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Memes: The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism?
Hosted Online by the Centre for Digital Culture at the Art and Humanities Research Institute, King’s College London in May 2020. Annual Conference of the Centre for Digital Culture 2020 Introduction: Paolo Gerbaudo (King's College London) Panel 1: Meme Magic is Real! Studying the politics of online subcultures through their memetic activity Speakers: Marc Tuters (University of Amsterdam), Sal Hagen (University of Amsterdam), Emillie de Keulenaar (University of Amsterdam & Utrecht University), Stijn Peeters (University of Amsterdam) & Tom Willaert (Vrije Universiteit Brussel), Daniël de Zeeuw (University of Amsterdam) Chair: Jennifer Pybus (King's College London) Panel 2: Politics of Memes Speakers: An Xiao Mina (Harvard University), Alessandro Lolli, Anastasia Denisova (University of Westminster), Philip Seargeant (Open University) Chair: Paolo Gerbaudo (King's College London) Further details about the conference including speaker abstracts and bios available on our website https://www.centrefordigitalculture.net/online-conference-memes-the-cultural-logic-of-late-capitalism/ For more on the Centre for Digital Culture, visit us on our website https://www.centrefordigitalculture.net. Or follow us on Twitter @DigiCultureKCL and Facebook.
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all right hi everyone and welcome to ourconference or memes and the culturallogic of Lake capitalism I in Polishabout and I'm the director of the Centerfor digital culture at King's CollegeLondon I'm very glad to introduce you tothese online webinar which makes up forthe conference which we Ori originallyshare on this date 15th of May 20 20 20

but which had to be cancelled obviouslydue to the coronavirus emergency thesehave been very complex and sad days forall of us for many people so perhaps instarting this event I think it'snecessary to send all our faults to allthe people were been affected by thepandemic to those who lost the relativesand friends during these crises and amessage of solidarity and support tohealth care workers and care workers

more generally were being such anexceptional resort such a vital resourcefor all our societies amidst thesecrises acts to all of us and to all ofyou and made these soon be over thisconference is actually our 6th annualconference visit our cultural conferenceI just realized today that this is thesixth year in a row that we are doingthis conference and this year

Ihere there are problems technicalproblemslet me know if you can hear me nowfully now you can hear me alright it'sfine now looks like you can hear me so

going back to the script this conferenceis our 6th annual digital cultureconference organized by the center fordigital culture and this year we pickthe topic of memesI mean previous years one year we lookedat platform capitalism digital activismwe looked at the dark digital future Imean we try to encompass many themesthat have to do with digital culture andits effects on society politics

economics and so on and so forth thisyear we pick the topic of memes which weconsider a very important issue todiscuss because how relevant memes thatbecome as a language in contemporarysociety I mean this topic we have chosenthis year especially given the setcircumstances we find ourselves inperhaps it may seem vulgar or trivial orbanalto some people I think that when manypeople think about memes they probably

consider them as something childishperhaps or unserious something that onlykids only young people use and share infrenetic social media conversationstherefore is something that doesn'treally is not really important is notreally something that as influence onsociety politics and so on and so forthso for many people memes are notsomething serious perhaps not somethingthat deserves being studied they are

perhaps just a fad or a subculture or asubset culture yet I think that thesedismissive attitude that we see for manypeople when way they are talking aboutmemes is quite similar to the dismissiveattitude we have seen time and againvisibly different new cultural phenomenaI mean right every time something newemerges be it hip hop or reggaeton or

other forms of music or even socialmedia andinternet I mean there are people whobasically argue that it is not importantthat these things are just somethingstupid something irrelevant somethingthat belongs only to subculture but thepoint of organizing this conference isinstead that we believe this is not thecase that is that memes are importantmemes F meaning memes are culturalobjects that have a content and that can

illuminate a number of social andcultural issues that are important tounderstand our society in this day andage memes are truly everywhere I mean ifyou think about it mean from meancharacters such as pepper the Frog andall the vulgar saga that appear in thepropaganda or different political groupsto endear their supporters or to vilifytheir opponents or think about themimetic contents of all kinds that wesee in this day and age on the Internet

I mean from political propagandacommercials YouTube and Instagramculture we see memes of different kindsas a language adopted by amateurproducers by activists by celebrities byall kind of actors using this languageso only one hand means can be describedas a genre or as a drop but moregenerally that could be also the stoodas a logic that effects the way in which

we use the Internet and that really hascome to permeate the entire digitalworld this way study memes and mimeticcontent more generally can offer us avantage point to understand digitalculture and popular culture which inthis day and age are really close to oneanother right because today's popularculture is by and large digital culturein so doing memes offer us also a way tounderstand the worries fears

preoccupations but also the emergingdesires hopes and passions thereverberate through society in this eraof multiple and converging crises let'sthink obviously about the corner viruscrisis the environmental crises and avery deep crythese of new liberal capitalism that weare now experiencing right mean whatlooks increasingly like a greaterdepression as it has been described byeconomists Nouriel Roubini so in front

of the situation there are a number ofquestions that we asked ourselves at theCenter for Digital culture and that ourspeakers are going to engage with I meanwhat are memes and what is the languageof memeswhat do memes tell us about the presentcondition about our society in ourdilemmas and how do memes reflectdifferent subjectivities that have beenemerging in recent years to addressthese issues we will have two panelstoday I mean obviously differently from

say a normal conference where we used tohave many panels due to organizationalissues we could only have two today butthey are in a way really bringingtogether many of the topics that we hadcovered in the normal conference panelone which is the one that we start nowafter my introduction is titled me magicIsrael studying the politics of onlinesubcultures through their magneticactivity and we will have a number of

scholars engaging we disease you lookingat the connection between onlinesubcultures memes and politics and thenat 5:00 p.m. in continuation continuingmoving on from from the first panelwe'll have panel to titled politics ofmemes with a number of internationalscholars discussing ultimately what isthe politics of memes what kind ofpolitics do means projects in our eraand I will share the final panel some

final information before we move topanel two all attendance can contributeto the discussion can contribute withcomments and questions by using the chatconnected to this stream so you canwrite there your comments I meancomments will be filtered and questionwill be filtered but then many of themwill be published and will be used bychair which shares on the

different panels to discuss issues withspeakers something about the structureof the panels the panels will havepresentations around 12 to 50 minutes atthe end of all the presentations we willhave a Q&A session that will be informedprecisely by the questions and commentsthat attendance will contribute on theconference chat if you are on Twitter

and want to comment on what is going onI want to provide some excerpts fromspeakers for example or comment on thegeneral discussion that is developing inthis conference you can use the ashtagmeme scone and that is pretty mucheverything from me so I would now handover to my colleague Jennifer peoples

who is my colleague in the Department ofdigital humanities which is a lecturerin digital culture and society thedepartment of digital humanities and amember of the Center for digitalcultures boards over to you Jenniferthanks Carla this is really exciting I'mgetting a large entrance so I'm going to

now introduce dr. mark TudorI've actually introduced his panel but Ithink he should also have his ownintroduction as well dr. tuder's is anassess assistant professor at theUniversity of Amsterdam's Media Studiesfaculty where he teaches graduatecourses on new media theory and anddirects the or the oh I lab which oftenworks together with the digital methodsinitiatives to map the cultural

techniques and infrastructures ofradical subcultures online so mark isgoing to come on and and and just tellyou a little bit about our first panelentitled mean magic is Ryo studying thepolitics of online subcultures throughtheir mimetic activity mark welcomethank you for coming thank you Jenniferand thank you Paulo for the invitationas well I I'd like to say a few words

before the presentations of saul steinemily and daniel take it to take anopportunity to try to very briefly frametheir approach to studying memes firstoff though i'd like i'd like to say howmuch I appreciate the organizersappropriation of Jameson's famed newleft review article title for theconference in place of post-modernismthe organizers have placed memes as the

cultural logic of late capitalism and inthat text the most quoted and discussedand debated article of the 1980saccording to Douglas Kellner Jamesonoffered a kind of symptomatic reading of1980s techno capitalism aimed atdecoding the political unconscious inthe depthless nosov post-modernism he

read American postmodern culture througha Marxist base superstructure model andoffered a diagnosis that was predictablyall-encompassing and dramatically grimof a transcendental subject adrift inposthyperspace effectively without a compassbut he also concluded that famousarticle with a remedy and that was whathe called the aesthetic of cognitive

mapping which he described in the at theend of the article as some as yetunimaginable new mode of representingour social confusion the concept itselfgenerated a great deal of interest atthe time and and he was asked some yearslater to elaborate on it at a famousconference entitled Marxism and theinterpretation of culture organized byCarrie Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg and

their Jameson actually comparedcognitive mapping to conspiracytheorizing he actually he saidspecifically that that that theconspiracy theorizing was the poorperson's cognitive mapping a degradedand desperate attempt to represent thetotality of late capitalism and it'shere with Jameson's offhanded remarkabout the poor person's cognitivemapping that I would like to begin this

kind of framing of this panel as itspeaks to a type of problematic memeculture that's that will be discussedhere like for example the red pill memefavored by men's rights activists andvarious right-wingers online kind ofreactionary conspiracy theorizing isubiquitous across anonymous web forumsand also pseudonymous comment spacesthat can be thought to connect the sort

of bottom half of the web as it's beencalled so this panel will trace thesedynamics within and across thesemillions now a few words on the oh I labopen intelligence lab the research thathas become the sort of basis of the oh Ilab started some years ago in the wakeof the fake news scandal that shook ourfield with former students now

collaboratorsall based at the new media and digitalculture program at the University ofAmsterdam where the digital methodsinitiative is also based and with whichthere's quite an overlap so initially webegan by looking at political memesshared in the 2016 US election and wemade a map at the time of sort ofreactionary Facebook starting from apage called god-emperor Trump and thatfeatured that end up featuring in

Jonathan gray and Liliana Boehner aGru's fake news field guide and was alsothe first post for the oil-- a BUwebsite that parenthetically that thelevel of granularity that was requiredto do that kind of map has becameimpossible after Facebook closed its APIin the wake of that very fake newsscandal so III Labs main focus has beenprimarily the to look at memes as

they're used in anonymous web foraand a few quick words on that wouldprobably be useful here because there'sno persistence unlike social mediabecause there's no persistent identityon anonymous web for like 4chan imagesacquire a greater significance they cometo sort of encode social relations in adurable form that can also travel and so

for better for worse we refer to thesetravelling objects as memes afterDawkins theory which as I understandfrom my colleagues and the exactsciences is considered somewhat outdatedfor us in our in in in our departmentthe the meme metaphor and in ourresearch the meme metaphor isn't alsoespecially sensitive to mediumaffordances which is a very important

concept for us and that refers to thedesign of how a meet that how the designof a medium constrains and allowsdifferent kinds of actions andpossibilities in his book virality forUniversity of Minnesota press TonySampson also points out that mimeticscontends to conceive the medium as aninert channel by contrast the way thatwe teach new media at the University ofAmsterdam is the axiomatic is the medium

is the message so this doesn't mean thatwe're not interested in the content allthe presenters in this panel haveethnographic domain expertise and theseto some extent in these subcultures butthe basic approach that connects thetalks in this panel is really at thelevel of mapping infrastructures andsort of identifying what we could whathave been called cultural techniques byby Bernhard Z Gert so now just a few

final words about the presentations thatare to comethey combine wet web ethnography andcomputational methods so both on the onehand local practices of what wesometimes refer to of as the deepvernacular web and a more zoomed outview of the dynamics of how these memestravel with Saul the focus would be onthe centrality of slang in negotiatingthe kind of a collectivity within

anonymous web communities with Stein andEmilyit'll be focused on cross-platformstudies of their ideas and and sort ofmythos from moving from fortune toBreitbartand moving from 4chan to YouTube andwith Daniel a look at the repurposing ofAI image categorization techniques tostudy a mean culture archive calledencyclopedia dramatica one final note

all of these presentations address whatwe could call problematic memes andmostly they're approached from azoomed-out kind of distant readingperspective but in some cases thepresenters can't necessarily make theirargument without putting somewhatproblematic phrases or images on thescreen so I'd please ask that you beaware of that and with that note I willpass the mic back to Jento introduce salt thanks so much mark

just just a word for everyone who'slistening so I see that everyone isalready making good use of the live Q&Aso if you put your questions here thenat the end we'll try to gather as manyof them as possibleand we'll have a conversation once allthe speakers are finished and with thatI'm going to now introduce Sal who's

going to be doing a presentationentitled is he our guy repurposing themeta language of anonymous onlinecollectives Sal is a PhD candidate atthe University of Amsterdam again in theDepartment of Media Studies heco-founded the o-i lab during his MA inMedia Studies and has studied theinternet subcultures ever since his workcombines cultural research immediatetheory with digital and computational

methods and we're very excited to havehim begin this panel over to you sothank you Jennifer I'm stirring mypresentation nowvery good so in this presentation I'llfirst quickly talk about the peculiaraffordances of image boards andespecially that of the controversial

imageboard 4chan which is now mostlyknown for its far-right activity andthen I'll be discussing what kind ofcultural production this generates andhow we can repurpose the memes comingout of these spaces and it's specificI'll be showing a case study of what Icall panoramic mean called our guy soafter what is now seen as a reactionaryturn in web culture occurring somewhere

between 2014 and 2016 many questionswere asked about how online subculturescould so effectively repurpose their gopractices towards extremists orotherwise reactionary ends and aparticular note here was for Jan theimageboard known for its throwingcampaigns at birthplace of the anonymousmovement and of course it means and well

fortune first gained infamy for the beor random so foreign and now it'spolitics set for pole was said to be thecultural breeding grounds of the socalled alt-right but it was oftenunclear what or who was actually meantwith this term alright so in order toavoid relying on fake structuralismnotions scholars Whitney PhillipsGabrielle Coleman and Jessica Bayercalled for an empirical mapping of

pseudonymousand anonymous spaces becausemisunderstanding them might alsobestowed them with some kind of godlikepower and may not be in sync with whatwhat's actually happening so thepeculiar affordances of image wereresolved in a situation where you younever step in the same river twice asthey said and I would also fetchingwater from this river so doing researchinto it is troubled by those affordancesin many ways firstly image words are in

elements as you can see here if youdon't you don't even account to post andif you post something it defaults to thedefault name anonymous so for researchthis means you can use demographic dataand it also stimulates particularly thesimulative identity play so you neverreally know if what people say isactually what they mean or what theirdentist behind it and image boards are

further more ephemeral so fortune wasreally intended as a repository forJapanese anime images and also deletionmitigated server costs so 20 years laterso right now the same infrastructurestill exists meaning that some data'slost forever and this is a visualizationI made a few years back where you cansee ingaalan's every five minutes of activethreats on 4chan poll and then seeing

that they have some kind of period wherethey're very active but in the endeverything is archived and deleted soreally sort of a river of washing itaway its own contents so whilecomplicating some aspects of empiricalresearch these affordances also set theconditions for the production ofextremely rich cultural data so as Davidour book described to meaningfully take

part in imageboard activity one has beenmeta aware of the quick philosophy ofmemes and vernacular resulting liscreating lots of meta language likeself-referential memes and selfdocumentation as to also seeparticularly in the last presentation ofthis panelso such meta awareness expressed asmemes is interesting for researchbecause then you're not necessarilystudying a meme as an object in itself

but also not as similar objects inawareness of each other but also thereare objects through which you study howonline groups construct a sense ofcollective identity and often especiallywith political far-right spaces like4chan pollrepurposing such memes can also shine alight on how those groups constructpolitical sensibilities so my researchis focused on on how to do so also in a

methodological sense so in a paper markand I wrote last year we did sorepurposing one meme known as the echobrackets or triple parentheses so thiswas used as an anti-semitic dog whistleso three parentheses were meant toencapsulate names of Jewish names orinstitutions in order to signal anout-group so what we did in this image

we aggregated the most used words withinthese parentheses on the far-right forexample forand then following the framework ofChantal move who considers politics asdiscursive articulation often us forthis it then from this perspectiveinstead of actually targeting specificindividuals or institutions it becameclear that the political out group wasmostly there's a nebulous fake them so

art will be the mean connected and thesemitism with aesthetic conspiraciststands upon other naturally the otherside of the coin is a sense of on us andof course any use of ingre boomer ormemes will construct a boundary betweenwho get the joke or file it's funny andthose who do not but some selfreferential memes in these meta

workgroups really explicitly negotiatewhat the larger collective is about andperhaps the clearest example this is theArg I mean which also originated and isused on 4chan pool so by asking is heour guy as you'll be able to see usersmake a case of whether a certain publicfigure aligns with their shared valuesso in this image for instance you can

see that someone apparently thinks thatElon Musk is their guy you're also incombination with the previouslymentioned triple parenthesis so usuallyin the title of a post the case is madefor a specific person as their guy and Iwould subsequent green texting which isalso another firm a key to practice onimage boards specific qualities of thatperson are listed and usually on poll

this results in anti-semitic racistmisogynist activities being seen asvirtues so before I move on to the casestudy I would like to relate these kindof memes triple parenthesis in our guideto what look throughrefers to as panoramas so in isreassembling the socialthat the represents panoramas as thesenotions that that offer totalizing yetmyopic view of collectivity and they

really represent a big picture and sortof an illusion of coherence and completecontrol over a social whole and wellthey should not be confused with thecollectivesunder scrutiny they form importantobjects for research because of theirrole for articulating quote a desire forwholeness and sensuality unquote andbecause they form metaphors for whatbinds groups together and that or makesthese points about you know larger

society and in a very broader contextbut that I would argue when researchingthese meta were anonymous groups thesepanorama are especially relevant becausethey take center stage idea of stableconnections between friends andfollowers like you that up on Facebookor Twitterso memes like triple parenthesis in ourguide does offer a panoramic view whatthey themselves see isn't us or them and

tracing such memes can then result intoin a mapping of the actors ownarticulation of their own totality themetaphor of panorama also appliesbecause it implies the sense of fixityand stability just to give an examplethis image shows the occurrences of postcontaining the triple parenthesis versusa more infamous mean that they here just

as a textual marker you can see thatPepe was kind of event-basedit was most popular during the climax ofthe 2016 US election but then droppedoff quite quickly in contrast to theconsistency of the triple parenthesiswhich implies to the need for a stablegrammar to construct a start anout-groupwell not as consistent as the tip orparentheses the trends of our guide was

also quite stable especially in 2017 andthe first half of thousand 18 as you cansee here it's occurrences on fortuneroll over the years after it wellparalyzed after the also after theclimax of the 16 election so as atraceable object that's an object ofresearch the argh I mean is it's beenless sort of convenient than the type ofparentheses because you can just extractthose inside the parentheses so you

gonna have to rely on othercomputational techniques so what I didhere what this graph shows is the wordsthat appeared close to our guy onfortune Pole over three years and thenevery column shows a specific month andthen the uppermost words are the mostcurrent ones you can see the fuel foodimage at oil a patty use this our guy soyou can explore it in your own leisure

and I won't discuss the whole thing hereright now but I would like to show somesome highlights so firstly showing thestart of the meme and which wordsappeared next to it we can see thatTrump is really consistent also in thelarger graph the yellow color here soeven though it's also quite contestedeven on a forward space a spool he is anextremely central figure then secondly

you can see Michael in a later part ofthis graph popping up and showing italso serves the argon beam is used todiscuss events because in this caseMichael made quite controversialcomments about Africa and then you knowas I said kind of controversial commentsare then seen as virtuous on fortunePole then in a later part of the graphwe can also very clearly see that got

counter-intuitively Robert Mueller thisspecial investigator in the USconnecting the Russia probe is reallyconsistently mentioned as as our guy orsort of look forward as our guy the blueline over here which relates to thequeuing on conspiracy which poses thatMueller was not actually investigatingTrump but the democratic elites whichwas connecting all kinds of crimesaccording to the conspiracy theory well

there's other sort of counterintuitiveour guys you can see for instance Andrewyang popping up here the Democraticcandidate the foreign extremism isundoubtable especially in March 2019 asthe shooter of the Chrysler's massacrewas heavily related to to the Arg I meanand we also see for instance we seePewDiePie which also appears earlier in

the graph pop up as it was mentioned inthe manifesto of the shooterso yeah seeing that his terrorist actreally resonated within this specificnew year of course the meme is not justcommunicated textually as you can seethe earlier it's often the question iser guys of the ask in combination with aspecific image so this graph shows allthe images next to both containing our

guy over time and when color-coding themost frequent occurrences of specificthemes and figures as unsurprisingly youcan see a lot of Nazi references alsoagain a lot of PewDiePie which did seemto resonate with in Fortune poll butalso more counterintuitive people likeGeorge Soros which is usually kind of anenemy of anti-semites and and the

far-right and well assume that viewimplies some sort of consensus if you gointo the actual threats they'reextremely antagonistic and indisagreement so this is counterintuitivea figure seemed mostly to function asprovocations to inside the bit and alsothe arc I mean in general is notnecessarily concerned with any form ofresolution in order to incite the bait anegotiation of what the collective is

about as you would see if you go intothe threats itself so just to closewhether we can actually see some kind ofideological crystallization or aradicalizationthrough a mean like our guy wouldrequire a further further mapping butdespite this I hope they've shown thatthat certain panoramic memes from fairlyvery relevant entry points to mapnetwork of associations and I can theybear very prominent issues even in the

very obscure environments of place likefortune thank you for listening thankyou so and next I'm going to call on onEmily she's going to talk to us abouthow to stand united and divided theright from 4chan to youtube transcodingcontested meme across fringe and

mainstream platforms just a little bitabout Emily she is a junior researcherat the University of Utrecht andAmsterdam'soh I lab collective at the OE lab herresearch focuses on the production andmisinformation in contentious debatesand the dissemination of far-rightpolitical thought across the fringe andmainstream platforms prior toresearching from the NetherlandsInstitute of International Relations she

obtained research fasters in new mediaand digital culture from the Universityof Amsterdam and in MA in history ofpolitical thought in intellectualhistory at the University College Londonthank you so much for for joining usEmily it's it's a your screen now greatthank you very much for thisintroduction Jennifer and also of courseI was also like to extend my thanks forthe organizers and my pleasure inmeeting you all even though in a very

virtual setting all right so I'd like tostart I think by kind of addressing athought that we all have here probablyor most of us have which is that most ofus probably already know this mean justas a matter of fact it's probablyalready considered an old nameI already kind of pass Amy and we mostlyknow it as a kind of a meme thatreferred to a fictional online state or

a nation that kind of demarcateddifferent territories mainly in thecontext of kind of online cultural warsin Kyrgyzstan was supposedly in thisimaginary the state of the territoriesof sort of woke users in opposition tosocial justice warriors and depending onyour version of the meme or your

interpretation of the meme againstidentity politics and identitarianpolitics now the point is that eventhough most of us know theas being having been associated to thiskind of umbrella term and movement wetoday called the old right it actuallyin its kind of complexity and internalcontradictions also included quitecontradictory positions depending on onthe different users that appropriated it

so while it was initiated for instanceby Sargon of Akkad ISM entire identityArian me it was also kind of used bywhite nationalists such as RichardSpencer and in this kind of complexityand this contradiction and incoherencealso very much I think illustrates theprocess of crystallization of apolitical movement online and this is alittle bit how we would like to kind ofretrace its Richard a story of this memehas to kind of also be able to retrace

this incoherent crystallization of allmy movements online now so this is alittle bit the point here is also to beable to capture this incoherence bynamely tracing the history of themeaning through its dissemination overdifferent platforms and in that sensealso getting the sense of what are theoverarching messages of the mean thatusers in all those platforms sharenamely Twitter YouTube and fortune

Joseph kind of the three main platformsaid it was disseminated onto and alsokind of getting the the the platformspecific and user specific meanings thatare not always shared across platformsnow another kind of implicit questionand I think most of us also have is whyshould we even bother actually focusingon this mean it has actually beenappropriated by violent politicalmovements and it has very problematic

aspects most of it actually does andit's also like I said earlier a littlebit old by this I think that speaking toa recent research or the most recentbook that Whitney Phillips and RyanMilner published that I might be whereand I kind of stillcoming to face or consider kind oflooming problematic that we've already

had that when we started this kind ofresearch in 2016 which is that why wouldyou what you even give visibility tothis kind of uglyor problematic online political culturebecause in doing so you would eventuallylegitimize it and give it a kind of areality and I think that over the yearswe have come to think or to to to shiftindeed from just describing problematicculture the contents of problematic

culture to mostly describing theprocesses from which it arises so alsothe sort of structural issue and problemproblems that make it exist in the firstplace and in this case I think we alsolook into Kiki Stan as a reflection of aparticular history so it was a realhistorical mean that reflects mainly onthe way that back in two thousandsixteen and seventeen and eighteen usersreappropriation elements of rightpolitical philosophy and others were

still grappling with it's verysuppositions to the idea of identityparticularly in the North Americanpolitical context now in order toresearch such a decidedly Semin aid andcontradictory kind of mean we usuallyfocus on the kind of research that wasvery much well initiated and somewhatvery much developed here within ourEuler group I saw and staying here and

then you know that are also going tospeak after me work for me and thenbye-bye that kind of research betweenwhat we imply is capturing the frequencywith which a particular mean in the formof award for instance or a query appearappears across platforms and in doing soI think the intentions is mainly to havean have an idea as to how it spreadssometimes kind of in a linear fashion

from point A to point B but when itcomes to more contradictory and sort ofvery veryappropriate and meme like Pakistan thechallenge here is to be able to captureboth sort of universality so Universaldissemination across the platforms witha sort of overarching message that allusers using the meme agree on andpeculiarity so with users what specificusers mean by the meme in specificplaces over time right and by that we I

think by the recommendation or theinitiative of mark tutors export thecity of transcoding by DeRozan quota intheir book mulatto and by thisparticular concept we mean being able tounderstand means as kind of units ofcommunication simultaneous communicationongoing communication between platformsof or what the authors will call meteorsin the understanding that those

platforms are always essentiallycommunicating they're never very much athorough genius right so it means kindof translate this ongoing communicationover time now of course operationalizingthese kind of abstract concepts is it'snot an easy thing to do but the way thatwe tried it and I think that so has anelement of experiment ality there is byquerying the world the word khaki Stanand obtaining serious data from TwitterTwitter YouTube and fortune posts

correspondingly and then in order tocapture the circular meetings that usersgave it or associated to it in everyplatform we use the computationaltechnique word embeddings which consistsin extracting words that aresemantically associated associated tothem another giving words so can youstand in this case and we obtained the25 most closely associated words Takeihey Stan and then finally we kind ofcategorize them into differentnarratives different words kind of sortof coming together into a global

narrative about what case that means youknow make myself clear out here byshowing our visualizations so if weworked with a story size this mean wewould begin I think when most casesalways with fortune Pole and this kindof unfortunate beginning of the meme isactually assuming in four countriesthat hosts in the eyes of analyst on theplatform excessively hosts MiddleEastern immigrants and so it was kind of

an islamaphobe ik slang the speak ofcountries that were populated by suchpopulations just to make sure here everydot is then awards that is semanticallyassociated SCADA Stan and multipleplatforms over time so green here ispredominant in the sense that it'sfortune but then you also have YouTubeand Twitter in blue overtime rights yousee here this kind of language that moreIslamophobic language also developed inthe end mostly on YouTube and Twitter

and after that after developing it assuch it went on actually to be theorizedas as its ultimate idea which was thisonline white at know states where userswould kind of congregateeither affectionately or truly in theform of private islands particularly and

and sort of consolidates their onlinefringe political subculture and theirdesires to stimulate its kind of widefriendly procreation policies and so soin those two instances at least it didhave a chiefly racist and or whitenationalist connotation and it's onlywhen sargon of akkad that the famousyoutuber there was active on twitter atthat time and you picked up on the mean

from fortune but then actuallyimportantly dropped that initialsignificance the initial connotation ofthe name being white nationalist me andjust kept the online admin states ideaand in the the effort there and this washis initial tweet that kind ofkick-started the movement acrossplatforms hereit was very well disseminated across allthe platforms visibly the idea was to

use the mean to troll liberals intobelieving that it was a whitelist mean and the essence of the jokewas to demonstrate the absurdity of thevery idea of identity and itself rightso if you believe yeah yeah that thismeme is a white nationalist movement andidentity then you approve or confirm inthe indeed the very absurdity of thatideaand after our sargans intervention in

the popularization of cross allplatforms kind of broke off as mainmovements to sort of freak agust andfree this fictional country online fromsocial justice warriors and all sorts ofother opponents and then that sense wasalso very much inserted in the culturalwar is in the sense that most platformsthere most users from all platforms verymuch greed and using the meme as a formof opposition to what they perceive asleft-wing liberal political movements or

what they called social justice warriorshere this is very much inserted in dancebut then eventually as external eyeskind of popped in namely from the mediaasking themselves what this mean meantas it began to proliferate online soMSNBC made a piece of this and theSouthern Poverty Law Center also made apiece of it describing it as a whitenationalist far-right mean then indeedthis kind of internal debates kicks off

particularly on on Twitter as to whetherthe mean is or is not an author I meanand so some people will chiefly identifyit as such of course just by the namename making fun of the Central Asiancountries implicitly but others willalso see in its kosygin's original idearight that it's and essentially anti Ididn't very mean and others actuallyrefused to sort of break off the spellof the joke and continue to sort of

invest in the idea of havingexternalized think that the meme isracist so there's this kind ofdeliberation dare going on and all thewhile actually curiously if you look atthe group of Twitter users that tweetsin favor of khaki Stanactually some of them are whitenationalist and I know this is not funnyof course but there's I'm laughingbecause there is an obvious evidencecontradiction there and the many

different appropriations of the nameonline well of course it depends onwhether we define them or how they werepresented at the time but RichardSpencer most most evidently tweeted thethe mean and other people other usershere in orange also retweeted him aswell as Lauren Saarinen and stuff andMominaso there is this kind of absurdcontradiction here and fortune although

well all the wealth means continues topropagate across all these platformsactually expresses favors on users theirexpress favor towards mean being adoptedand kind of propagated even even if itwas in some instances corrupted in thesense of becoming an anti identitaire Imean in their eyes or hat thateventually the normies will haveappropriated the meme and will in thatsense be inadvertently red pills into

becoming white nationalists just by bythe sake of using it rights so withouthaving that having said all of that Ithink what we can conclude here is thatPakistan wasn't it constituted bymultiple oftentimes contradictory ideasthat in themselves are very muchevidence of the often incoherentconstitution of online politicalmovements and to capture the complex

formation of these movements throughmemes then also implies capturing themultiple meanings of the mean and themultiple places it travels to like wetry doing even an experimental form andI think that in this sense I think thisalso speaks to a very definition of ameme to a certain extent that it isitself evidence of multiplicity ofmeanings and multiplicity and presencein various places at the same time sothat was it thank you very much for your

attention I look forward toyour comments later on which I know whatkind of possibly generates many debatesgiven to the controversial aspects ofthis presentation they just so muchEmery I feel like I want to stand in andbe the applause from everyone that'slistening online and next I'd like tointroduce Stine Peters he is going tojoin us and talk about memes as markers

tracing political thought from fortuneto bribe her through mimetic content soStine is a postdoctoral researcher atthe University of Amsterdam in theDepartment of Media Studies in 2018 hecompleted his PhD research on the sharedhistory of Twitter in IRC King's CollegeLondon as part of an ER C fun it's anego media project his current research

interest focuses on platforms andhistories and a media archaeologicalanalysis of Fringe communities on socialmedia platforms within the digitalmethods initiatives he has developed andco-developed multiple research toolsincluding the search engine scraperissue crawler and for cat capture andanalysis toolkit last I'm really reallyexcited to have you please start yourslides Thank You Jennifer and I for one

I'm very happy to be back at King'sCollege even if it's only virtually so Ilove presenting for both of the authorslisted for this paper and which ismyself and also some real acts from thefree university of brussels and some andit's colleague contributed much of thedata work this presentation is based onbut to not make things more complicatedthan they already are I'll be the onepresenting it but it is in the audienceand if there are any questions about thedata that we based is this presentation

you'll be able to answer thoseafterwards so our contribution here isprimarily primarily empirical in ourresearch we should seek to verify ratherthan extreme problematic memesbut originating the French Knightsfortune in this case which you've seensome examples of and whether they theymove from from there to a moremainstream sites which in this casewould be Breitbart news so here we workwith the idea of memes as markers and

what that means is that the memes areset of memes can indicate a particularpolitical position or a particulardiscourse of course that is notional initself can be debated which emily hasjust done but will what get it to deathso what I want to talk about here is theresearch that we've done to trace thespread of extreme IDs for fortune -Breitbart so Breitbart is a right-wingnews website in the United States that

became quite popular especially aroundthe presidential elections in 2016 whichfamously saw Donald Trump had electorsso Breitbart has existed since the early2000s actually but it became especiallyfamous during the election campaign andactually it's had editor at the timeSteve Barron joined Donald Trump's staffjust before he got elected so Breitbartis a heavily proton website obviouslyand generally it can also be

characterized as nationalistanti-immigrant strongly conservative andalso skeptical of things that climatechange so in general you could say thatit is in the same corner as fortune I'mdo logically speaking but it's importantto note that it is far less extreme thanfortune it is still somewhat amainstream news website as opposed tofor sandwiches on the fringe and there'smostly not supported explicitly racistracist points of view though the wordsmostly is important there andimportantly it has a very broad audience

and or at least did so during thatelection campaign so this is a graphfrom a famous cloth by now from work bya yokai banker and others who made ananalysis of the right-wing mediaecosystem during the during the electioncampaign in 2016 and obviously Breitbarthas a very big role here in thepolitical media ecosystemand in his analysis banker and

characterized by part as a translatorand rich that helped to legitimate andpopularize extreme views on topics suchas immigration and also anti-muslimsentimentsso in summary Breitbart is arriving newswebsites and it but it is not as extrememisfortune and as a far broader audiencewhich then allows us to function a sortof a bridge between the fringe and themore mainstream part of the mediaecosystem now there has been researchpart by parts and the right-wing and its

place in the ecosystem burner that'smostly focused on the articles publishedby decides which of course makes sensebecause after all the site'seditorial content is what most peoplewill see but Breitbart also has veryactive comment section as you can seehighlighted on the screenshots andactually that part of the side which isbelow the falls as they say and we canget generate very large comment threadsand we've seen some that we each up to30,000 comments in some cases and in

many cases those common threads actuallyhave a very noose relation to thearticle and so instead people used totalk about basically anything politicalso in some ways the break our commentsection has become a forum much likeFortune so of course it's very differentin other ways but our goal here was tosee how are these from from 4chanresonate in in this part of my parts thecomment section and what we are lookingfor there is our phrasal memes so what

means you often think of primarilyvisual content but in some casestext actually has very similar magneticcharacteristics sophrasal memes then our particular wordsor phrases that have been created orappropriated in this case unfortunateand they behave much like a meme so thattheir meaning shifts they sometimes weappropriate parts of other memes orpartial other phrasal means in this caseand they spawned variations endlessly

versity so an example actually is CACwhich of course came up in the previouspresentation and then the board has hada variety of meanings and a wholeconstellation of related memes that hasbeen discussedso in that sense we can view thisphrasal mediums that are oftenimplicitly or explicitly related to eachother by meaning or just by the way theylook we can view them as a constellationor a complex of memes or mean blacks sothat will be a set of interrelated memes

that together can be seen asrepresenting some sort of a brotherpolitical theory political ideology orparticular kind of discourse so thequestion then is can we find evidence ofthese meme flexes that originateunfortune and can be be set toencapsulate fortunes political attitudescan we find evidence of those crossingover to the Breitbart comment sectionand if so that would be empiricalevidence of bright parts indeed fillingthat role as a bridge platform and also

complete picture of drivers role in theright-wing media ecosystem because evenif this often quite explicit slang isfunicular to these these phrasal memesdo not occur in the right partseditorial content because that still hassome journalistic integrity and theywould not by itself use for chantsvernacular and you could find it maybein the Czar's comment section and thenthat would be a more explicit connectionwith the extreme fringe of mediaecosystem and evidence that it does take

IDs and funicular from there so we havetwo datasets here one for fourteen andone for bright parts and we focus hereon Fortune's both form and which is asdiscussed the place where a politicaldiscussion happens so for both fortuneand write part we scraped commentsbetween 1 June 2015 1 June 2018 justroughly three yearscentered around the 2016 US elections tocapture their period of time in which in

which the at least Breitbart was themost prominent and we are interestedhere in the text content of the posthere because that is where the phrasalmemes will be found so we're notinterested in the authors or themetadata just at the text of the postsand then what we are looking for inthose posts is evidence of travelingtokens so traveling Tobin's would betokens which means wespecifiy so the discrete building blocksof the text you would be looking for

evidence of those tokens traveling fromfortune to to Breitbart and what that inpractice looks like is that we would belooking for tokens that occur first onlyon fortune and then later they would beoccurring also in bright parts and thenthat would be suggestive of the tokenactually traveling from fortitude bypart so being or originating there andthen being picked up in another platformof course you would need to do more work

to really be able to see that itoriginates in fortune and we'll get tothat but this is the first step of thatkind of analysis so there's what we didfor a burden for data sets and you coulddone for each token color code themonths to see its occurrence pattern soyou can in this case you can see foreach month in which data sets the tokenoccurs and if you condense this kind ofoverview into one line of data per token

and then turn it on its side and then dothat for all tokens together you get agraph of the language between both ofthese data sets and how it overlaps andin time it overlaps or doesn't sothere's one line here horizontally foreach token and from top to bottom we gofrom the beginning of our data sets tothe end and one thing we can observehere is that in the middle there's a lotof tokens that actually occur in bothdata sets all the time which makes sense

because both of these are Englishlanguage websites and there's a lot ofcommon language that will be used toboth this just normal everyday Englishand then there's also a portion of thedata that occurs on one platform onlyand what you can immediately see thereis the 4chan is far more prominent inthat regard from bright parts so inother words 410 use a lot of languagethat is unique to 4chan compared tobright part that doesn't use a lot oflanguage unique to bright part but what

we're really interested in here is thelanguage that is first seen on oneplatform and then later on another thatis contained within these parts of thegraphso here we can see that from thosetravelling tokens far more startlingfortune than start on dry parts so stillwith the caveat that become know justfrom this if the language readingoriginates in 4chan we can't say thatmercy travels from fortune to brightparts in so far as it travels between usor at least it occurs on fortune before

it's in mumbai parts most of the time sothis is a very quantity few of the datathe brought out of you but we need tomake a further quality step to make thisactually useful because we need to knowwhat kind of tokens are travelingbetween the platforms and where thiswood is really originated a fortunebecause the other option is that fortuneis simply an early adopter and actuallyall of this originates elsewhere on athird platform that we are not studyinghere and in that case we will be lookingin the wrong place basically so this is

where we actually look at a subset oftraveling tokens near the sample oflanguage that we found to first occurfrom fortune and then later on brightparts so this is very small sample ofcourse and the actual data set is farlarger but it is a relativelyrepresentative sample of what we foundand then what we can see is that amongthese words are two broad categoriesfirst we have what information sign iscalled named entities so these arethings that you can refer to with aproper name so there will be a person or

a city or country you may remember fromSaul's presentation just now we also usethose in his research so these areprobably not original to hide a fortuneor bright part because they're simplynews topics that happen to be discussedon fortune before they were discussedelsewhere and that is actually quiteuseful if you want to see what topicsboth platforms are talking about andwhether there is overlap or whethertopics unique to one or the other but wecan't say anything about thingstraveling from one to another question

justicehowever there is another category oftokens prominently in the dataset andthat is the more interesting one andthese are the actual the phrasal memesthat I mentioned earlier so these arethe vernacular neologisms or thelanguage actually coined by fortune sobased on other research that we've donewith others have done and also justclose reading of these data sets and wecan say that these are phrases that dooriginate on fortune and then based onthis analysis we can say that after they

originated on fortune there was at somepoint also used some bright parts so whyis it interesting well if you look atthe kind of language as processing forit's mostly these these phrasal memes sovariations on words it's all newvariations that are related to eachother implicitly explicitly andimportantly there are always virtuallyalways political and there are virtuallyalways Britany in particular way andoften unambiguously so so a lot of thesethese words you wouldn't use thesephrases ignorant of their office

offensive meaning and I don't have thetime to go into these particular wordseither well it's nothing actually neededeither because on the whole you can someof these are very self-explanatory andyou can see that they representedconservative racist transphobicxenophobic politics and then if you takethese as a meme flex as a set of memesthat are interrelated and representativeof a particular discourse they'retraveling to another platform suggestthat these politics are also finding

purchase elsewhere in this case inbright part and since 4chan Paul isknown as a particularly extreme spaceand that could be cause for concern asit would mean that these politics itsextreme politics are no longer taboo inmore mainstream spaces either so that isour modest contribution to this panel Iam an empirical investigation of thatinfluences threat of fortunes discourseand indeed seems to be confirmed by thedata that it crosses over to pry barsand notably that crossing over mostly

shows in the comments section ofprogress news rather than in itseditorial contents where it is stillabsent mostly so mething what freedomand this research also should yetsuggest that the method oflooking for these travelling tokensbetween corporate and then using similareconomy that we used with a category ofphrasal memes and category of otherthings you find in our cases namedentities and that may serve as a way to

study the diffusion of meme plexus ofmemes in general of discourse in generaland also as a way to monitor theinfluencer role of extreme Internetplatforms and especially their role in awrite or online media ecosystem this isongoing research for us and but canmaybe serve as a blueprint for similarresearch and other phrasal means or inother platforms and then it will be away to map this diffusion of content andthought from one platform to another inmore detail that's what I'll leave youwith for now thank you for yourattention and looking forward to any

questions that you may have thank youthank you so much fantastic conversationwe're going to move now to our finalpanelists before we have questions todayand that is dr. Daniel that the zoosorry if I'm mispronouncing your name ifhe is a lecturer at the Department ofMedia Studies at the University ofAmsterdam and a member of the oh I lab

his current research focuses on thepolitics and aesthetics of onlinesubcultures and he is going to addressus on mining the visual encyclopedia ofdramatic dramatical Explorer so ThankYou Daniel please go aheadokay thank you very much for thisintroduction so in this presentation Iwill talk about encyclopedia dramatica

as an index of chain culture and how tostudy it and first of all I want toexpress my thanks to those whocollaborated on this project mainly ameal then text from the digital methodsinitiative Mikaela Maori from thedensity design lab from Milan as well asthe previous speaker studying Bader's sofirst I'll introduce the IDI and

contextualize its role in early memeculture you know back when memes werestill cool as there's a kind ofpostmodern nostalgic impulse to memeculture which ironic which is ironic oreven strangely dialectical given memecultures fetishistic embrace of the newthen secondly I will showcase the onlineinterfaces and visualizations to explore

this rich repository of subculturalnomadic content that came out of the DMIdigital methods initiative summer schoolabout two years agotheall right so you could see encyclopediadramatica as a kind of parody or mockepic of wikipedia and a mock epic is

defined as the form of satire thatadapts elevated heroic style of theclassical epic poem to a trivialsubjects and trivial indeed it ishowever browsing through ideas as anexploration of Jang culture in the formof an encyclopedia but a strange one atthatnamely one steeped in the ambiguities ofPoe's law that makes it impossible toinfer true beliefs or attitudes

however independent of this inability toestablish belief it's a fact that's ascould be expected in this panel there'sa lot of problematic contents racistanti-semitic misogynistic homophobicviolence and just generally disgustinghere I have a quote from Edie's aboutpage which shows that it constitutes

itself out of an antagonisticrelationship to Wikipedia as thehegemonic reference point within wikiland it says the IDI is in famous sitethat's been made by a-holes who gotkicked out of editing at Wikipedia sothey made her own wiki where standardsof good taste common decency and theavoidance of not-safe-for-work picturesdo not existthey made pages for about a gazillionpeople who did him unfit to live

including myselfso they are about three main domains towhich to Edie could be said to belongfirst it's part of a universal so calledsub cultural heritage sites like KnowYour Meme urban dictionary or TV tropeshowever a difference differs from thesesites and that is not really a genuineattempt to catalog meme culture and acts

more as an extension of the thematicpractices themselves in other words isit's fully rooted in the vernacular ofthe culture and the participantsthemselves secondly it belongs to acountercultural universe of so-calledold PDAs and you could imagine a kind ofspectrum here between the more lousytrolling culture and straight outs white

supremacist fascist sites like metapedia where the satirical ones are theones like encyclopedia and rational wikiagain this doesn't really make much ofthe content of the sites lessproblematic and thirdly you could saythatedie belongs to a very broad realm of

so-called weird internet culture such asa wiki for fur furry fandom listed belowhereso in more historical terms you couldsay that Eadie'scan be defined as part of North Americanchant culture which has its roots in theAmerican forum Something Awful as wellas Japanese image world culture which

together culminate in fortune and givenin fortunes ephemerality as suggested bythe previous presentations and securedperiod rheumatica while added it all thetime offers some more persistent formsof fortunes specific cultural repertoireso as such I think that mmm the IDI kind

of offers a unique slice or database ofthe deep vernacular webs mass culturefrom about 2004 onward and this makes ita really interesting object of study forthose trying to understand the socialnorms and political tendencies that inhere in these kinds of radical onlinesubcultures so moving from low Katz toNazi buffets and this brings me to how

we can study the IDI as a wiki usingdigital methods so first we made a copyof the whole site and archive in orderto inspect its different elements suchas the internal link structure betweentheir wiki entries and the categoriesthat they are stored under we alsolooked at so you're looking at an

interactive online interface where youcan basically browse the IDI universe soyou could select a category like trollswhich contains thousands of entries andfor example one of the entries would beScientology and if you're interested infollowing that link down the rabbit holeyou could select the Scientology pageand you would see the differentcategories that are associated with it

besides the one of trolls and whatinterests what's interesting here isthat for example truth is a categoryassociated with Scientology but it showsthat the satirical band of the platformreally extends to the use of thewikimedia system itself including theones of categoriesso the label of truth for Scientologymust be seen as an ironic wing to what

Ananse know namely that Scientology ismainly so another visualizationthat we did was looking at associatedpage clusters which allows for certaincommon themes like nerd or hackerculture to emergeand we also looked at a peculiar featureof Wikimedia systems and namely that

pages can be redirected to do each otheras well as showing the internal links soin this case we have the entry ofInternet tough-guy and a couple of otherentries which are redirected to thatpage and that's also used often in ahumorous kind of lousy trolling likemanner so finally we arrived at the

visual analysis which is of courseimportant given the context of thisconference so we did a visual analysisof the top 5,000 most used images on edyusing Google's cloud vision API so whatyou see here is an enormous network ofimages clustered around keywords thatthe division API extracted from them andhow this works is that you input a set

of images and it can extract informationabout the physical properties theobjects that it recognizes in the imagebut what we specifically looked at wasso-called what's called web entities andwhat it does is it looks at where theimage appears on the internet and itlooks for contextual information aboutabout the image so rather than physicalproperties like yours you're looking at

a head and it has a nose etc or it'sit's a logo you can interpret imagesmore as we would interpreted them namelyas cultural objects so for example youwould see the the meme as a label thatit attaches so what is online interfaceallows you to do is select the key wordsthat are extracted from the images andsee all the associated images around

them and conversely if you click on animage you can see all theassociated labels that it predicts theimage will be about and this is a reallyintuitive snowball method of what youcould call serendipitous research so inthis case of the meme label you wouldsee certain anti-semitic memes like the

happy happy merchant meme as well asvarious Nazi peppe'sbut you also see let's say older layersof meme culture like epic fail guy whichprovided the starting point for theanonymous and the Guy Fawkes mask soonce again if you zoom on one of theimages you can click on it and see thelabels that Google vision API attaches

to it so the labels are the morephysical properties that it in first andbelow are the more semantic elementslike 4chan rage comic or mefinally and this is more for futureresearch we're looking to look at theEdit revision history that each page in

the encyclopedia dramatica has so wecould in a way like the archive theinternet archives wayback machine wecould reconstruct how pages develop asthey are being revised by differenteditors and this potentially allows usto answer the question that's relevantto this panel and namely does Edie'srevision history confirm or deny theidea that Chang culture has made a

reactionary return in recent years so itreally would allow us to reconstruct thedirection of this part of meme cultureso that concludes my my presentationthank you for listening thank you somuch for that final presentation Danieland thank you to all of our panelistsfor their fantastic for their fantastictalks now it's my job to try to

summarize some of the questions thathave been coming through so I'm going todo my best but please please bear withme as there there are many of them Ithink maybe it's it's good to start witha question that really references all ofthe talks that we've just heard I'mgoing to read out a Samira's questionbecause I think that there are a numberof different people who have askedsimilarly and he says thank you for a

great conference as I've just wonderedhow all the speaker's datasets assetsinside meme 2.0 so that are referring toa sort of transformation within withinmean culture and I should say there'sother questions that are there askingyou know is this something that isactually new so in the sense that theyhave moved away from the firstgeneration of means very finite list ofmemes into a second generation anythingthat can be indoes this opening out allow the space

for these memes to exist and can weblame this opening out from the wave ofall right memes which have transcended4chanso perhaps based on all of your talksand perspectives the four of you couldor five of you could start to addressthat and I'll just say as an aside theother questions that have come that anumber of people residence they might

want to kind of introduce to speak moredirectly to your methods and the waythat you were approaching thesequestions in your papersanyone like to start us off so I thinkis the question is sort of thinking

about what is what is what is what isnew within this within this newreactionary environment and how do wehow do we conceptualize this in terms ofare they transcending fortune I thinkrelated to my presentation I think love

is not new so in my case memes as sortof collective markers and also ways toresearch online cultures it's notnecessarily new but I think with theadded political gravity of recent yearsI would say it does sort of gain a moresense of urgency in many ways especiallythe asked means you know circulate andpropagate through neat trace where then

in a web they also appear as for theface this ecological crisis what somepeople would say requires a lot ofentangling I think indeed in this sensememes can be prime objects to tacklesuch such questions and urgencies so myguess that that's a change that theurgencymaybe I can jump also jump onto this so

for our paper I think means our I meanobviously it's based on data from a fewyears ago so in that sense they're notnew and I take the point of the I wantto ask the question that means defaultin that of course there are differenttypes of means now the medium changes aswe go from the past to the future but Ithink in our case and choice for text

means is because that's what what worksfor the data sets that we have soprivate comments are primarily text soyou would be looking for text forchanneis but textual and visual in thiscase the textual part was the one wecould that overlaps and method logicallywith a prybar so that's what we went forbut if you were to look at differentplatform you would need to do differentthings so for example if you would belooking at tic toc it would be analyzingthe videos and maybe tracing the trends

as they call them in cig talk insteadand you would be looking at the musicthat is copied from video to video andbe prepared in different ways so I thinkit's not so much I'm a choice for aparticular kind of meme as the ones whomean but the choice for a particularkind of beam as fitting the research forthat particular platform and again forus it was text in this case but indifferent case it could be somethingelse and maybe they'll also address the

other question the Jennifer and put tous about the methods that could maybeserve as the clarification of why wewent with this particular method in thiscase I think that so I have to admittoday I'm not sure I understood thequestion very well but I'm gonna give ita try I think that so in in thesomeone's comments that we have movedaway from then in study of meme 1.0 2.0

and 2.0 be that the mean could be prettymuch anything and everything I thinkthat thethat there is also the idea that perhapswe have moved from a study of memes askind of units that deserve kind of focusand study in their own selves and alsoas for their nature which i think isjust so hard to to capture and tocontain since it all seems to change so

much so a study of memes as anindication that platforms kind of speakto each other right so they exchange alot of information a lot of informationis exchanged from one planet to anotherand users communicate to another alsocross plasma and so on it's anindication of kind of much more sort ofmacro communication and sort of a vesselthrough which ideas around to given youknow general conversation in the case of

my presentation about you know politicalmovements around new rights isdisseminated if it makes sense so it'sit's a bit more like a cartographicstudy of I mean position you mean withina much broader field of communication

great and I will put another question tothe group so this is thinking thinkingabout how how we establish a meanliteracy so given given that that thatthat we that you're largely looking atthe anonymous quality of these fringe

communities how you know how do weunderstand the the mimetic vernacularpatterns that get legitimated and valorand validated on the platforms based onon your research perspectivesthis is from Juliajust to clarify how how means though

certain wreckers get legitimate it onplatforms yes that's right how thevernacular patterns are legitimatedlegitimated and validated and and howhow you start to think about this andestablish a sort of mean literacyand some of the challenges because ofthe not anonymous nature

I feel that Saul would have a lot to sayabout this I'm not sure it's alreadyunderstand the question Hydra that's interms sorryhungry I'll read it entirely if you wantmajority me math validation of aspecific I think that I think thequestion is try to understand how thegrammar how you read the grammar how itcomes together so Julia Julia writes

I would method logically I would like toknow how you isolated memes from nonmimetic content then a curiosity for allof you given the anonymous quality ofthese fringe web communities how do youthink mean literacy is established putdifferentlyhow are the mimetic vernacular patternsyou have investigated legitimated andvalidated on such platforms welcomedeathly speak the first point so as

inherently connected connected objects Ithink well you you necessarily have tostart somewhere so in my case with mypresentation this was actually this ourguy meme was actually something Isnowball into through doing morecomputational linguistic work to howwords the context of the work Trumpchanged on 4chan and then alreadythrough such techniques you you get a

set of connections to various means andthen I think you have to have some kindof starting points right I think that'swhat I started to argue that that Iformed kind of create these especiallypiece of what I said porn Arabic meansfrom great entry points through which toidentify issues or or contextual changesand what I really presented here wassort of I guess a map the rich to start

this really and a sense of powerisolated this yeah I need this I thinkgoes back to what what Stein was sayingthat this is also largely methodologicalchoices and ideally you'd you'd not allthe variations of a specific meme oroath relations which is unfortunateimpossible so I for instance I did useor merge all the various ways how to

type our guy and also typos into oneword so to account for its variousrelations to at least sort of throwquite a wide net for it but you have toto deal with with limits eventually Icould jump in here yes go ahead markokay I think I thought that was a very

interesting question a very richquestion as well and I had been lookingat it and as the previous part of thatquestion actually asked for kind of atheory of memes across the variouspresentations I think that's also aninteresting part of that question I inthe in the in my introductory remarks Itried to make the point that the theconcept of memes is somewhat limited interms of the approach that I sort of

would see running through thesepresentations in that it doesn't provideand a capacity to really deal with theaffordances of these platforms orwebsites it's not a concept that is wellsuited to that and so we have to come upwith some sort of alternative metaphorsor concepts to be able to speak to this

kind of the the way that this researchis being conducted which is more like interms of the relations around theseobjects for example through that thereare Co words also the ways in which theyare being used in particular in relationto the affordances of the platforms forexample the fact thatthat unfortune it is anonymous that is

very fast-moving and so forthand so I think that the didn't thesepresentations didn't necessarily getinto that theoretical framework but Ithink that ideas that are more usefulfor us around that then the meme mightthey could kind of draw a lineage thatwould go throughI think the tour was mentioned Deleuzewas mentioned and all the way back toGabrielle tarde and the idea ofimitation imitated objects and the way

that they kind of extend and connectvarious sort of assemblages that I thinkis what these presentations have incommon in terms of like a theory of thememe and so I wanted to add thatcontribution in response to Julia'squestionmaybe a remark about so I don't know if

just was the original question orwhether it was the summary but Jenniferdid but there was a question about thegrammar of memes and I have I don't knowif this was your attention but it got methinking about whether there is a way toformalize the mean whether you can breakit up into its components and then maybelook for the presence of thesecomponents and in that way you couldmaybe find memes in the data setcomputationally and maybe some of you

got the impression that that's what weare doing because we are employingcomputational methods but unfortunatelythat is kind of hard because I don'tthink it is possible to break a meme ascertain to different components ofcourse there are theories of memes thatthat identify different characteristicslike like evenly more shipments work butit is really hard to formalize that insuch a way that you could point your

computer at a data set and say hey findeverything that has this particular formand then return me all the means so ourapproach mostly is to to start with adata set of course and then do a mixtureof computational methods and maybepattern matching but there's also veryimportant qualitative part where we lookat the data and then find patterns andin our case we were looking for textthat has these mimetic magneticcharacteristics of changes meaning being

remixed into different kinds of wordsthat still are somewhat similar and thatis a very important step but it's thequalitative step mostly so we areinformed by existing research by by memetheory that exists but as Mark said butit's not always useful if you want towork with novel datasets but there'salso a matter of I would say domainexpertise we're spending time especiallyin deeply funicular spaces such as 4chan

and you would need to to know how theytalk about things to understand what isand what isn't a meme so that is part ofthe part of the work nowith subculture works what they findimportant how they converse and thenwith that domain expertise and the helpof some computational methods andspending just time reading through theposts and you can identify in our casetext protocol so the images or evensound that remixes or real bro creates

particular parts of the discourse thathave been established so again maybemore methodological answer to thatquestion but hopefully that clarifies atthe basethank you the next the next question isis based on a few different commentsthat were that that emerged when whenall of you were speaking and this thishas to do with the the affordances of ofthe message boards and a lot of peoplewould like your thoughts on you know do

these automatically lend themselves toright-wing politics or is are there moreradical possibilities and within thatyou know are there lessons there for forthe left and then it just as an asidebecause I'm throwing a bunch ofquestions together what is the role ofhumor as well if anyone wants to talkand speak to that yeah I kind of think I

can talk with this so yeah we we mostlywe most of presentations here deal withfortune all the politics board offortune which which is whatunambiguously far rights of course thereare also other boards there's was evenlike a left-wing board on HN which isnow eight but yeah i think i think

anonymity might sort of have thatreputation nowadays but i think a lot ofits you know only a few years ago DanaBoyd promoted that anonymity wasactually a virtue and especially in incontrast with sort of the real namepolicies off off Facebook I think thereis sort of a lot of cultural politicalpotential there and I think with spacesthat do also allow you to operate with

either multiple counts or pseudonymsreddit or tumblr I think you know thatit there is some kind of beauty in a wayof identity play there and alsosometimes result resulting in moreprogressive movements or discoursesespecially on tumblr and someof Reddit it's an interesting questionso I don't think another image boards

affordances necessarily promoteextremists of far-right views but thereis something in the ephemeral and ananonymous quality where you invitesaying the unsaid right so to transgressboundaries in some sense I think youwill necessary have to deal with withwith extremism in that way yeah I thinkthat the connection between far-right

politics and the use of memes and humoris interesting because I think at leastit if we positioned reposition ourselvesand sort of the heat of the moment ofthe cultural Wars of thousand 16 and 17I think that's the big central you knowelements there and auntie's debates whois I think table taboo in great partswhere it's a a feeling of taboo aroundissues that people felt for themselves

they couldn't really speak freely aboutaround you know migration identities andyou name it and I think that the use ofmemes was in that sense for people whohave wanted to speak freely aboutestablished and actually just just to goback quickly I think there are lots ofparticipants from Brazil in this commentsection here and I think that alsospeaks tremendously to to the issues in

Brazil there especially having to do ofthe military dictatorship right so beingable to say things that you were notallowed to say before or for which youwill generate scandals if you do saysomething about that and the use ofmuseums is important in that it kind ofsort of plays or instrumentalized is thetaboo to to its favor also so humor andirony there is instrumental in forinstance disassociating your sense ofyourself right from your opinion or your

speech because if you make an ironicjoke someone will never be able toattribute it to your own responsibilityright into your own opinionso you can say the crazy source a spacewhere you can finally kind of you knowsay whatever right and yeah I think thatthere's there's there's somethingprofound problematic in that but it alsoshows how there's something alsoaltogether very problematic in in the

state of dialog right about these keyissues of several democracies around theworld to to jump in the Tysons maybeI'll that one quick comment it this iskind of seems to me like why can't whycan't the left mean question which wehear from time to time and I think thatpart of the answer has to do with the

kind of structural inbuilt populationthat makes up deep vernacular webculture it's certainly not inherent inthe affordances of anonymous web formsmoreover there has been since thisexplosion of reactionary in culturesomething of a push back there's

certainly a plenty of non far-rightmemes and me Lea's in which peopleproduce them for example Santa Claus isa meme a left-wing meme and gayspace-age communism so there's therecertainly lots of those that haveemerged in a kind of a push back as wellthere I thought that that would add mytwo cents on that point

and responding to this this question inmy research I also felt that there is astrange paradox at the heart of chenculture let's say because many of theearly practices of fortune were allabout you know identity play so Imentioned strange forms of metamorphosissexuality and dye and all that stuff and

it seems so contrasted to the kind ofdesire for purity and roots and identitythat seems to be at the heart of of thealright so in a strange way it isreactionary in the sense that it maybealso reacts to this more globalpostmodern aspect of jiang culture andthat it's the kind of reaction formation

against while at the same time comingfrom this same space and and certain andand appropriating a lot of its itstransgressive tactics so but i i wouldsay that it's important to maintain thisparadox or this distinction and notcollapse it as some scholars like engineon a go and whitney phillips tended tendto to do now so so basically salvage the

power of humor and and identity play forfour different ends thank youi'm just going to try to get a few ofthe slightly more specific questions forfour speakers so I always start withEmily because dimension Brazil and it'strue that many of Brazilians who are onthe call here is from one of them and

they right here in Brazil the rightappropriated the ideas and aesthetics ofkekaa stand and the alt-right in generalwell I haven't been researching this itseems to me that since Boston Araselection this rhetoric has declined asbecome more explicitly fascist I thinkthis might be due to them migrating intomore private spaces like whatsapp groupshave you noticed anything similar inyour study of Kingston so there's a bitof a disclaimer because they already

answered that question on the commentbut I think it's also interesting todistribute this question amongst otherpanelists and I by the way nice to seeyou again I think that the idea thatperhaps language in the Brazilian publicspace has radicalized I think inconjunction also to the possibleradicalization depending on how youdefine it of American and Europeanonline spaces like Whitney Phillips and

Ryan Milner also note in their latestbook as is possible I think particularlyin private spaces and not least becausea lot of users in Brazil use what's upbut also because this kind of safe itcreates a kind of safe space of coursefor liberalizing language without havingto be corrected it corrected you knowmorally corrected on the front of whatthey would consider opponents but Ithink that the that perhaps the danger

in that depending how you would see itis at least in my impression thatlanguage has become much more mainstreamso for instance the case of pro militarydictatorship language it doesn't seem tome at least I don't know what the othercommenters feel about this that there ismuch of a taboo about declaring yoursupport of the you know the militaryregime online and I think in that sensethe safe space could have also moved

from a small private community type froma much larger space itself right soperhaps in that since the Overton Windowhas become bigger right has shifted yeahthat's that's my impressionand also I think to note that somethingvery particularly interesting that I

wanted to also mention it andpresentation before lack of time itdidn't it's very interesting to see thatwell there is a there are a lot ofexchanges between American and Europeanfor a right culture and the American fora right political culture being a kindof model to the Brazilian one I thinkthe key issue is between these differentmovements are quite radically differentso the key issue of race and identitybeing the case in American foreignpolitical culture is quite particularly

and different or a historicallydifferent at least in Brazilso it's interesting how you know thereare some things that there's also somesome very unique exchange they're allright for very very very differentcultures it's um thank you very muchI will ask another specific questionthis one is for for Sal we have a

question wanting you to just expand alittle bit on your application of thetour's panorama means specificallythinking about the comment you made withrespect to stability yeah thanks for thequestionI think yeah you could go a lot of wayswe already mentioned Jameson's cognitivemapping I chose or I find the panorama

from the sewer very inspiringalso because of it's sort ofmethodological implications so thetourist sector network theory as beingcoupled or inspired these two methods alots of tracing my data repurposing thatfor decisionso you're mute

hear me now yes yes so as you hear myfirst part or do you have to argue I'lljust start over yeah so just to be shortthat brief then the Bonerama for me isinteresting for its its implication ofthe face is totalizing ideas but theyalso that have that is explicitassociations to the different notions or

actors in that sense so methodologicalii i think it's a very sort ofoperationalizing apportionable term interms of the stability yeah I think Ithink I like that because inherent tomemes is this notion that they transformand if they change in the play they havedifferent meanings in different contextsso I think sort of thinking of with yourstability of this grammar doesn't that a

meme offers I'm also kind of allows tothink more energetically about memes andnot not just see them as theseever-changing things because as we've asMark and I have seen in this paper wedid about those triple parentheses forinstance it it it's really concept inits frequency but also what is usedinside it so yeah that that panoramicmaterial Sensibility I think really

speaks to those kinds of of memes I'mnot even sure if you could actually callthem memes at that point anymore butthat's I think another discussion to behadthank youum and on another specific question wehave as for first time so how effectiveis the seniority of users on theplatforms which is spread of the you

could just speak a little bit more aboutthat sorry I think there was adisruption in someone's connection Ithink you were gated yes sorryeffective is an important is theseniority of the users on the platformplatforms in relationship to how thewords are spread it's asking about theseniority of the users yeah that was one

of the questions then we passed it Ididn't know so is it something that'srelevant is it something that isrelevant is that seniority as in SE andio r yeah yeah maybe there's somethingbut generational debates I would seeokay yeah boomers yeah that's definitely

an interesting question in that sensebecause there is this one one way to seewhat we were seeing is that these peopleon Breitbart they're they don'tunderstand internet culture becausethey're also and so they're using thesethese memes or these these words andthese phrases without reallyunderstanding them or being maybe a bitnaive in how they're they'reappropriating them and I think that that

could definitely be the case at somepoint because of course as something istranscoded from 4chan to Breitbart itloses some of its new ones and if it hasthat and where something may have ameaning unfortunate SSC's as some depthto itif you just see the words on Breitbartthen maybe some of that death is lostand especially if you're not familiar atall with like internet soft culture so

you could say that that makes thesepeople in Breitbart if we assume thatthey're older than average maybe which Ithink we can assume I think there hasbeen people have written about thedemographics of Breitbart now you couldsay well maybe good more susceptible tothis mean because I just don'tunderstand underneath and they'readoptingwithout properly grasping what theyactually mean however I would counterthat with by saying that a lot of these

these words and these phrases and alsothese images in as far as they are usingthose very unambiguously problematic Ithink is the way to summarize them soit's variations on existing racial slursit's I'm just looking at my presentationto see what when I showed in there andyeah it's it's variations on racialslurs it's people's names but then

written wrongly I mean that is always away to be negative about people and it'sappropriations of words that are notjust racial slurs but just insults andthen combining them with I don't knowliberals so there's no really no way tomistake these from some kind of benignword that is just fun to say it's veryunambiguously insulting and it's veryunambiguous because it's subtext so I

would say that the ad has definitely adifference in the demographics of theseplatforms and I may amplify the loss ofmeaning as things travel between thembut on the other hand the things thatthey are appropriating are not reallyhard to mistake so in that sense it'salso limited to the influence of the agetastic thank you um I think we arealmost at the end of our time there'stwo minutes left maybe what for for one

last question this one is from fromYasmine and this really open to to thewhole panel so we can bring everyoneback together and and she also isinterested in this question of humourand means but actually from the otherperspectives so she wants to know if ifyou think that there's actually been anincrease in in non humorous means and ifthis is something that is becomingimportant to political conversation it's

a very interesting question well I wouldsay definitely this least sort ofconspiracies as memes so kind ofconspiracy theories without theory asyour admin Rosenblum also called it ingreat book they wrote I think you knowsomething like just so that we recentlywitness like Obama Gates as certain notnecessarily I'm not a joke that's morejust a term propagating online that yeah

as in a way more magnetic qualities thanit has that of a conspiracy theory Ithink that's quite interesting anddevelopment of the of the latest yearswhat's your if you couldn't have theincrease of that and I think it's a finedistinction as well that's the pops tomy mind I'm not sure if the rest it alsocan add to thismaybe I'll jump in the I think all of

the memes in the presentations thatwe've seen are not sort of funny they'rebetter described as conspiracy theoriesor what as Jameson called them forpersons conspiracy theories theirattempts to kind of make sense of theposition that people a kind of a minorposition which is a very reactionaryposition as it turns out but they'rethey're the culture that they merge from

is full of humor but many of thesethings are and and in some cases they'reframed as as jokes but they many of theexamples that we've seen are perceivedas being extremely serious and so Ithink that indeed they have they theyspread like memes they they kind of arecirculated alongside memes and in the inthe milliliters of memes maybe with thesimilar grammars but they are indeed

connected to serious political politicalissues and dangerous in some casepolitical issues as I think thesepresentations have touched ongreat thank you and I think that takesus to the end of the session everyoneplease join me in thanking our wonderfulpanel and if you stay tuned we have oursecond and and our next panel is on the

politics of means and we'll be startingshortly with Paulo shubroto who will bechairing it thank you thank you verymuch Jennifer thank youwe can start straightaway think hieveryone thanks very much Jen for

cheering that very interesting panel andthanks to mark Daniel Steinso Emily for their very interestingpresentationsthanks very much also to our virtuallisteners and attendants we had over1000 registrations and there are severalhundred people online at the moment isreally great to see all this interestfor this topic and for the research thatis being conducted on that and you'realso welcome to continue contributing toour QA so that we make the discussion

more interactive so now we move to panelto the politics of memes in the firstpanel we have looked at the language andthe structure of memes how they moveacross different platforms how they aremade up of different things phrasalmemes for example the ones Steindiscussed in in the second panel wecontinue discussion on what the politics

would look in more other questions ofcontent at political implications ofmemes and also considering in a way howthe left is reacting to the to these asthe first panel was mostly on theoutright and/or reactionary politicswhile at some points in this secondpanel will also look at left strategiesregarding memes and to develop thisdiscussion we have four excellentspeakers in this panel the first pickle

is axial Mina who is enough to leadresearcher at the Berkman Kline Centerfor Internet and Society and she's theauthor of many articles and a book titlememes two movements which is obviouslyvery relevant to what we want to discusshere the second speaker will beAnastasia Denisova who is a seniorlecturer in journalism a University ofWestminster and she has recently altered

a book title memes and society which isobviously very close towhat we want to discuss here and publisharticles for several journals just mediaculture and society social media societyand so on and so forththe third speaker is Alessandro Laliquea fellow Italian from Rome he has amaster's degree in philosophy oflanguage which i think is very pertinentto what we are discussing here as many

issues we discuss here touch uponquestion zone of language in linguisticsand it writes about pop culture musiccinema and internet trends for severalonline magazines is recently Oriasrecently authored a book in italiancalled la guerra dame ma the world memesthe video translation on the history thepolitics and the semiotics of internetmemes and that's for alessandro and our

fourth speaker will be Phillips urgentthe seer lecture in applied linguisticsand the Open University where he teachesand researches language andcommunication with a particular focus onpolitics and social media his mostrecent books that have been publishedfrom correct fitted with little spacebetween one another right are the art ofpolitical storytelling and the emojirevolution I mean they are both two veryexcellent books that I think would be of

interest for many people who areattending this conference and is alsocontributor to a number of publicationsincluding European the prospect and theF in tone post so we are going to followthe same structure that we use in thefirst panel namely each speaker willhave 12 to 15 minutes to make apresentation then we will continue witha Q&A discussion so the lines are open

the chat is open you are very welcome towrite you your comments ideas andquestions to the speakers so should westart from an ru we designI cannot seeso suggest if on is not connected at the

momentsuggest we start with AnastasiaAnastasia Denisovaand over to youhello everyone hello everyone hi greatto see you all here virtually thank youfor coming Thank You Paulo as well forconducting this conference evenvirtually I think it's it's tremendous

really glad to be able to listen tothese conversations and to otherspeakers so um right let me upload myslides and be really happy to talk toyou about my vision of meanswhiteyoubrilliant so um hopefully you can all

see what I seeright so my idea about internet meanswhen I started doing this research 10years ago was first of all to figure outwhat do they do for people why do peopleuse them why do people spare their timecreating memes sharing means liking themfinding meanings because memes asprobably you all know are kind ofhalf-baked jokes meaning that themeaning has to be co-created together

with whoever is looking at the me soit's not clear from the onset what thejoke is supposed to be about so you andI we have to continue finish thesentence in my talk I wanted to show youthe classification and I'll be using inmy book in my research and a couple ofexamples just to trigger your couple ofideas have a look at those memes andthink why why would you enjoy something

like that why would you share a memelike that what is the joke so what dothis means do for you so let's say thefirst one right it says okay boomer soit's a very big meme as you probablyknow yourself quite well it's been goingaround for a while and literally it hastwo words and a picture of a dog thereare different reiterations so it'stechnically meaningless to the majority

of people but probably if you do knowwhy it's supposed to be funny youalready can link it to the context thenif you can look at the next example overthere about Airlines and in me we're inthis together emails when my suitcasewas 52 pounds I was on my own so in thiscase it's a bit more informative you canget an idea that it's a meme that'sbeing created during the comet 19pandemic and the airlines that have toeither refund the customers or come up

with vouchers or some murky schemes thateither enable or kind of obstructthe receipt of the money so there arethose jokes they do contain informationnot just the funny element but they alsocommunicate something that we do knowfrom the facts from the news from thecontext let's take a couple more so theother meme on the left has been

circulated I think couple weeks agostarted in the US there's been versionsin Italy where people cheer themselvesup in the mirrors in their bathroomtrying to imitate the bar or nightclubatmosphere so this man over here isfully dressed and trying to show a kindof a commute that he would enjoy on histube right somewhere in New York sayingexperts recommend sticking to your dailyroutine even while working from homeokay New York is it just you know can it

kind of keep it from themselves and dorecreate the idea they still have tocommute and enjoy this reading theirphone on the way to work and lastly asyou can probably know from the stylingfrom this three phrases that go oneafter the other this is a meme that'srelated to the recent UK governmentalstrategy about the easing of lock downthat clan it doesn't depend really onyour political use you don't have to be

supportive or critical about it but youprobably understand why the joke isbeing made so the recent guidelines inthe UK announced last Sunday by BorisJohnson they do specify stay awarecontrol the virus say lives I believe soso the me makers that have found theirown versions and they've been goingaround for over a week by now so we'vegiven up now so you go and do what youwant then we can blame you for it so

quite a critical me there could be otherexamples where people are notnecessarily critical but they just makefun of the vagueness of the messagemaybe they just like this three-actstructure so they enjoy themselves usinga piece of material which is politicallyimportant socially important and it'scontextually you know a really big dealright nowso based on this four examples what Ipropose in my research the approach that

I'm using I think that means they playfour main roles so first of all theyhave become the internet language thecolloquial slang that we all usedifferent generations people coming fromvarious b