April 18th: STS Event Featuring Whitney Phillips and Ryan Milner
Date & Time
Apr 18, 2018
from
04:00 PM to
06:00 PM
Location
STS Conference Room (1246 SSH Building)
Description
"The Vernacular Vortex: Analyzing the Endless Churn of Trump's Twitter Orbit"
with Ryan M. Milner and Whitney Phillips
A talk hosted by the STS Program in partnership with the UC Davis ModLab.
This talk explores how digitally-mediated folkloric and institutional expressions influence one other and memetically shape public conversations. It will focus in particular on the deluge of antagonistic and ambivalent folkloric expression surrounding the quasi-official Twitter persona of U.S. President Donald J. Trump, which amplifies and is amplified by a variety of institutional forces, including emerging journalism practices, algorithmic docenting, and content moderation policies. In so doing, this talk will show that it is critical to consider this intertwine of folkloric and institutional expressions when responding to unfolding public controversies or mediated narratives.
Ryan M. Milner is an Assistant Professor of Communication at the College of Charleston. His work includes The World Made Meme: Public Conversations and Participatory Media. Whitney Phillips is an Assistant Professor of Literary Studies and Writing at the Penfield College of Mercer University. She is the author of This is Why We Can't Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture. Milner and Phillips are the co-authors of The Ambivalent Internet: Mischief, Oddity, and Antagonism Online.
