Memes Incitement & Gun Control - Couverture souple

Hunt, Michael Nicholas

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 1916404723 ISBN 13 : 9781916404724

Editeur : Carfax Press, 2019

Synopsis

Some memetic content is like a safety catch on a gun. This case study traces the development of the ‘ABC’ meme and its history of incitement from the writings of Nobel prize winner Rudyard Kipling in 1912, to the Easter Rising Dublin 1916 and the Chicago Riots in 1919. The meme was given fresh impetus in 1970 when it was taken over and repurposed by the Jackson 5.The case study illustrates that there is no substitute for voluntary curation of the content we use in the media as it can strongly influence how certain people behave through effects of unconscious bias. Those choosing the shortcut of heated rhetorical populism to boost ratings online may jeopardize the safety of everyone when there are more measured means of public communication available. A repurposed version of the ABC meme was revived and amplified during recent Confederate Statue demonstrations in 2017 and 2018 as populist anti-minority sentiment was openly expressed on the streets and counterdemonstrations occurred. The meme contextualizes how content we consume on social media can be a factor in inciting mass shootings as have recently occurred in Gilmore California, El Paso Texas and Dayton Ohio in 2019. The populist memes function like a safety catch on a loaded gun. There is great additional unknown peril in handling a loaded weapon if the safety catch is not being properly utilized resulting in accidents and unnecessary mortality which is equivalent to the unconscious nature of the bias being amplified by some populist Alt-right agenda. This inciteful content unleashes a contingent and capricious peril with no regard for safety.The history of this longstanding ABC meme is related in its various guises to the recent political situation and situates the subtext of the meme within a broad range of civil demonstrations, music and cinema. The reader will be able to connect the historical beginnings of the meme, and its encrypted Irish language history, to the gun control debate for the 2020 election cycle, and to the rise of populist political rhetoric as a social media tool. Memes accelerate interpretation from the general to the specific.It may contextualize why a sitting US President was banned from Twitter and Facebook in the aftermath of the January 2021 rioting in Washington D.C. where five people died.As we survey the storming of the capital in Washington D.C. in 2021 the ABC memes too are present in an adapted form in the manner a virus can adapt. With the tools made available in the case study, it is possible to trace the connections between memetic content and sustained wrongful campaigning. There is an involvement of flags and other Trumpism paraphernalia, and Alt-right paraphernalia, in the storming of the capital. These objects adorned the statues within the capital buildings for photo-ops posted online. While ‘Lost Cause’ statues are being removed across America and as US military bases seek an alternative to being named in honor of Confederate generals, populist groups of the ilk who marched with burning torches in Charlottesville burn the flags of their political and ideological adversaries gaining the type of front-page notoriety ideal for rabble incitement and crowdsourcing.These Alt-right groups may channel the notoriety of the US flag burning regularly exploited as a propagandist tool by the Iranians during the US Embassy Hostage crisis in Tehran (1976-1981). The political timing is significant as the release of the hostages minutes after the handover of the presidency from President Jimmy Carter to President Ronald Reagan on 20th January 1981 was viewed as a deliberately timed propagandist disruption of the Carter administration’s legacy on its last day in office. The propagandist tactics of subversion usually exerted between hostile nations can also be exploited from within the homeland through the malleability of memetic subtext in the wrong hands.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Carfax Press
• Date d'édition: 2019
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 1916404723
• ISBN 13: 9781916404724
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 76
• Coordonnées du fabricant: Printed by Amazon on behalf of the author; https://www.amazon.fr/hz/contact-us; ; c/o Amazon Media EU S.à.r.l., 38 Avenue John F. Kennedy; Luxembourg; L-1855; Luxembourg