Emergent New Media Genres
From a rhetorical perspective, we understand genres to be “typified rhetorical actions based in recurrent situations” that provide “the rhetorical means for mediating private intentions and social exigence” (Miller, “Genre,” 159 and 163). While genres often and obviously carry on from generation to generation, genres are always in flux—evolving to meet a particular community’s social needs, adapting to technological innovation, transforming to market demands, and so on. Although many dominant, official genres are enduring and thus make lasting impacts within a community, non-dominant, vernacular genres tend to be ephemeral but nonetheless play notable roles in specific historical-cultural moments within communities that are marginalized, unrecognized, and/or understudied (see also Applegarth 276). In new media environments, vernacular new media genres seem to proliferate constantly through rhetorical play and innovation (Miller, “Where,” 19). Vernacular genres, to be clear, are genres that emerge when users with few administrative or institutional constraints find ways to collectively respond to a shared exigence (Miller, “Where,” 24). Lynn Lewis, for instance, demonstrates how memes have become such a popular means of dissent that we can identify an “emergent participatory economy” that is constituted by a network of “densely imbricated values, exigencies, exchanges, and contexts both embodied and virtual.” As an example of how participatory economies emerge, think about the pepper spray cop meme that surfaced in response to Lieutenant John Pike pepper spraying students at a protest on the UC Davis campus in 2011. As well documented on Know Your Meme, once two remixes of a photograph documenting the incident began to circulate, viewers who shared similar values began responding to each other’s remixes, taking advantage of the Web’s speed and digital platforms to participate in a short-lived but intense collective moment of new media resistance.
As Miller notes in “Where do Genres Come From?”, “emergence” in reference to genre innovation is a complicated if not misleading term, especially in that emergence, as a term and phenomenon, has been defined and explained differently across a wide variety of disciplinary contexts. Yet, in terms of new media genres, Miller draws on Timothy O’Connor and Hong Yu Wong to note that emergence might be best understood as a genre that arises out of something pre-existing yet nonetheless is irreducible to it (3). We can best understand emergence, she suggests, if we think about a new media genre in terms of epistemology, not ontology. After all, all cultural innovations derive from patterns of social meaning and thus cannot be entirely novel in their coming into being. But epistemologically, or better yet phenomenologically, we can understand genres as new if they are determined by a community or culture to be something new and meaningfully different. One clear way we can recognize an emergent genre, then, is to look for evidence of shared recognition and shared common practices, for example in the naming, parodying, and metaculture that developed in relation to the pepper spray cop meme (see Miller, “Where,” 5).
To better understand how specific genres emerge and come to take on socio-cultural significance, Miller argues that we are best off taking empirical, case-based approaches (26), paying close attention to how genres not only emerge onto a community scene but also evolve, circulate, and participate in various collective activities. Iconographic tracking can be a productive method for doing digital visual studies in that it enables us to empirically account for the emergence and evolution of vernacular genres as well as their circulation and collective activity. In digital visual studies, emergent, vernacular new media genres abound as notable objects of study. In addition to memes, we might think of the ubiquitous selfie, for instance, but we can also think about less prominent genres, such as zoombombs, TikTok stunts (Bailey), YouTube Geiger-counter videos (Rea and Riedlinger), and shred videos (Skågeby). Trumpicons and their antecedent Obamicons are also examples of emergent, vernacular new media genres in that they have become wildly popular genres that have developed their own emergent participatory economy with implications for public culture at large.
As apparent in our case study of Trumpicons, vernacular genres do not necessarily stick to one particular domain or serve one narrow function. For instance, vernacular genres can become, among other things, marketed or commercial genres that sell to a mass population (Miller, “Where,” 25) or, as this chapter illustrates, mediators of activism with potential to raise awareness, augment funding, enact protest, trigger conversation, and counter troubling discourses. Also, as Jason Mittell’s study of television quiz shows demonstrates, many genres are sites of cultural contradiction and tension and have conflicting rhetorical goals (see Miller, “Where,” 15). Such tension surely complicates our understanding of a singular genre’s governing rhetorical action, but this tension and contradiction reveals how new media genres are rhetorically flexible, able to meet the social needs of community members with different ideologies determined to weigh in on contemporary socio-political matters. In this sense, we can position new media genres as socially recognized communicative actions that come to co-constitute our everyday practices as well as our individual and collective values and identities as they facilitate diverse meaningful interactions, often through engagements of negotiation and struggle.
Critical Genre Studies
Over the last decade, new media genres have become vital contributors to how racial tensions get played out not only in participatory culture but the public and the politics of the nation-state at large. Lisa Nakamura has examined how the Internet is “a privileged and extremely rich site for the creation and distribution of hegemonic and counter hegemonic visual images of racialized bodies” (Digitizing Race 13). Relevant to our research here, Nakamura forwards the idea of cybertypes to “describe the distinctive ways that the Internet propagates, disseminates, and commodifies images of race and racism” (Cybertypes 3). Cybertyping, she notes, occurs when circulating images of race emerge as “the fears, anxieties, and desires of privileged Western users . . . are scripted into a textual/graphical environment that is in constant flux and revision” (Cybertypes 6). In Nakamura’s work, a number of new media genres such as cyberpunk films, Internet advertisements, and graphic chats contribute to cybertyping. Trumpicons, we argue, ought to be added to such list, as our research makes visible that Trumpicons build on and respond to self-stereotypes that Trump has generated—stereotypes which reinforce fears, anxieties, and desires of whiteness that, in Sara Ahmed’s terms, stick to Trumpicons as they circulate, making impressions upon encountered bodies along the way. We find it useful, then, to supplement Miller’s theories of new media genres and Nakamura’s theories of race and Internet culture with Ahmed’s work on the cultural politics of emotion—a key foundation to our own concept of the racial politics of circulation. As Ahmed’s work in The Cultural Politics of Emotion helps to elucidate, emotions and doxa (commonplace opinions and beliefs) stick to cultural artifacts that give rise to impressions left on both the individual and collective body (see Gries and Bratta). In one sense, emotions and doxa circulate among bodies entangled in close relations. But in an emergent participatory economy, emotions and doxa often spread quickly among strangers connected to each other only via the production, remix, and sharing of new media genres, such as Trumpicons. We might think of the connection between Miller, Nakamura, and Ahmed as follows then: the more a new media genre that functions as a cybertype circulates, the more culturally constitutive and reinforcing it becomes of racialized logics and formations as well as economies of deeply affective opinions and beliefs.
As a critical concept, the racial politics of circulation draws attention to the ways in which new media genres such as Trumpicons and race are entangled and constantly feeding off each in the public realm. With the racial politics of circulation, to be clear, we refer to the phenomenon in which race—as a cultural-rhetorical construct that operates in overt and covert dimensions—drives the (re)production and (re)circulation of rhetorical artifacts, which, through various channels, feed back into public discourse and interlocking racialized logics and formations tied to the nation-state (Gries and Bratta). By racial formation, we work from Michael Omi and Howard Winant’s definition: “the sociohistorical process by which racial categories are created, inhabited, transformed, and destroyed . . . a process of historically situated projects in which human bodies and social structures are represented and organized” (124). Michael Lacy and Kent Ono note that racial formation is always shifting within a culture as racialization and racialized logics become reified through emergent rhetorical practice. They remark that “race and racism are cannibalistic and vampiric, feeding off of cultural changes and one another, transforming themselves to fit every situation or context” (6). That is, as old as they are, racialized formations and logics become culturally recemented as different figures, technologies, discourses, affects, and beliefs emerge within and across cultures. The racial politics of circulation helps turn scholarly attention to such phenomena in order to disclose how racism is being both promulgated and resisted in what Jeff Maskovsky calls an era of white nationalist postracialism.
Maskovsky argues that white nationalist postracialism is a “new form of racial politics” that has emerged with Trumpism —a form of racial politics in which “white racial resentment seeks to reclaim the nation for white Americans while also denying an ideological investment in white supremacy” (434, our emphasis). Based on our research of how “Build the Wall” and “Fuck your Feelings” Trumpicons promulgate such racial politics, we have suggested that “white nationalist postracialism is a form of circulatory racism that is gaining amplification as it becomes highly distributed across physical and digital contexts and amplified by new media genres” (Gries and Bratta). But, as our case study shows in this chapter, Trumpicons also work to expose and resist white supremacist logics and formations and thus participate in a cultural-rhetorical, affective practice in which tension over white supremacy gets played out.
Resistance, we should note as an end to this section, is perhaps an overused term, one that loses meaning in its ubiquity of rhetorical explanation. By resistance, however, we draw on Brian Ott who defines it as “any discourse, performance, or aesthetic practice, which through its symbolic and/or material enactment, transgresses, subverts, disrupts, and/or rebels against the social codes, customs, and/or conventions that—through their everyday operation—create, sustain, and naturalize the prevailing relations of power in a particular time and place” (335). This notion of resistance is apt for our research in that Trumpicons often work to push back against white supremacist fantasies that are already circulating—amplified in part by Trump and the white supremacist postracial logics that undergird many of his policies and rhetoric. In this sense, many Trumpicons enact visual resistance by taking advantage of the fact that in a culture dominated by the public screen, audiences, as Kevin Michael DeLuca and Jennifer Peeples argue, often are drawn to “[i]mages over words, emotions over rationality, speed over reflection, distraction over deliberation, and slogans over arguments” (133). Determining whether such visual resistance is efficacious in its efforts to challenge/undo white nationalist postracial logics and rhetorics is certainly difficult to determine and beyond the scope of this particular research project. Iconographic tracking, however, demonstrates that Trumpicons, at the very least, attempt to confront such logics and rhetorics head on as they enter into the hypervisible racial politics of circulation at play in our current national and global context.
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