in ilburg apers ulture tudies 247 T P C S Negotiating Ludic Normativity in Facebook Meme Pages by Ondřej Procházka Tilburg University [email protected] December 2020 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/ Negotiating ludic normativity in Facebook meme pages Negotiating ludic normativity in Facebook meme pages PROEFSCHRIFT ter verkrijging van de graad van doctor aan Tilburg University, op gezag van de rector magnificus, prof. dr. W.B.H.J. van de Donk, in het openbaar te verdedigen ten overstaan van een door het college voor promoties aangewezen commissie in de Portrettenzaal van de Universiteit op maandag 7 december 2020 om 16.00 uur door Ondřej Procházka geboren te Kyjov, Tsjechië Promotores: prof. J.M.E. Blommaert prof. A.M. Backus Copromotor: dr. P.K. Varis Overige leden van de promotiecommissie: prof. A. Georgakopoulou prof. A. Jaworski prof. A.P.C. Swanenberg dr. R. Moore dr. T. Van Hout ISBN 978-94-6416-307-0 Cover design by Veronika Voglová Layout and editing by Karin Berkhout, Department of Culture Studies, Tilburg University Printed by Ridderprint BV, the Netherlands © Ondřej Procházka, 2020 The back cover contains a graphic reinterpretation of the material from the ‘Faceblock’ article posted by user ‘Taha Banoglu’ on the Polandball wiki and is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution- Share Alike License. All rights reserved. No other parts of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any other means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without permission of the author. Acknowledgements Doing a PhD may sometimes feel like an early Antarctic expedition – ‘small wages, bitter cold, long months of complete darkness, constant danger, safe return doubtful. Honor and recognition in case of success’. Unlike Ernest Shackleton, the unfortunate author of this fabled ad, I was lucky enough to have several people who helped me to secure the means to carry out this research, who offered me the warmth of their home in difficult situations, who led me to see the light in the most tenebrous moments of writing, who gave me confidence to combat the omnipresent self-doubt, and who went above and beyond to help me in my publishing (mis)adventures. First and foremost, I am deeply grateful for the continuous support, insight and pa- tience of my supervisors, Jan Blommaert and Piia Varis. Jan has provided me with a cease- less fount of inspiration constantly reminding me the words of Marcel Proust that ‘the real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes’. However, seeing is not doing and shaping the ideas into a coherent body of work would have been hardly possible without Piia’s keen eye for detail and countless comments. I am also indebted to Ad Backus whose unrelenting interest in my work gave me courage to explore unconventional perspectives and thoughts. On the same note, I wish to thank everyone at the Department of Culture Studies at Tilburg University for a warm welcome, stimulating discussions and valuable feedback. A special thanks goes to Karin Berkhout for editing and creating the layout of this thesis. A big thank you also goes to my former colleagues from the Department of English and American studies at Ostrava University who cultivated my interest in the world of memes in the early stages of my research. In particular, I thank Renata Tomášková for her encouragement to all aspiring scholars, Miroslav Černý for a passionate introduction into (socio)linguistics, as well as Magda Hanusková and Dominika Kováčová for reading my work and commiseration upon various perils of our doctoral journeys. Finally and most importantly, my family had to accept my separation from them and still gave me nothing but support both emotionally and financially despite these trying times – my love and gratitude for them can hardly be expressed in words. I dedicate this work to them. Contents Chapter 1 Introduction 1 Chapter 2 From playfulness to play 9 2.1 Play as separation 10 2.2 Play as ordered activity 13 2.3 Play as community-making 15 2.4 Play as an action-oriented approach to ludic normativity 18 Chapter 3 Methodological preliminaries 21 3.1 Digital ethnography 21 3.2 Induction 22 3.3 Situatedness 26 3.4 Reflexivity 28 Chapter 4 ‘Polandball can into more funny’: Articulating ludic normativity 33 4.1 Translocality in Facebook meme pages 34 4.2 Inequality in Countryball discourses 36 4.3 Analysis 40 4.4 Concluding remarks 48 Chapter 5 ‘No hat for UK? 2/10’: Policing ludic normativity 51 5.1 Grassroots prescriptivism and memetic vigilantism 52 5.2 Chronotopic approach to identity work in memetic communities 55 5.3 Analysis 58 5.4 Concluding remarks 67 Chapter 6 ‘Fake heroes and overreacting biggots’: Breaking ludic normativity 69 6.1 European migrant crisis in Internet memes 69 6.2 Facebook, identity and Simondon 70 6.3 Transindividuation of memetic chronotopes 72 6.4 Analysis 75 6.5 Concluding remarks 90 viii Negotiating ludic normativity in Facebook meme pages Chapter 7 ‘Don’t post offensive memes then’: Re-constructing ludic normativity 93 7.1 Memes and communicative competence in the posthumanist perspective 95 7.2 Revisiting memetic communities 97 7.3 The ethnography of algorithmic systems 100 7.4 Analysis 101 7.5 Concluding remarks 110 Chapter 8 ‘Homo Ludens 2.0’: Closing thoughts 113 Works cited 121 Summary 141 CHAPTER 1 Introduction “It is through this playing that society expresses its interpretation of life and the world.” (Huizinga 1980: 46) A quick glance over the growing scholarship on Internet memes reveals an interesting incongruity. While Internet memes have been continually described as a playful expres- sion of human creativity exploiting the communicative affordances of digital technologies, the elements of play have been increasingly backgrounded, ambivalent or entirely absent. That is, if we accept play as a voluntary and absorbing activity remaining “separate, in- closed, [and] in principle devoid of important repercussions upon the solidity and conti- nuity of collective and institutional life” (Caillois 1957: 99; Huizinga 1980). The spirit of ludic play has accompanied early research approaching memes as usually humor-driven artifacts endemic to marginal Internet subcultures laden with absurdity, irony, silliness, bizarreness, mischief and other oddities governed by their own logic that inspires curios- ity rather than seriousness (Shifman 2014b). However, much of the recent discourse-an- alytically oriented research on memes suggests otherwise (Denisova 2019; Wiggins 2019b; see Miltner 2018 for an overview). In this view, we are presented with both theoretical and empirical accounts of memes as vehicles of grassroots socio-political commentary and critique in the contemporary online-offline nexus – memes offer powerful means of both subversion and advocacy with a capacity to sway public opinion, and therefore we should take them seriously (Shifman 2013). This (non-)seriousness of Internet memes de- serves a closer look. Internet memes generally refer to digital items (images, catchphrases, videos, sounds, choreographies and other semiotic assemblages conveying a message, concept or an idea) gaining influence through online transmission and mutation as a result of partici- patory culture. Memes were originally conceived of as cultural counterparts to biological genes replicating and spreading among people on the basis of Darwinian evolution (Dawkins 1976). In the more contemporary understanding, Internet memes are not passed on entirely ‘intact’ like genes; instead, they are “changed, modified, mixed with other referential and expressive resources, and regularly given idiosyncratic spins by par- ticipants” (Knobel and Lankshear 2007: 208-209).1 It is therefore unsurprising to find re- current references to memes as playful or creative reconfigurations and recontextualiza- tions of culturally loaded semiotic resources to portray or comment on any issue of public 1 Memes are sometimes distinguished from ‘virals’ circulated without altering their form or content (Jenkins et al. 2009). 2 Negotiating ludic normativity in Facebook meme pages attention. But engaging with Internet memes in the sense of play as something inconse- quential to institutional and everyday reality is rarely considered, especially in the light of concerns about authenticity, visibility and ambivalence of user-generated content and its exploitability (Phillips and Milner 2017; cf. Blommaert 2018b). These concerns involve online fringe communities associated with far-right sections on various platforms (particularly 4chan, Reddit and Gab) ‘weaponizing’ memes to propel racist and hateful sentiments along the lines of extremist ideologies centered mostly around ethno-nationalism (notably that of the American Alt Right, e.g. Zannettou et al. 2018, but also its European New Right counterparts, e.g. Bogerts and Fielitz 2018). The communities exploit the pervasive nature of and affective potential in memes as part of ‘attention hacking’, that is, co-opting online cultures to increase presence and visibility of their ideologies in the digital mainstream. The notion of play is then sometimes invoked with regard to using elements of humor and irony to ‘whitewash’ bigoted, xenophobic and other ideas expressed through memes as mere satire disinterested in the ‘real world’