, slx analysis, critical discourse analysis etc; Catalogues data in .csv, .txt, .json or .xlsx format; Search can be tailored by a variety of parameters; Can collect *lots* of meta-data. Drawbacks ➤ ➤ ➤ Need to be familiar with Python scripting language and terminal/command line; Data needs a lot of cleaning (deleting URLs, usernames etc); Volume of data can make it difficult to know where to start with analysis. DATA Number of threads topic politicians 33 Pro-EU 27 decision making 19 Trade 6 Pro-Leave 5 Misc 4 Health care 3 UK standing 2 The Union 1 Totals 100 Table 1. Breakdown of top 100 posts on /r/Brexit Number of comments Number of words 2837 4432 1628 666 500 200 361 226 316 11166 92,218 156,275 57,865 25,794 19,652 5,824 15,729 12,864 6,013 392,234 REDDIT - IS IT ALWAYS ABOUT HUMOUR? “What harm has Brexit ever done to us?” INTERTEXTUALITY AND RESEMIOTISATION ➤ “Often by blending pop culture and political references, remixed digital content results in commentary that reflects different public conversations, contestations and concerns about the current state of politics and society… Among these is the widespread (re)use of political memes, GIFs (graphics interchange formats) and user-generated content on social media. This can involve the repurposing of photographs and the words of politicians and public figures, yielding acerbic statements that can be as critical and/or offensive as they are humorous” (Sobande 2019: 1). REDDIT - IS IT ALWAYS ABOUT HUMOUR? Figure 1*. Breakdown by post type - humorous/not humorous *Figures drawn using MatPlotLib v3.1.1 (Hunter 2007) POST MEDIUM Figure 2. Breakdown of top 100 posts on /r/Brexit by medium DATA Number of threads topic politicians 33 Pro-EU 27 decision making 19 Trade 6 Pro-Leave 5 Misc 4 Health care 3 UK standing 2 The Union 1 Totals 100 Number of comments Number of words 2837 4432 1628 666 500 200 361 226 316 11166 92,218 156,275 57,865 25,794 19,652 5,824 15,729 12,864 6,013 392,234 Table 2. Breakdown of top 100 posts on /r/Brexit - selected sub-corpora for closer analysis POLITICIANS: FREQUENCY LIST Figure 3. Top 25 most frequent words in politician sub-corpus POLITICIANS Figure 4. Breakdown of top politician targets in sub-corpus BORIS JOHNSON: POST TITLES “Little Britain’s PM” “Can't get an election” “Even the bus stops have had enough” BORIS JOHNSON: COLLOCATES Collocates johnson (21) lost (5) pm (8) give (7) both (5) may (11) parliament (5) election (6) same (5) had (6) Table 3. Top 10 collocates of Boris Figure 5. Graph-Coll analysis of Boris in #LancsBox BORIS IS… has done more for the meme community. Boris is a copycat. ignore those and it still stands that Boris is a habitual liar. Trump, Trump is a bigoted moron, but Boris is a malevolent and smart man. was and UKIP et al probably encouraged it Boris is a self serving basic buffoon who Maybe. But you can't deny that Boris is factually a liar at this point Your argument only works if we assume Boris is honest, genuine, and not scheming They are all liars in Parliament, Boris is just lousy at it hence why he re turning up the screws, even though Boris is literally the *worst* PM ever Does this mean Boris is Putin's puppet too? I wonder if Boris is the biggest chicken in town Table 4. Selected concordance lines for Boris is Johnson is a fucking imbecile Johnson is : The Incredible Sulk PRO-EU: FREQUENCY LIST Figure 5. Top 25 most frequent words in Pro-EU sub-corpus BREXIT IS… everyone but the Brexiters is certain Brexit is a bad idea. of course allowed at the same event. Brexit is a culture war. is going away. Mays deal / soft brexit is a non starter in any form. The attend this event and I think that Brexit is a tragedy that's going to hurt how that position can be understood though. Brexit is an enormous lie and a hoax. There them a blue crayon for the passport. Brexit is like a crazy old man demanding has. They 'll never know the difference. Brexit is like watching an old friend getting drunk Brexit is the equivalent of watching a spoilt child the moment no one is certain that Brexit is a good idea or a bad one. war between business and government and Brexit is a major win for anti government forces. just prove that reddits opinion over brexit is a farce full of brainless remoaners. Table 5. Selected concordance lines for Brexit is PRO-LEAVE: FREQUENCY LIST Figure 6. Top 25 most frequent words in Pro-Leave sub-corpus DEMOCRACY… ➤ In the pro-Leave subcorpus, democra* variants occur almost five times as much as they do in the pro-EU sub-corpus (57.5 per 10k vs. 10.5 instances per 10k). ➤ Usually deployed in reference to parliamentary democracy, a democratic mandate, and discussions about where democratic power resides. ➤ “Finally we have a PM with the balls to do what needs to be done. The remainiacs have been trying to subvert for democracy for over two years now. If they had accepted the result none of this would have been necessary. Make your memes and cry foul as much as you want....we are finally getting brexit. Well done Bojo for not being intimidated and delivering the democratically reached decision!” CONCLUSIONS ➤ As Sobande (2019: 5) argues, “Memes and digital remix culture are (re)mediating British politics and public life in messy and meaningful ways that show no sign of slowing down.” ➤ In that sense, humour functions as a form of cultural archiving, capturing a sense of contemporary civic mood that we can examine in a systematic way. ➤ That said, we should also look at the linguistic content and discursive strategies which accompany humorous content, as a way of accessing more serious social commentary. REFERENCES Boe, Bryce. 2019. Python Reddit API Wrapper Documentation. https://praw.readthedocs.io Dean, J. 2019. Sorted for memes and gifs: Visual media and everyday digital politics. Political Studies Review, 17 (3): 255-266. Jaworska, S. & Sogomonian, T. 2019. 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Zappavigna, M. 2019. Ambient affiliation and #Brexit: Negotiating values about experts through censure and ridicule. In V. Koller, S. Kopf, & M. Miglbauer (eds.), Discourses of Brexit. Oxon: Routledge