MAKING PROFIT, MAKING PLAY: CORPORATE SOCIAL MEDIA BRANDING IN THE ERA OF LATE CAPITALISM
David F. Stephens
A Dissertation
Submitted to the Graduate College of Bowling Green State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
August 2020
Committee:
Radhika Gajjala, Advisor
Thomas J. Mowen Graduate Faculty Representative
Lisa Hanasono
Timothy Messer-Kruse ii ABSTRACT
Radhika Gajjala, Advisor
This project is concerned with the forms of play that modern restaurant companies engage in online and the implications of them. I evaluate the strategies of corporate social media accounts through 3 critical lenses--postmodern theory, affect theory, and critical race theory.
Using a combination of methods, including textual and discourse analysis, as well as grounded theory, I deconstruct the various strategies utilized by corporate social media accounts to connect with their consumers. My argument rests on the notion that these interactions represent a larger dialectic between consumers and producers of culture. Social media has impacted this relationship by increasing consumer freedom and agency. As a result, companies have found ways to adjust to this consumer freedom in different ways—through mocking and dismissal, or perhaps a viral social challenge as well as racialized performances. While on a spectrum, these strategies represent the anxiety of modern corporate representation in late capitalism. iii
To my father, who never stopped believing in me. iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
First and foremost, I want to thank God for carrying me this far and for knowing where to place me during every part of this journey. Secondly, and almost as importantly, I want to thank my parents for everything they have done since I was born to ensure I arrived at this point. My mom—for being caring, empathetic, always providing a hot meal before school and for taking off work to bring me my lunch money when I forgot it (which was all the time). My dad—for being a relentless advocate for my success, and without whom I would not have a roadmap for my life. I seriously cannot thank you enough. I am moved to tears when I realized all the sacrifices you have made for me, and it drives me to succeed every day.
I would also like to acknowledge those who have significantly impacted my academic journey thus far. My intellectual curiosity developed during my undergraduate career at Alabama
State University supported by faculty in the English Department, specifically Dr. Jacqueline
Trimble, Dr. Mark Hill, and Dr. Kathy Amende. These professors cultivated my critical thinking and gave me direction both personally and academically. I have strived to model myself after them as they represent the height of what it means to be an exceptional educator. Furthermore,
Dr. Trimble and Dr. Hill have served as mentors, guiding me through the harrowing path of academia. I frequently call upon them for advice and they never hesitate to offer it to me.
I am also grateful to Dr. Elizabeth Steeby of the University of New Orleans. My training under her further developed my scholarly instincts and awareness. Our office talks consistently challenged my world view, introducing new concepts, ideas, and perspectives. Furthermore, I want to thank her for pushing me towards the field of American Studies. Without your encouragement to keep an open mind, I might not have been willing to go beyond my academic comfort zone. v Of course, I would like to thank my committee members for being wonderful scholars and mentors who have pushed me to do my best work through my time at BGSU. Dr. Timothy
Messer-Kruse has been integral to my understanding of theoretical concepts that I thought I would always struggle with. His patience and encouragement was necessary for me to build the confidence I need as a scholar. Furthermore, his desire to see students learn shines through and makes him a joy to be in class with. Dr. Hanasono has also been critical to my success at BGSU and beyond. Our introduction during a learning community my first semester developed into an instrumental academic relationship. Her focus on the research process and the integrity of scholarship has contributed to my professional development as well as my ability to take pride in my work. Her attentiveness to clarity and consistency made her a wonderful addition to my committee and a rewarding person to work with. Dr. Gajjala has been the most important figure in my academic journey since I made the decision to attend BGSU based partly on her position at the university. I cannot say enough about how you have given me the space to develop my own ideas and identity as a scholar, and creating opportunities for myself and others. I am so grateful for the way you have looked out for me since the beginning of my matriculation through this program. Putting me in the right spaces, introducing me to the right people and setting processes into motion are just a few of the ways you have advocated for me. And I don’t use that word lightly. I don’t know that I would have had the confidence to proudly exclaim that I was attending graduate school to study memes if I did not have your constant support. vi
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page
INTRODUCTION ...... 1
Scholarly Intervention ...... 9
CHAPTER 1: REVIEW OF LITERATURE AND METHODS ...... 11
Postmodernism ...... 11
Time & Space ...... 12
Language ...... 15
Identity ...... 18
Affect Theory ...... 22
Critical Race Theory ...... 26
Methods...... 31
CHAPTER 2: POSTMODERNISM ...... 36
The IHOB Name-Change ...... 36
The Pre-Announcement Ads ...... 37
Postmodern Semiotics ...... 42
Postmodern Affects ...... 46
The Postmodern Colonel: A Case Study ...... 50
The Cyborg Simulacrum ...... 65
CHAPTER 3: AFFECT THEORY ...... 70
The Retweet Challenge ...... 70
Gamification ...... 71
Neoliberalism and Individualism ...... 79 vii
Neoliberal Positivity ...... 85
Managing Affect ...... 94
CHAPTER 4: CRITICAL RACE THEORY ...... 99
Introduction & Background ...... 99
The Whiteness of Wendy’s ...... 100
Wendy Raps? ...... 105
The Whiteness of Chick-Fil-A ...... 112
Chicken Sandwich Wars ...... 116
#OurPleasureNigga ...... 123
CONCLUSION ...... 127
Review of Findings ...... 127
Implications...... 129
Future Directions for Research ...... 135
REFERENCES ...... 137
SOCIAL MEDIA REFERENCES ...... 146 viii
LIST OF FIGURES
Figure Page
1 Lazar Photo ...... 1
2 BK Tweet...... 2
3 Pro-BK Tweet ...... 2
4 Denny’s Tweet ...... 2
5 Anti-Denny’s Tweet...... 2
6 IHOP Instagram Screenshot ...... 37
7 IHOP Instagram Screenshot 2 ...... 37
8 IHOP Instagram Screenshot 3 ...... 39
9 IHOP Instagram Screenshot 4 ...... 41
10 IHOP Instagram Screenshot 5 ...... 43
11 Bancake 1...... 43
12 Bancake 2...... 43
13 “I’m back America” KFC Ad ...... 50
14 KFC “Sunday Dinner” Ad ...... 52
15 “KFC School” Ad ...... 52
16 Social Media Colonel ...... 54
17 Social Media Colonel Introduction ...... 55
18 #TBT Colonel Photo ...... 58
19 Colonel and Photoshop Potatoes...... 59
20 Colonel and Photoshop Chicken ...... 60
21 CGI Colonel ...... 61 ix
22 Virtual Influencers ...... 66
23 Colonel and Tom Green ...... 66
24 Tweet Convo 1 ...... 75
25 Tweet Convo 2 ...... 75
26 Tweet Convo 3 ...... 75
27 Tweet Convo 4 ...... 78
28 Tweet Convo 5 ...... 78
29 Tweet Convo 6 ...... 82
30 Twitter Story Screenshot...... 84
31 Tweet Convo 7 ...... 87
32 Local News Tweet ...... 89
33 Carter Tagging Celebrities ...... 91
34 Sarcastic Patriarchy Tweet ...... 91
35 Pro-Feminist Tweet ...... 91
36 Feminist Tweet Question ...... 92
37 Spicy Chicken Nugget Return ...... 107
38 Mic-drop Wendy’s GIF ...... 109
39 Cartoon Wendy’s Tweeting ...... 110
40 Chick-Fil-A Back the Blue ...... 115
41 Popeye’s Chicken Sandwich Tweet ...... 117
42 CFA Response Tweet ...... 117
43 Popeye’s Responds to CFA ...... 119
44 Parody CFA Tweet 1 ...... 124 x
45 Parody CFA Tweet 2 ...... 124 Stephens 1
INTRODUCTION
In a June 2019 article on Vulture entitled “Brand Twitter Grows Up,” Nathan Allebach tracks the curious phenomenon of humorous, self-aware corporate social media accounts. The subtitle of the article is "How corporate social media mostly moved past its awkward phase and connected with audiences" which underscores the evolution of these strategies of engagement.
The article photo illustrates an anthropomorphic Denny’s pancake standing nervously on a stage performing stand up as other anthropomorphized brands like Wendy's, Netflix, and Sunny D peek anxiously from behind the stage. The audience is composed of angry looking blue birds, an allusion to fickle Twitter users, who can, in one instance, make you go viral for a witty tweet,
Figure 1. Lazar Photo and in the next turn on you for trying too hard.
Starting in the late 2000s, Allebach outlines a U.S.-focused history of what is called
Brand Twitter, including hits and misses from companies like Dominoes whose first tweet was a less than endearing post about them firing two employees after they messed with a customer's food, or Chrysler who dropped the F-bomb in a tweet. Even a trend of "blame the intern" was popularized as a result of awkward forays into humor, and companies struggled to adjust to the new medium and its potential pitfalls. Businesses are usually averse to openly taking such risks. Stephens 2
Traditionally, television has been the primary advertising medium for major corporations. This medium was safer because it was one-way, meaning the affordance as well as the political economy of television were such that producers had a monopoly over the airwaves. As a result, consumers were less empowered to voice their critiques or speak out against corporate entities.
As the above photo envisions, this phenomenon places power into the hands of consumers, as it positions them to be the judge and jury of any company's attempt at humor or shock. As brands settled into their own style of subversion, users expressed mixed opinions about this postmodern communication. Some users appreciated this form of engagement, noting its sociality and humor. Others criticized it for pandering and inauthenticity:
Figure 2. BK Tweet
Figure 3. Pro-BK Tweet
Figure 4. Denny’s Tweet
Figure 5. Anti-Denny’s Tweet Stephens 3
What characterizes this recent behavior online? Why is it that companies are choosing to engage with consumers in this manner? I believe the specific medium in which this phenomenon is occurring explains, in part, why businesses have indulged in this new persona. Social media is a space of "play.” Whether users are creating memes as a response to a trend, recording a Vine or
TikTok, or trading verbal blows in jest, social media's value is in providing a space for users to creatively engage with one another. Popular pictures, tweets, or videos become "memes" and have the potential to travel across multiple platforms. Consistently funny accounts can gain thousands of followers, opening an avenue for financial gain by promoting products on their respective pages or under viral tweets. The same dynamic works for corporate entities as well.
When they first stepped onto the scene, it was easier for brands to get attention for amusing tweets. The surprise of reading McDonald's tweet like your funny coworker is enough to capture most people’s attention. But as brands like Denny’s, Wendy's, and Taco Bell paved the way for a large following based on entertaining tweets, this strategy took on new importance and saw corporate brands trying to outdo each other in their creative outreach.
Play describes more than the literal actions these companies are engaging in. It also describes a critical concept in postmodernism, one that provides the basis of my forthcoming investigation. I believe this turn, whereby companies take on a more human ethos online is a symptom of our postmodern moment. Postmodernism is a philosophy that celebrates mixing high and low culture, irony, and subversion. It questions and deconstructs overarching narratives
(Kellner, 1988). Social media is a tool that allows for the expression of postmodern values. For instance, the number of people on Twitter means countless perspectives are being offered every day. There is no "one" truth as users tweet their differing opinions and debate viewpoints. Play, or "freeplay," refers to the ways in which signification is opened up or disrupted. Stephens 4
Poststructuralist philosopher Jacque Derrida (1967) emphasized the importance of play, stating
"... play of difference [is] the functional condition, the condition of possibility, for every sign; and it is itself silent” (p. 5). In other words, difference is the quality of play that makes it so radical.
We exist in a culture based on signs. The McDonald's arch. The KFC Colonel. The
Wendy's girl. These are all types of signs, whether icons, or logos, or spokespeople. They embody something more than what they represent physically or visually. As consumers, we come to make associations with certain businesses based on our interaction with them, as well as how they have depicted themselves through marketing. We understand them as having an ethos based on their price, locations, physical environments, and even other consumers. McDonald's for instance has a reputation for being low cost, ubiquitous in location, and thus creates a family- friendly atmosphere. That narrative is attached to the arch itself. And so, when that sign communicates something outside of the traditional narrative, resulting in play, it expands the qualities of that signs and what it represents.
This play, I argue, is an expression of the ways businesses are dealing with the existence of social media. This space gives companies another avenue, another page, as it were, to create new narratives about themselves. Essentially companies recognize the freedom and agency that social media offers consumers both personally and commercially, and they want to capitalize on this tool as well. There are different motivations for this play-- for some, the benefit is developing intimacy with their audience, others want to be edgy and relatable. And others want to push back against consumer critique. For example, the clapback is a tactic where a company actively shows hostility towards, or mock their consumers. The clapback is actually phrasing that comes out of Black communities, which combines biting humor with speed to develop a mic- Stephens 5 dropping response. Brand Twitter is a chaotic maelstrom of experimentation that is constantly developing new approaches to cash in on the attention economy. Brand, then, are in a rush to gain as many followers as possible because as Allebach (2019) reminds us "The arc of Brand
Twitter is absurd, and it bends toward sales." Wendy's has one of the biggest following of its competitors, with nearly 3 million followers.
The forms of play that these companies engage in and the implications of them are the primary concern of this project. I am interested in evaluating the strategies of corporate social media accounts through 3 critical lenses--postmodern theory, affect theory, and critical race theory. My goal for this project is to evaluate various forms of play that corporate social media accounts engage in. The accounts that I cite have one thing in common--they are all food services. While this phenomenon is not specific to the food service industry, these companies have been the most recognized for their humorous online presence. Given that 54 percent of
Twitter users are 44 or under (Statista), it makes sense that businesses trying to incorporate a younger audience would find success on such a platform. Furthermore, a younger audience better understand the kinds of tactics they employ. I will be guided by 3 research questions that will elaborate on the phenomenon on Brand Twitter:
1. What forms of play are businesses employing to communicate with their customers or represent themselves online? 2. How does the structure or function of social media influence these representational strategies? 3. What impact do these strategies have on the relationship between consumers and producers and producers with themselves? The importance of the first question is clear. To compete for attention, companies must develop new ways of being or performing that differ from their past and differs from similar brands.
What they chose to do speaks to their perception of themselves and their consumer base. The second question emphasizes the medium of social media and its inherent qualities and Stephens 6 affordances which structure their brand performances. Some brands occupy a fairly distinct persona from their television representation which indicates as Marshal McLuhan famously says,
"The medium is the message” (p. 7).
The third question has perhaps the most real-world implications. In some ways, it is an extension of the second question. It is a question about power. Social media gives consumers the power to approve or disapprove of their online performances, since brands are inspired by the language and sentiments of their audience. This feedback helps companies adjust their strategies but it can also prove to be a powerful tool of dissent. The clapback is an example of companies engaging in antagonistic behavior to silence critique. This communication style risks being perceived as rude. However, a deeper concern is the possibility that a medium which gives consumers more agency than before, could be absorbed into a more commercial function. In other words, the shift in power that social media instigated can be disrupted if brands utilize the medium in a way that extends corporate hegemony and overrides consumer agency.
I want to evaluate these forms of play through 3 theoretical lenses in cultural studies:
Postmodernism, Affect Theory, and Critical Race Theory. While these by no means are exhaustive in their approaches, they offer useful concepts with which to analyze corporate strategies. To reiterate, the postmodern concept of play is central to my argument, as it provides the foundation for understanding the difference in behavior for brands offline vs online. Play also is a framework for understanding the kinds of affective and racialized performances brands draw from.
Additionally, postmodernism brings us the language of late capitalism which is crucial for this project. Late-capitalism is a stage of economic development characterized by hyper- commodification and hyper-exploitation. In Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Stephens 7
Capitalism, Fredric Jameson (1984) clarifies that late-capitalism is not a term that hearkens the end of capitalism, but
“is rather the sense that something has changed, that things are different, that we have gone through a transformation of the life world which is somehow decisive but incomparable with the older convulsions of modernization and industrialization, less perceptible and dramatic, somehow, but more permanent precisely because more thoroughgoing and all pervasive (xxi). Though his description may be considered vague, it shows his hesitance to ascribe a totalizing definition to this phenomenon, while still attempting to highlight its impact and significance.
Still, what is important to draw from Jameson is the idea that late-capitalism provides a pervasive logic to that shapes cultural production and consumption. Terry Eagleton (1983) describes this change in terms of the class struggle: “It is as though postmodernism represents the cynical belated revenge wreaked by bourgeois culture upon its revolutionary antagonists, whose utopian desire for a fusion of art and social praxis is seized, distorted and jeeringly turned back upon them as dystopian reality.” (p. 60). Postmodernism, then, introduces a commodifying impulse that absorbs non-capitalist or explicitly anti-capitalist cultural production and discourse into the capital accumulation process. In other words, the same postmodern concept of play, which underscores and empowers social critique, gives way to a new mode of commercialism. This ability to nullify anything that resist the hegemony of the economy is a feature of late-capitalism.
Jason Hickel (2012) argues, ‘Today, dissent is a highly valued commodity that is openly bought and sold in the marketplace…In a neoliberal age, capitalism supplies not only a mode of production but also a form of resistance, though one that will never supersede the conditions of capitalist production (p. 214). Social media provides a unique site to study this process because of its postmodern ethos, which in some ways, offers consumers more freedom and creativity, but also has a tendency towards the commercialization of I discuss these varying definitions of late- Stephens 8 capitalism because they structure the critique of this essay. Whether the subversion of identity or the commodification of critique, the strategies of play companies engage in are extensions of the commercial process, despite their friendly and social persona. By placing these strategies within the context of late-capitalism, I hope to underscore this phenomenon as part of the intensification of postmodern culture caused by the expansion of markets and fragmenting of consumers.
I will save the discussion for definitions of affect for that section of the literature review but in all cases, I will generally mean a particular emotional state, orientation, or tendency when referring to affect. Affect theory is concerned with how people and objects "affect" one another as well as our capacity to be affected in the first place. In the digital realm, this takes on new forms as companies instigate laughter, frustration, or disinterest through their interactive personas. These emotional qualities stick to brands and structure forms of communication with consumers. While ultimately, each brand is concerned with increasing their economic potential, they do so by developing their own unique persona through affective performances.
Additionally, critical race theory gives insight into the way race is coded in language, performance, and other types of representation. Many of the companies I will discuss have coded themselves as white either through icons and spokespeople, their prices, and their advertising.
Historically, few major food chains see their primary consumer base as Black. However, to appeal to a younger, cooler audience, brands drawn on Black cultural signifiers, like slang and music in order to perform their knowledge of modernity. As Black culture entered the mainstream, it became commodified by entities seeking to position themselves as counterculture.
These three theories provide the best framework to explore the kinds of online performances of the self these businesses pursue. As they construct their identity, they necessarily adopt the characteristics of their audience. I like to think of Postmodernism as Stephens 9 answering the question "What" and "Why" because it explains the social and economic condition from this phenomenon springs. On the other hand, affect and critical race theory answer "how" because it explains the qualities--emotional and racial - - they adopt.
Scholarly Intervention
My dissertation intervenes in the study of Brand representation online. Since social media became popular, there have been hundreds of books written on how to capitalize on this medium.
Trade magazines feature research for business owners interested in expanding opportunities online. Businesses have also developed social media analytics as a technology to track data like user engagement, response time, and other factors that judge consumer interest (Reyhle, 2018).
From a scholarly perspective, the recent work in social media and celebrification has helped develop a framework for understanding popularity and virality on social media platforms.
Works like Authenticity ™ (2012) and NoLogo (2009) explore how brands search for new trends to attach themselves to appeal to the modern consumer. However, very little has been written specifically on strategies that the restaurant industry has engaged in to attract consumers online.
By focusing on the food industry, I believe I am better able to explicate the way late-stage capitalism influences disparate aspects of lives including the relationship between brands and their consumers.
I also think my project works to frame these tactics of absurdity as expressing anxiety about how to adjust to the increased agency of the consumer. Underlying all corporate strategies is the knowledge that they are potentially exposing themselves to critique. In fact, the very presence of a business online means increased user access and transparency. Their performances are attempts to mediate consumer agency by pushing the limits of what is appropriate behavior Stephens 10 for a corporate entity. By framing this play as anxiety, I think it exposes these strategies as a game of power rather than simple fun or amusement.
To create a clearer picture of how my project came together, I turn to the review of literature and methodologies. The review of literature will discuss the genealogy of thought regarding each of my three theories and will feature key authors and texts. Though it is not exhaustive, it does set up key themes for my project. Stephens 11
CHAPTER 1: REVIEW OF LITERATURE & METHODS
Postmodernism
Postmodernity is perhaps the most useful frame to analyze how social media has impacted the relationship between producers and consumers of culture. Every mention of postmodernism is followed by an exclamation of how difficult a concept it is to define. I submit the same caveat, though there are a few characteristics of postmodern culture that are commonly mentioned.
The contemporary social and political moment is greatly influenced by postmodern thought: “Utopias and the idea of progress are rejected, and religions are called into question.
The myths surrounding politics and leaders are destroyed. Great charismatic figures disappear, and little ephemeral idols arise” (Garcia, 2016, p. 167). Postmodernist sought to expose and reject the political and economic hegemony that influenced the lives of consumers and citizens.
They believed that pillars of modern society such as businesses, media, science, and religion, and our reverence of them, actually hindevered our freedom rather than promoted it. The
“blasphemous” criticism of these pillars has created a rich culture of irony and subversion, the spirit of which continues to be expressed on social media. Susana Salgado (2018) writes, “In sum: no absolute and definite truths exist and values, knowledge, and ultimately reality are relative to discourse and interplay, which often gives rise to contradictory interpretations of reality and values coexisting alongside and sometimes clashing with each other (321). That social media is made up of the everyday experiences of various people from different cultures, nationalities, and geographies means that concepts like time & space, language, and identity are always in contestation. Stephens 12
Time & Space
Time, too, is a significant theme of postmodernism thought. Central to the unfolding of cultural postmodernity are changes in the condition of economic production and consumption.
As Dickens and Fontana note, "The spheres of exchange and consumption parallel acceleration of production time. In exchange, computer-based systems of communications and information how, along with more streamlined techniques of distribution, made it possible to market commodities around the world more rapidly and effectively." Important here is the sense of time that affects various aspects of social and economic life. As Harvey (1990) observes, "I think it important to challenge the idea of a single and objective I sense of time or space, against which we can measure the diversity of human conceptions and perceptions. I shall not argue for a total dissolution of the objective-subjective distinction, but insist, rather,/ that we recognize the multiplicity of the objective qualities which space and time can express, and the role of human practices in their construction" (p. 203).
Postmodernism seeks to understand how both individual and social understanding of time create the human experience. This view of time, as an individual rather than totalizing experience, fits within tenets of postmodernism because it rejects time as a unifying or grand experience. However, these various flows of time are also attached to ideological positions. In fact, the discourse about how users spend their time has found salience through terms like the attention economy. Susanna Paasonen (2016) notes how intertwined notions of legitimate usage of time are tied up in capitalist modes of production: "In other words, capitalism generates attention, distraction, and constant modulation between them through its accelerated speeds of circulation and sensory stimulus. Distraction and attention may then intermesh to the degree that they are virtually impossible to tell apart.” Similarly, "Like attraction and distraction, work and Stephens 13 play continuously leak into one another in the uses of networked media. Social media services and applications are used as distraction from work tasks managed on the same smart devices."
The transformation of memes, gifs, and other digital cultural products into forms of communication and economic exchange for companies occur through "The rhythms of work and leisure, tied in with ubiquitous online connectivity, near-instantaneous communications, and the ready availability of data” (Paasonen, 2016). Thus, the leisure of laymen is appropriated through corporate communication, repackaged, and projected back to the masses as a legitimate use of time. The stratification of space through the creation of social media has meant the creation of another sphere of leisure as well as work.
Accordingly, space is a major site of investigation for postmodern theorists as they are concerned with its role in the production of culture. In a point that even Lefebvre himself posits may seem obvious, he says, “(Social) space is a (social) product” (p. 30) Lefebvre (1991) is highlighting the fact that space is not a pure or abstract idea, but rather is made up of the material objects within it including people. For social space, including social media, people are the primary characteristics that define the space as such. He proceeds to argue that capitalism has defined space through “three interrelated levels…: (1) biological reproduction (the family); (2) the reproduction of labour power (the working class per se) ; and (3) the reproduction of the social relations of production - that is, of those relations which are constitutive of capitalism and which are increasingly (and increasingly effectively) sought and imposed as such (p. 32). For this project, I am interested in how companies use social media to exercise economic motivations in a social space, thus eliding the seemingly separate equities of social and economic.
Robert G. Dunn (1998) argues, “…our relationship to culture undergoes dramatic change as a direct consequence of technological innovation. This occurs in the form of a compression of Stephens 14 time and space and a reversal of modernity’s privileging of time over space by new spatializations of culture made possible by its visualization through a world of images” (p. 11)
Social media provides a location for this new world of images, with each site containing various spaces for people to construct the passage of life through visual imagery.
In fact, social media in many ways, is the location of space within spaces. These spaces extend from bigger to smaller: The timeline is probably the biggest space, with statuses, videos, and photos occupying this space. Social media works because it has created new spaces of representation. With each space comes a new logic, a new hierarchy, and a new struggle. The fact that digital spaces have a logic or order is not a grand argument to make. The reason that capitalist entities have succeeded in crafting postmodern corporate identities on social media is that respective social media do, in fact, possess an ethos or characteristic that companies can borrow from. For example, the ethos of Tumblr is quite different than Facebook:
For several years, the social media and microblogging platform Tumblr has been central to fannish passions and creative production among youth, especially girls, people of color, and LGBTQ-identified fans, who have found a home on the platform. Tumblr has been most widely known, however, for enabling the formation of counterpublic spaces for marginalized millennial communities and progressives (“social justice warriors”)….(McCracken, 151) While Facebook has grown to prominence because it promises to create new spaces and opportunities for interacting with close friends and family, Tumblr has acted as a foil to
Facebook—the anti-social media, if you will. Spaces are shaped by the people who interact in them, so it is interesting to note that, given McCracken’s assessment, Tumblr has become a refuge for marginalized groups and the representation of their stories. Subcultures have proliferated on and because of Tumblr which is more likely to connect people through shared interest, esoteric as they may be. With the proliferation of diverse communities online, language has also played an important role in shaping the ethos of social media. Stephens 15
Language
Postmodern theory posits that part of what allows institutions to maintain their power is through their control of discourse. Institutions, whether schools, businesses, media organizations, or governments, accrue power through their monopolistic claims on the truth. This “truth” is upheld by our investment in the linguistic center—the term which Jacques Derrida uses to describe our belief in the absoluteness, or consistency of language, understanding, and meaning throughout history. From this absolute center, we can establish, say, a top/bottom, or East/West binary, to which we have attached values that legitimize inequality. In “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences” Derrida (2001) writes, “The function of this center was not only to orient, balance and organize the structures—one cannot, in fact, conceive of an unorganized structure—but above all to make sure that the organizing principle of the structure would limit what we might call the freeplay of structure” (p. 352) These binaries make our world simple and easy to decipher, however, this representation is not accurate and serves to funnel power to institutions that can lay claim to the “truth.” However, social media has established a pathway for the legitimization of multiple truths.
One need not look further than the proliferation of Black Twitter to see how the breakdown of trust between traditional media organizations and its viewers contribute to challenging the notion that these companies can be trusted with representing reality. Black
Twitter has been termed a “digital counterpublic,” a reference to Michael Warner’s (2014)
Publics and Counterpublics where he explores the social institutions that bind us, make us
“relate” or “connect” with one another. His book begins with a simple premise— “Most of the people around us belong to our world not directly, as kin or comrades or any other relations to which we could give a name, but as strangers” (p. 7). Many social media sites encourage users to Stephens 16 interact with people who one may not know in real life, but who share common interests, whether it be entertainment or political affiliations. One way these connections are forged is through the use of a linguistic sign such as a hashtag. The hashtag became a powerful tool in the creation of online communities like Black Twitter.
The hashtag is a signifier that usually places one’s tweet or post within a larger conversation occurring on social media. During coverage of high profile events such as the trial of George Zimmerman for the killing of Trayvon Martin, or especially the murder of Michael
Brown in Ferguson, these hashtags were crucial in creating a counternarrative from the often racist and classist traditional media coverage of the “riots,” as they were deemed by the likes of
CNN and FOX News. As Yarimar Bonilla and Jonathan Rosa (2015) argue “The types of publics created by Twitter emerge from the hashtag's capacity to serve not just as an indexing system but also as a filter that allows social media users to reduce the noise of Twitter by cutting into one small slice” (p. 6). This “slicing” also speaks to the postmodern conceptions of space as one can stitch together people that effectively becomes the “community.” This is not to say that those
Black-identified users are monolithic in their politics, ideology, or interests, but rather that through the linguistic sign (hashtag), one is about to “enter” a new public sphere that is made possible through the infrastructure of social media. Twitter is a natural place for the creation of these subcultures because it allows people to connect through a common language. The fact that
Black Twitter has become a cultural force of its own, evidenced by the plethora of academic and non-academic research exploring the phenomenon from scholars like Andre Brock and Mia-
Moody Ramirez and publications such as Vice and Buzzfeed , showing the role of social media in helping to legitimize counternarratives. Stephens 17
Now I want to return to the idea of “freeplay” as a central concept (pun intended) in the function of social media, henceforth referred to simply as “play.” Derrida (2001) writes,
“Nevertheless, the center also closes off the freeplay it opens up and makes possible. Qua center, it is the point at which the substitution of contents, elements, or terms is no longer possible” (p.
352). Social media enhances many people’s communicative power to be sure, however, how they do this is different across platforms. It may seem ironic, but Twitter’s originally 140 (now 280) character count probably embodies the concept of play more than any other platform. This limitation, one might think, imposes on the expressive impulse of the user by forcing them to capture their idea within a tight word count. However, this limitation drives the creativity of users on the website. In the early days of Facebook, some users adhered to a strictly grammatical/syntactical guideline that mirrored the structures learned in most educational environments. These ardent constructivists called out others for their poor use of the English language and their attempt to depart from standard, often hegemonic language forms. Part of this may have to do with the ethos of Facebook—because the platform mirrors offline social networks, users may feel the need to adhere to a similar, offline, language rule.
On the other hand, Twitter revels in allowing users to exercise slang, colloquialisms, regional dialects, neologisms, and other innovative language uses. Twitter, thus, has the capacity to legitimize a multitude of languages and encourages users to play with words if they want to communicate their ideas. The poststructuralist application of Twitter goes beyond merely slang and dialects. Another way the concept of play is encouraged is through the use of bricolage and pastiche. Bricolage is a concept introduced in Claude Levi-Strauss’s (2018) The Savage Mind.
The bricoleur is one who uses “the means at hand,” meaning they take what is available, whether that is the lexicon or history itself, and employs it in non-traditional ways. This compiling of Stephens 18 different sources does not have to be to some serious political end. Memes are perhaps the most widely recognized form of bricolage as they usually take a picture or still from a televisual source, and combines it with an individual phrase or caption. The visual aspect of the meme is usually recognizable, and thus more easily able to be decontextualized and used for another, usually humorous purpose. Stuart Hall’s (2006) “Encoding and Decoding in the Television
Discourse,” speaks to the power of traditional media in homogenizing meaning and recognition:
At a certain point, however, the broadcasting structures must yield encoded messages in the form of a meaningful discourse. The institution-societal relations of production must pass under the discursive rules of language for its product to be 'realized'. This initiates a further differentiated moment, in which the formal rules of discourse and language are in dominance (p. 165).
Hall’s assessment is regarding corporate media which must produce programming that is recognizable to the widest segment of the population. However, social media allows users to exploit traditional signs and creatively remix them. The ethos of social media also expresses ideas about postmodern identity and performance, which my next section discusses.
Identity
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, Identity is an important category for understanding the impact of postmodernism on everyday life. Robert G. Dunn (1998) considers the changes in Postmodern concepts of identity as a result of social movements based on race and geography, arguing that "the Eurocentric subject has been eclipsed by historical trends disrupting colonial and imperial relationships between Europe, the United States, and the “Third
World,” evident especially in the new social and cultural movements, changing patterns of immigration, and newly emerging patterns of global trade and telecommunications” (p. 4) If postmodernism is about the rejection of grand universal narrative, then the right for minorities to Stephens 19 be recognized politically, socially and economically impeded ideas such as white supremacy that asserted a monopoly on human rights. More importantly, though, Dunn (1998) places the fight for human and civil rights as a motivator for changing concepts of identity, alongside " alongside changes in the structural and institutional conditions of advanced capitalist society [which] have generated strains on personal and social identity" (p.4).
Finally, he says “commodification can be taken as the cause of an unsettled social and cultural existence characterized by a fleeting and superficial landscape of consumer goods and images and an anxiety-filled evacuation of meaning. In contrast, a pluralizing logic based in established democratic traditions of voluntary association and group participation, by allowing new collective formations, works against the condition of privatized consumption to overcome its fragmentation and rootlessness. A loss of connection and coherence thus drives the creation of new communities promising renewed social bonds, personal and social fulfillment, and coherent, however multiple, identities” (p. 144). Dunn's critical assessment contextualizes the changing nature of identity and exemplifies how this shift can result in a hyper commercial impulse or a politically efficient collective This opposition is crucial to this project because I also argue that identity can be used as a means of freedom of expression, political action, and social improvement, or it can be robbed of its potential in a hyper-capitalist setting.
Baudrillard's concept of the simulacrum is of central importance to this project. It provides the foundation for thinking about corporate branding and identity in the postmodern/late capitalism era. His theory essentially argues that the world has become mediated through signs and images leaving us with no trace of the real. He writes,
Representation stems from the principle of the equivalence of the sign and of the real (even if this equivalence is Utopian, it is a fundamental axiom). Simulation, on the contrary, stems from the Utopia of the principle of equivalence, from the radical negation Stephens 20
of the sign as value, from the sign as the reversion and death sentence of every reference (1982, p. 7).
In other words, Baudrillard claims that the only purpose the real serves in a postmodern era is as a referent for that which is simulated. Simulacrum describes the state of an object after it has been removed from its historical specificity after it has been detached from its origins and circulates purely as a set of signs that hold no resemblance to reality. This concept is important for thinking about how corporations like KFC have incorporated its original owner into its marketing strategy, thus reducing him into a mockery of the original Colonel.
Likewise, Guy Debord's (1967) Society of the Spectacle has greatly influenced this project as well. His Society of the Spectacle has many theoretical insights regarding the case studies I discuss. He writes, "In the spectacle's basic practice of incorporating into itself all the fluid aspects of human activity to possess them in a congealed form, and of inverting living values into purely abstract values, we recognize our old enemy the commodity." Debord, like
Baudrillard, senses a change in how the world is being represented and argued that the commodification of life has produced a society where authentic social interaction is reduced to a representation. Social media commodifies social interaction, and blurs the lines between the social and economic which has proved useful for companies who want to appear friendly and social, to pursue economic ends. The spectacle invokes an aspect of performativity, which is especially useful for thinking about corporate behavior on social media which relies on phantasmal reproductions of the self. I view these performances with great skepticism, as I see them contributing to the obfuscation of offline business practices.
Feminist scholars like Donna Haraway and poststructuralist Judith Butler saw in postmodernism, the ability to question overarching narratives around gender and its binaries. Stephens 21
Haraway’s (1991) contribution came through her essay A Cyborg Manifesto which explores the implications of the boundaries contemporary society has set between humans, animals, and technology. She envisions the cyborg as a way to overcome these binaries through the celebration of multiplicity. Similarly, Judith Butler's (1993, 2015) corpus of work has questioned the sign/signifier complex that orders our understanding of gender. Rather than seeing gender as an absolute quality of an individual, she sees gender as being “performed,” language which calls attention to the ways in which gender can be potentially subverted for positive political ends.
My attention to postmodern identity is also concerned with the status of the consumer in a world where their actions on social media can be commodified without their knowledge. With this in mind, Mark Andrejavich (2011) exposes the complicates nature of identity in the postmodern digital era. In Social Network Exploitation he writes, “By capturing and channeling user-generated activity for marketing purposes, emerging forms of online commerce subsume the potential diversity of social life to narrower commercial interests” (p. 83). In
“The Labour of User Co-Creators: Emergent Social Network Markets” John Banks and Sal
Humphreys (2008) posit “Rather than being a zero-sum game where if companies derive economic benefit it negates social benefit to the users (and hence is couched in terms of exploitation), is this instead of an example of a new articulation of a cooperative and non- zero-sum game whereby different motivations and value regimes co-exist (p. 412-413).” As the space of social media becomes mobilized to further social and economic ends, the average user is bound to perform a type of labor than can then be appropriated by companies in one way or another. The idea of the user as both producer and consumer has also interrupted our notions of strict divisions between identities. As I will discuss in my chapter on
Affect theory, this division is central to the communication and marketing strategy of Stephens 22 corporate brands who enlist the affective attachments users have with one another to advance their commercial interests.
Affect Theory
Affect theory is a useful frame for thinking about how emotion motivates activity and engagement online. To begin, in the introduction to Affect Theory Reader, Siegworth and Gregg
(2011) describe affect as “a force or a force of encounters” (p. 2). They also use affect as synonymous with energy or “intensities” (p. 1). These forces of encounter determine our ability to affect and be affected. Sarah Ahmed’s “Affective Economies” tells us how affective energies are used to organize people, objects, and bodies around certain political or ideological goals. Arguing against the notion that emotions are private/personal or well up from within and project out, she suggests emotions “create the very effect of the surface or boundaries and worlds” (117). Teresa Brennan (2004) agrees, acknowledging the historical transformation of notions of affect: “As the notion of the individual gained in strength, it was assumed more and more that emotions and energies are naturally contained, going no farther than the skin” (p. 2).
Affect even traverses the technologically mediated as Patricia Clough (2007) notes in her crucial work The Affective Turn: “The technoscientific experimentation with affect not only traverses the opposition of the organic and the non-organic; it also inserts the technical into felt vitality, the felt aliveness given in the preindividual bodily capacities to act, engage, and connect
—to affect and be affected” (2).
The extension and mediation of affective life through technology has renewed interest in how emotions shape our everyday experiences in the social and political. Some scholars have focused on the radical potential of social media to coalesces emotion into forceful political organizing like Olivier Jutel’s (2018) ”American Populism, Glenn Beck and Affective Media Stephens 23
Production” in which he argues that mediated performances of affect orient the emotional life of the Republican Party. He writes, “While the politics of this strain of populism is thoroughly retrograde, it speaks to the centrality of desire, enjoyment, and antagonism in the increasingly universal nexus of affective media and politics. From online conservative social media, Fox
News, and Trump’s political-media spectacle, the logic of affect is central to connecting with an audience or movement that will perform labour in the service media brands, celebrities, and political parties” (p. 375). Zizi Papacharissi’s (2014) Affective Publics: Sentiment, Technology, and Politics. In this book, she uses the case studies like the Occupy Movement and Arab Spring to show “how media serve as a conduit for affective expression in historical moments that promise social change” (p. 4)
For this project, I am interested in how affect is mediated online during interactions between consumers and each other as well as consumers and producers. In “Sensation,
Networks, and the GIF: Toward and Allotropic Account of Affects.” James Ash discusses the affective potentials of GIFs. He focuses on three qualities of GIFs that create this potentially—
“the short temporal duration, its limited color palette, and the way it can be programmed to continuously loop and repeat” (pp 125.) For instance, at one point he argues that the short, decontextualized nature of GIFs creates an excess of affect, meaning viewers have can create new uses or emotional experiences for the same image. Kylie Jarrett (2015) explores the “tension between rich affective interaction and cheapened commodified exchange” which “underpins a great deal of research into the economics of digital media.” Jarret’s topic is crucial for understanding, for instance, why users would be so passionate about helping Carter Wilkerson reach his 18 million retweets (henceforth RT) threshold in a context that would economically unevenly favor Wendy’s. What particular emotional impulses are driving these behaviors? Stephens 24
My chapter on affect works through how certain affective orientations motivate certain behaviors around sharing and communication online. I juxtapose two contemporary emotional impulses—postmodernism and New Sincerity—to discuss how users manage their own emotional investments in the outcome of the RT Challenge. Regarding postmodernism, I focus on the emotion of skepticism, nihilism, and irony. In Simulacrum and
Simulation (2019), Jean Baudrillard argues that postmodernism is a nihilistic era. The simulated nature of reality, from Baudrillard’s perspective, keeps us from truly being
“affected,” by the real, instead of settling for the simulacrum of feeling or sensation. He talks about the way postmodern representations “seduce” consumers and talks of this fascination as a type of spellbound magic diverting our attention without any real promise of emotional fulfillment. Contrary to postmodernist, thinkers in the New Sincerity movement seeks to reconstitute joy, hope, and most importantly, sincerity as the emotional zeitgeist of our age.
In his 1993 essay on television fiction, David Foster Wallace (1993), a founding thinker of
New Sincerity writes, “The next real literary "rebels" in this country might well emerge as some weird bunch of anti-rebels, born oglers who dare somehow to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall actually to endorse and instantiate single-entendre principles” (180). New Sincerity comes out of a desire for authentic social experiences, while postmodernism calls into question any overarching theory of reality and by extension sincerity or authenticity, standards by which reality can be judged.
Neoliberalism also plays a role in how these affects are distributed. I posit that neoliberalism creates a feeling of emotional precarity between these groups of people who have either positive, negative, or neutral affective investments in the outcome of
Wilkerson’s challenge. Neoliberalism’s focus on market logic, the individual, as well as its emphasis on positivity structure the discourse of this challenge. Put simply, I believe Stephens 25 precarity is the emotional state which characterizes the dialogue among consumers and producers. Precarity derives from the French term “precariat” which is used to describe seasonal workers or contingent labor. In the neoliberal economy, the creative and cultural class (sometimes used interchangeably) have been primary subjects of precarious labor conditions. Dimitris Papadopoulos frames precarity in terms of time and knowledge of the future which influences how “workers ‘invest’ in ‘themselves’ by shaping their current activities according to the possible future gains…” When viewed through the prisms of neoliberalism, Wilkerson’s challenge is an example of the way market logic
(what I call gamification) is extended to everyday contexts. The uncertainty of whether their labor will be sufficient for Wilkerson’s success, or simply another opportunity for free advertising for Wendy’s shapes people’s expectation and help determine how people invest in their relationship with Wendy’s. Ultimately, it is my position that these debates represent the larger dialectic consumers have both with producers and the economic market itself.
Finally, my argument is that both New Sincerity and postmodernism are dominant strains of thought among contemporary consumers. The RT challenge provides an opportunity to see the contestation of these philosophies as expressed by discourse among users and Wendy’s themselves. As they have an economic and reputational stake in the outcome of this challenge,
Wendy’s must maintain a certain emotional atmosphere within the comment section. Michael
Hardt (1999), who coins the term “affective labour” highlights the role that affect plays in capitalist accumulation: “although affective labor has never been entirely outside of capitalist production, the processes of economic postmodernization that have been in course for the past twenty-five years have positioned affective labor in a role that is not only directly productive of capital but at the very pinnacle of the hierarchy of laboring forms (p. 90). Stephens 26
Hardt’s observations are particularly useful for this project because it centers economic postmodernism as an engine driving this change in labor forms. Social media has created a new circuit for affect to travel, thus new forms of capital are created as well. Arlie Hochschild (2003,
2012) asks the questions: “Now what happens when the managing of emotion comes to be sold as labor? What happens when feeling rules, like rules of behavioral display, are established not through private negotiation but by company manuals” (p. 19)? Hochschild helps to clarify the ways that the emotions of workers are mediated through company policies and guidelines. In other words, the affects of workers are commercialized and put to work for the company.
Emotions, then play a crucial role in the accumulation of capital. Wendy’s, for example, wants to accrue social capital through affective engagements that position them as cool or relatable. This, of course, structures their commentary as they, ironically, urge Wilkerson on in his quest.
Critical Race Theory
My chapter on critical race theory makes the argument that social media managers perform Blackness as a way to appear cool or trendy. There is a long history of companies as well as individuals using signifiers of Blackness as a proxy for coolness. This part of the literature review seeks to outline some historical and contemporary issues concerning the appropriation of Blackness. As I will argue as well, the appropriation of Blackness by social media managers to affect a particular persona is enabled, in part, by the postmodern ethos of our time which revels in cultural tourism, performance, and irony. Thus, this portion of the literature review will attempt to fashion these theories in a manner that will exemplify the tripartite relevance of these theories to the communication strategies of social media managers.
I begin with Cornel West's (1990) "The New Cultural Politics of Difference” in which he makes the argument that...... In" What is the "black" in Black Popular Culture "Stuart Hall Stephens 27 summarizes West's argument as 3a reaction to " The first is the displacement of European models of high culture, of Europe as the universal subject of culture, and of culture itself in its old
Arnoldian reading as the last refuge…The second co-ordinate is the emergence of the United
States as a world power and, consequently, as the centre of global cultural production and circulation...The third coordinate is the decolonization of the Third World, culturally marked by the emergence of the decolonized sensibilities” (pp104).
Hall and West are observing cultural trends of the latter 20th that challenged the traditional influences of a dominant Western /European culture around the globe. As a result, movements spurred that sought to highlight contributions of those in less desirable social categories, especially as it pertains to race such as Blacks and residents of the Global
South. America, as a global center of cultural production, represented a shift "both a displacement and a hegemonic shift in the definition of culture—a movement from high culture to American mainstream popular culture and its mass-cultural, image-mediated, technological forms” (Hall 1993, pp. 104).
Efforts such as the Civil Rights Movement, the so-called dissolution of segregation, and the post-legislative integration of Black people into the workforce exposed the average white American to a mainstream representation of Black culture. From the beginning of slavery,
Black material and cultural production have been ripe for exploitation. Blackness has been positioned as a site of abstraction--the value of it determined by how it advances the interest of a white capitalistic power structure. As the digital age has progressed, identity has become a commodity in online communication.
Brands have used notions of Blackness to market their products to both Black and Non- black consumers for decades. David Crockett (2008) begins his exploration of Black people in Stephens 28 advertising from the minstrel shows of the Antebellum South, claiming "…archetypal minstrel characters were easily incorporated into early advertising strategy through humor” (pp. 246)
Even after the Civil War, this image of Black people was used to market to whites who continue to see Blacks as inferior in the cultural imaginary. However, during the second half of the 20th century, as brands attempted to market to a growing Black middle class, representations of Black people strayed from these overt stereotypical depictions. Still "…advertisers construct a version of blackness (i.e. black cultural identity), particularly as expressed by youth, that functions to set trends in the mass market – not to be served as a segment apart from the mass market (pp. 247).
In other words, advertisers exploited Black culture, circulating its signs and symbols outside of the specific context in which they are used.
The value of Blackness in advertising is intimately related to its association with coolness and modernity. The musical genres and rap and hip hop in particular, as well as their accompanying influences on language and fashion, were sources of inspiration and expropriation. As Naomi Klein (2009) says in No Logo, "... young black men in American inner cities have been the market most aggressively mined by the brandmasters as a source of borrowed "meaning" and identity. This was the key to the success of Nike and Tommy Hilfiger, both of which were catapulted to brand superstardom in no small part by poor kids who incorporated Nike and Hilfiger into hip-hop style at the very moment when rap was being thrust into the expanding youth-culture limelight..." In other words, brands took advantage of the white mainstream desire to explore urban culture, allowing them to frame their own products as a way to temporarily identify with Black culture.
This desire to explore the other, to temporarily occupy the other's space is facilitated by mass media. In her chapter “Eating the Other” in Black Looks: Race and Representation, bell Stephens 29 hooks (2015) writes, "Within current debates about race and difference" mass culture is ...the contemporary location that both publicly declares and perpetuates' the idea that there is pleasure to be found in the acknowledgment and enjoyment of racial difference” (p. 21). She centers this enjoyment as a driving force in American Culture: "Certainly from the standpoint of white supremacist capitalist patriarchy, the hope is that desires for the "primitive" or fantasies about the Other can be continually exploited” (22).
As the signs and symbols of urban Black culture began circulating, they became detached from their origins, manipulated by advertisers and brands to appeal to mass audiences. Colin
Mooers says, "The fetishism of multiculturalism, as with that of the commodity, involves a forgetting of origins; meanings are detached from their sources and hypnotized. Subjects are invited to invest in and define themselves in terms of these reified forms. As such, multiculturalism is an ideology of denial. It asks the oppressed to make an affective investment in the reified ethnicities it establishes and to forget those bodily memories of racism which rear up from everyday life but which now find no place in the official transcript of the public sphere” (p. 48).
The digital realm provides a natural place for those interested in a type of racial "tourism" that allows white users to play a minoritized race without the weight of the accompanying history of racism. In "Race In/For Cyberspace: Identity Tourism and Racial
Passing on the Internet" Lisa Nakamura (2005) uses an ethnographic approach to exploring racial tourism on LamdaMOO, a game, and online community where players have to choose from several social identity categories including race: "The fact that Lambda offers players the ability to write their own descriptions, as well as the fact that players often utilize this programming feature to write stereotyped Asian personae for themselves, reveal that Stephens 30 attractions lie not only in being able to "go" to exotic spaces,4 but to co-opt the exotic and attach it to oneself. The appropriation of racial identity becomes a form of recreation, a vacation from fixed identities and locales."
So, for example, the hip hop culture that is born out of a desire to express the daily anguish of Black life in America is reduced to snapbacks, Nikes, and gold chains. Just as consumers use Black culture to perform otherness, so too do corporate social media managers who want to embody an edgier persona than their traditional spokespeople and logos may allow.
Digital platforms and communities encourage users to play with their identity. In some spaces, there is less of an expectation that a user’s online identity accord with their offline. Radhika
Gajjala's work connects the digital and the affective throughout her work but especially so in
“Online Philanthropy in the Global North and South: Connecting, Microfinancing, and Gaming for Change” which highlights the ways online and offline weave together to create material conditions of marginalized groups. She focuses on the politics of online philanthropy, and how how digital technologies create and spread affects that shape the conceptualization of the digital
Subaltern. Her work has contributed to the study of marginalized communities online as she questions the virtual/offline binary that structures internet discourse. As Lisa Nakamura (2005) argues, some sites "offer their participants programming features such as the ability to physically
"set" one's gender, race, and physical appearance, through which they can, indeed are required to, project a version of the self which is inherently theatrical” (pg. n/a).
Critiquing the performance of Blackness by social media managers is complicated considering the worker is hidden behind both a computer screen and a corporate ethos that dissolves the many into one. However, brands like Wendy's, whose mascot is a white girl with red pigtails, while not an overtly white company (like Starbucks perhaps) does identify itself Stephens 31 through white racially coded signifiers, especially with a name like Wendy. Thus, my analysis is aimed at how social media managers can do the work of reframing traditionally white companies as cool, edgy, and modern through Black signifiers.
In the realm of social media, this is often through language: "deeply collaborative practice, signifyin’ has traditionally fostered group solidarity in Black American communities. Dexterous use of language and skilled verbal performance are key elements of signifyin’, and such performances have historically served important roles in the creation and preservation of Black communities" (Florini 2014, p. 226). Spaces like Black Twitter are shaped in part by their online adherence to tenets of Black culture including language, which comes out of the liminal space African Americans occupy in the United States. Twitter, with its focus on brevity and creativity, has seen a boom in Black cultural production but has also seen that creativity co-opted by users and companies seeking to rebrand themselves. As social media encourages postmodern performances of the self, it provides the natural environment for companies to "borrow" from Black cultural signifiers to accomplish this goal.
Broadly speaking, social media managers use postmodern communication strategies to appear friendly and relatable. Specifically, these managers use Black cultural signifiers to create, or “affect,” a cool persona. I use the word affect intentionally to suggest that companies adopt certain linguistic and visual representations to appear or perform relatability.
Methods
All of my chapters utilize discourse analysis to some degree but in different ways. For my first chapter, I conduct a discourse analysis of IHOP commercials using social media ads as my specific objects of analysis. There were 16 ads in this campaign and they were uploaded to their @ihop Instagram page from May 27th, 2019 to June 21st, 2019. I use textual analysis to Stephens 32 map out the ads individually, noting their content as well as recurring themes within them. I am especially interested in the semiotics, or logic of grammar, that is created when reading these ads in a postmodern way. Semiotic theory was developed, in part, by linguists Ferdinand de Saussure. He develops an underlying theory on the system of language that rests on the sign, signifier, and signified. He says, “The linguistic sign unites not a thing and a name, but a concept and a sound image.”
Postmodernism uses semiotics to disrupt the traditional sign/signifier system of communication by subverting commonly understood signs. By comparing the denotation vs connotations of an object, I analyze the way corporations use irony as part of the dialectic with their consumers. After noting the semiotic arrangement of the ads, I contextualize them with similar ads to draw conclusions about the larger discourse occurring between consumer and producer. In fact, not only are the ads themselves a discourse, but they are discourse about discourse given that IHOP incorporated the backlash it received into a new marketing campaign. Therefore, the texts of in the ads are part of a metanarrative or discourse on consumer/producer relations.
Similarly, for my analysis of the postmodern character of the KFC Colonel, I use semiotics to discuss visual representations of the Colonel. In order to track the transformation of the colonel, I draw on early commercials that feature the Colonel, celebrity impersonations, as well as the swath of social media postings mostly between August 17th, 2015 and up until Spring of 2020 which amount to over 400 posts. I do not go into detail with all of them, instead using the majority of them to understand the particular tone of the page at any given point. Ultimately, my goal is to expose the postmodern semiotics that constructs contemporary notions of the Colonel. I want to frame the Colonel as a cyborg and discuss the Stephens 33 semiotics of the cyborg as an amalgamation of biological, ideological, and technological parts. By framing this cyborg in terms of semiotics. I expose the process by which Colonel
Sanders becomes a simulacrum.
Regarding my second chapter, I draw from parts of grounded theory method to collect data from tweets under the WENDY'S RT Challenge tweet. I actually collected every single comment available, even taking a screenshot of some conversations. This amounted to about 61 screenshots and over 200 comments. I did this to a) have enough data and b) to draw out themes other than what I envisioned. Furthermore, I draw from grounded theory methods to be open to other concepts at play in the comments I analyzed. Grounded theory, Kathy Charmaz (2006) says, "consist of systematic, yet flexible guidelines for collecting and analyzing qualitative data to construct theories 'grounded' in the data themselves” (p. 2).
For instance, I knew that many of the tweets would revolve around themes such as hope or skepticism, which I categorized using the framework of New Sincerity and Postmodernism, respectively. However, it was not until I analyzed all the collected tweets that I began to notice a larger affective tension-- that of precarity. Coding plays an important role in grounded theory as well. While reading the tweets, I began taking note of themes within comments. They revolved around calculating Wilkerson’s chances, expressing doubt over them, and expressing optimism. I did the same with Wendy's tweets, which seemed to feature a positive and optimistic tone while conversing with users about Wilkerson’s chances.
It seemed as if my analytical categories would be "positive," "negative," or "neutral."
However, the tweets I collected regarding the inclusion of feminism as part of the discourse under Wilkerson's post contributed to me applying the larger framework of precarity or uncertainty. Rather than simply framing the discourse through the binary oppositions of doubt and belief, grounded theory allowed me to see precarity as the larger framework driving this Stephens 34 discourse. In other words, the tweets on feminism seem odd compared to the rest of the tweets directly addressing Wilkerson's challenge, but when viewed all together, the tweets fit within other logics in the comments.
The limitations to this phase of analysis include the fact that given the age of this post, and the evolution of privacy features on Twitter some of the conversations appear incomplete or are not connected by the usual thread that ties conversations together on the platform. This is a general problem that affects everyday users as well as researchers. When users are conversing, they are often unaware of who is all tagged in the conversation which causes unnecessary confusion and sometimes conflicts. I try to use conversations where it can, with reasonable certainty, be surmised the parties involved are intentionally corresponding with one another.
Collecting tweets from Wendy's under Wilkerson's post was easier both because they commented frequently and because their tweets have value as standalone comments even if they are part of an incomplete conversation. Equally, I was interested in tweets that exemplified a hopeful attitude towards Wilkerson's prospects as my argument is they needed to maintain a perception of goodwill to users/consumers. As a result, I analyzed their individual tweets as well as how they respond directly to other users who express doubt. Essentially, I use both textual analysis and discourse analysis to analyze tweets as individual units of expression as well as representative of affective discursive practices.
For the first half of my final chapter, I use critical race theory and discourse analysis to track the way Wendy's has adopted racial signifiers. I observe early Wendy's commercials, contemporary television ads, and social media performances to think about the way Wendy's has transformed itself from a wholesome family restaurant to one that might roast you on Twitter. I argue that this occurs in part through their adoption of racial signifiers in their larger attempt to Stephens 35 construct a cool modern persona. Why discourse analysis? Van Dijk (1993) states plainly the necessity to study race using discourse analysis, explaining, "Overlapping with its sister discipline of linguistics, the study of racism and discourse shows how various grammatical structures…may express or signal the perspectives and ethnic biases of white group speaker” (p.
93). As Amber Hamilton (2020), a Ph.D. student at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities observes, "Within Internet studies, colorblind racism has been expressed through an imagining of the Internet as a racial utopia within which the social inequities of the physical world could be left behind...Rather than appreciating race as an organizing principle of the social world” (p. 2).
By highlighting the way race is encoded online, both visually and linguistically, we can better understand how systems of inequality and exploitation operate in different spheres. Mills and
Godley (2017) argue that ultimately what's at stake for our understanding of race online is a concern for the ways "digital media have become a platform for transforming social action, maintaining the status quo, or reproducing racism and colonization." Applying critical race theory allows us to see the way race is not only articulated online but also how encoding practices often reflect offline stereotypes and appropriation.
For the second half, I employ critical race theory to analyze the discourse between restaurant brands during the "chicken sandwich wars." My goal is to show how integral the role of Black language was in constructing this debate. Furthermore, I hope to show how the discourse represents cultural differences (or even schism) between Black and White people in
America so I draw from popular responses to the competition such as a viral Facebook post and several news articles. Henry Louis Gates's The Signifying Monkey aids in this cause by emphasizing the legacy of Black linguistic traditions that include elements of play, irony, and double meaning. Stephens 36
CHAPTER 2: POSTMODERNISM
The IHOB Name-Change
In May 2018, IHOP, one of the world’s most recognizable breakfast brands, shocked the world when it announced it was changing its name. When the brand flipped the “P” to a “B” it left consumer stunned and wondering what the B could possibly stand for. Why would the company, whose claim to fame is embodied through its acronym, suddenly switch from IHOP to
IHOB? Put simply, they needed to draw attention to their new product, burgers. Recognizing its niche product as pancakes, the company knew it needed to play it big if it wanted to cut through the noise and successfully launch their take on one of the nation’s favorite pastimes. Once people realized what the B stood for (i.e. burgers), it became apparent that IHOP was using this to market their new line of hamburgers. This sudden ploy was met with mixed criticism, and people turned to Twitter to express their views. Some called it clunky, compared to the original name which rolled out of the tongue much easier. Others appreciated it from at least a marketing perspective.
After a month of trolling, the company did change its name back, but not without admitting that it was a marketing ploy. Despite the negative attention about the specific campaign, IHOP’s burger sales quadrupled and was considered a “huge success” by the brand’s executives. A year later the company commemorated the affair with a new viral campaign that shot back at consumers who dared critique the brand’s efforts the year prior.
The subject of the campaign was an expansion of their hamburger line which included a
Garlic Butter Burger and Loaded Philly Burger but the ads also included a hostile undertone directed at viewers who negatively opined on the IHOB name change. The ad campaign is the first case study in my chapter on postmodern influences in corporate social media advertising. I Stephens 37 argue that the strategy of play, which includes active hostility towards their consumers, is a way for IHOP to reassert its cultural dominance against the ridicule it received on social media. The affordances of social media are what gave consumers the power to express their disapproval of
IHOP’s marketing strategy, but this new set of ads pushes back against consumer freedom and consumers themselves. Ultimately, the formation of this campaign speaks to the dialectical relationship between consumer and producer in late-stage capitalism.
My analysis of the IHOB/IHOP name change will utilize rhetorical and visual analysis of commercials that were featured on the IHOP Instagram account from May 27th 2019 to June 21,
2019. I aim to show how the IHOPs response to the backlash draws from tenets of postmodernism, such as the questioning of truth and reality, and the concept of play and irony.
By using postmodernism marketing and communication techniques, IHOP obscures the impact of social media criticism to assert and maintain a monopoly over their corporate image.
The Pre-Announcement Ads
As I mentioned, the response to the name change prompted a campaign of ads that served a dual purpose—to expand their hamburger line and to respond to criticism from the previous year. This introduction is teased with a few Instagram posts. The first, posted on May 27th,
Figure 6. IHOP Instagram Screenshot
1
Figure 7. IHOP Instagram Screenshot 2 Stephens 38
2019, (a year after the name change) is an image of the IHOB logo with the caption "When we changed our name to IHOB, the internet had a lot to say. Well, we heard you. Stay tuned for June
3rd." All of the ads follow a similar vein in which they indicate that they have taken into consideration consumer critique and have thus altered their messaging or strategy.
Another ad features the tweets of critics appearing in the sky above the IHOB sign. The tweets are presented one after the other, escalating more quickly. The tweets are accompanied by a confusing of critics saying things like “IHOB?, ”stay in your lane” "stick to pancakes." The chaos swells to a climax as the b in IHOB reverts back to the original P. Another ad simply shows tweets going into the ear of an IHOP cook, symbolizing their willingness to listen to and acknowledge criticism. By hyperbolizing the outrage, as in the ad depicted above, IHOP appears to be making a concession about their name change. This ad indicates that they are aware of people’s disapproval and whatever their announcement is, it is supposed to make amends to customers who dislike the marketing tactic. However, despite acknowledging the power of social media to spread consumer critique, in the same motion, they disempower it by framing it an incessant and emotionally-driven.
Furthermore, alluding to the original name change creates a continuity between last year’s campaign and this current one. As a result, the company is creating a meta-narrative about marketing, and consumer/producer relationships. The campaign is not self-contained, but rather self-referential and self-aware. As a meta-ad, this campaign offers what appears to be a corrective to a ridiculous marketing ploy, but is actually “a renewed effort on the part of advertisers to positively recapture their power to institute a general semiotic regime for interpreting their ads” (Parmentier 2016, p. 154). In other words, by commenting on the Stephens 39 advertising process, these ads are disregarding consumer interpretation and critique. They are attempting to minimize the distance between their intentions and consumer perception.
The last pre-announcement ad features a white spokeswoman in a Grey suit, brown hair, and a somewhat overly enthusiastic smile, in a set that mirrors the suite of a corporate executive, who unveils a sign that says, "to be revealed June 3rd."
As indicated by the refrain “last year the internet told us to stick to pancakes,” the criticism that seems to impact them the most are those that come from social media and particularly Twitter. Because social media has been framed as a medium that increases user and consumer agency, IHOP clearly recognizes that the name change backlash occurred with such intensity because of spaces like Twitter that not only make consumer feedback more available, but also makes it easier for those criticisms to proliferate among other/potential consumers. If social media, as Christian Fuchs (2017) argues, is “a field of struggle” between “dominant actors” and “alternative actors” who can disrupt the former’s economic potential, Twitter, then, presents a specific threat to businesses who have established their economic and culture position through the medium of the television (p. 80).
Figure 8. IHOP Instagram Screenshot 3 Stephens 40
On June 3rd, they finally uploaded an ad to Instagram explaining the surprise. The set is the same as the ad before it which featured the smiling spokeswoman. It is in this ad that the true objective of the ad campaign is presented. The opening frame of the first ad includes the view of a commercial set in which we can see a director, lights, a camera, and other equipment that call attention to the fact that this is a marketing construct. IHOP breaks this fourth wall by presenting the commercial as a manufactured reality rather than a genuine one, a strategy that counters the impulses of most businesses. The mis-en-scene of the executive suite is supposed to represent the depth of thought they have given to the campaign, such that it has reached the highest levels of the company. The set represents the system of public relations that acts as a defense to corporate reputation. That said, the fact that we are privy to the set is a subtle indication that we should not take IHOP too seriously.
The commercial continues with a voiceover informing us of an announcement from
"IHOP formerly known as IHOB." This kind of postmodern self-awareness is supposed to be a bit self-deprecating and alludes back to the fact that the IHOB rebrand was indeed a temporary marketing strategy. The spokesperson begins her presentation by acknowledging the critique they received a year before the airing of this ad. She is standing next to an easel with a large print out of a critical tweet from Chandler, a user from what appears to be Twitter. Chandler becomes symbolic of all of the social media backlash the brand incurred. She says "Last year, Chandler told us to stick to pancakes..." The camera then changes to a medium close up of the spokesperson's face at which point she says, "Well Chandler, we heard you." At this point, the facade of sincerity and authenticity, built up through the ad campaign from days prior is broken down, thrown aside and revealed to have all been an elaborate scheme to not only market their Stephens 41 new variety of hamburgers but to also reset the power imbalance between consumer and producer.
After reassuring the audience that they've listened to feedback, the spokeswoman turns to unveil a line of burgers with a banner that labels them "pancakes." she continues, "Wow look at those pancakes with all-natural Black Angus Beef" as an image of a burger being pressed onto a stovetop. All of these images oppose her insistence that the product is actually pancake by the common understanding. Even the labeling of the beef as all-natural only highlights the irony they are attempting to employ.
The end of the commercial best articulates the attitude the IHOP feels towards the critique they received in the following year. After introducing the burgers, the spokeswoman walks back towards the easel with Chandler's tweet and states, "We're excited for everyone to try our new pancake." The camera reassumes the earlier medium close up used to indicate sincerity at which point she says "Even, you Chandler" and finally proceeds to knock over the easel. The spokeswoman even releases a cathartic sigh of relief upon the act of knocking over a poster board of a critical tweet, while maintaining her gratuitous smile.
My analysis of this ad and others within this campaign can be split into two sections:
Figure 9. IHOP Instagram Screenshot 4 Stephens 42 postmodern semiotics and postmodern affects. In my discussion of postmodern semiotics, I want to explore the way IHOP’s playful manipulation of the traditional sign system. On one hand, this tactic is used to play with their consumer—specifically, to take a dig at those who disapproved of their previous stunt. On a deeper level, these postmodern semiotics expresses a desire for homogeneity in opinion and the reduction of risks and exposure.
Postmodern Semiotics
Before I analyze subsequent ads, I want to highlight the specific strategy of consumer engagement IHOP is using through these ads. “Murketing,” as Stephen Dunne (2018) defines,
“holds earnestness at arm’s length, not so much in contempt, but as in abeyance” (p. 1299). This ad, and the pre-announcement ads before it all play with the idea of truth and honesty. They are not quite lying, but rather temporarily disregarding the necessity for truth so they can string their audience along. Dunne continues, “This is not a capitulation to dishonesty. It is rather the contextualisation of the contemporary marketer’s calculated double-bluff which anticipates the iteration of an average consumer’s responses, the firm’s playful wink to the spectator, the advertisement’s own revelation of an underlying strategic intention alongside – sometimes even on behalf of – the audience” (p. 1299). This “wink” and “nod” are a postmodern technique that reveals the façade of product advertising. The ad privileges those who understand the irony, who can fuse their knowledge of the previous ad campaign with the current to understand the entire narrative and humorously frustrating those who dare take the ad too seriously. More specifically, this type of marketing acknowledges the dialectic between consumers and producers. By breaking the fourth wall of the ad, IHOP is reminding us that ultimately, the success of any product is based on those who wield the power of representation. Finally, by countering the criticism with an ad campaign of equal absurdity, they regain some representational power. It is Stephens 43 also IHOP’s way of showing their consumers that they are two steps ahead—that whatever criticism they might throw at the brand, they can commodify it into the branding process.
This marketing allows them to subvert the semiotic process and allows them to express multiple meanings at once. The second third ad featuring the spokeswoman begins with a complaint about the IHOB backlash. She begins reading out the names of the “burgers” when a
Figure 10. IHOP Instagram Screenshot 5 production assistant interrupts, stating, “Wait…that’s a burger.” With a slight tone of annoyance, accompanied by the waning grin on her face, the spokesperson retorts, “Not it’s not…Just ask our new mascot, Mr. Pancake” who appears in the form of, you might have guessed, a
Figure 11. Bancake 1
Figure 12. Bancake 2 Stephens 44 hamburger. When the assistant continues to question the validity of the commercial’s claim, the mascot becomes enraged, screaming “What did you say? Huh? What am I? SAY MY NAME” as he chases the assistant off the set.
Each ad serves the purpose of undermining the power of the consumer. They are a reminder of the vast institutional persuasive techniques corporations leverage to attract consumers by making semiotics associations. Another Instagram post shows the spokesperson enunciating “Pancakes” with the image of the burger hopping above each syllable. The perspective is one reminiscent of the famous brainwashing scene in A Clockwork Orange (1971), where Alex is forced to watch a montage of horrific crimes set to Beethoven. While the ad exudes nowhere near the same intensity, it does emphasize the way the world is constructed through language and how corporations utilize media technologies to create desires and market their products. We as the viewer are implicitly being “trained” to identify pancakes with burgers, and thus burgers with IHOP. Even in the previous ad, Chandler, a critical tweeter, was used as a metaphorical head on a spike—a way of showing how they can leverage their power to make an example out of a single consumer. Another, perhaps more appropriate comparison would be the
Party in George Orwell’s 1984. The only thing the Party asks of you, as the book so famously notes, is to “reject the evidence of your eyes and ears.” In other words, IHOP is asking us to ignore the traditional signs that differentiate pancakes and hamburgers, in favor of a consensus forced upon us through a corporate technocracy. The penultimate sign of IHOP dabbling in a late-capitalist dystopia is their rollout of the “Bancake List,” which is an online archive of negative tweets aimed at the original IHOB rollout.
The now-defunct website was featured on IHOP’s Twitter account on June 10, 2019. The post encourages users to visit the website to see if they have been “BANCAKED” (a Stephens 45 combination of the words banned and pancake). When users were banned, they were shown which tweet violated IHOP’s standards. The message also featured a red label, similar to that used in sensational tabloids, to mark the user as “BANCAKED.” To get back into the good graces of the company, the user was met with this message: “You started this. Now you can finish it. Just tweet something nice to eat something nice.” IHOP is imagining a world where corporations have access to such a degree of consumer data, that they measure and track positive sentiment regarding their products from particular consumers. Pamela Odih (2007) warns of these, what I call “technologies of allegiance” when she writes, “Advertising’s dedication to these electronic databases conjoins Orwell’s vision of a panoptic system with the decentralized, rhizomatic networks of electronic information processing. The strategic implication of these developments has been to provide advertisers with access to massive electronic databases containing aggregated records on consumer characteristics, behaviour and residential location”
(172). These kinds of technologies whereby individuals are judged, and afforded access based on their adherence to certain rules are familiar to those in the mainstream through shows like Black
Mirror and the framing of these worlds as dystopic fails to acknowledge the very surveillance processes that occur today. Though they are simply playing, they allude to technologies that would give them control over user data in an unprecedented way.
What pushes this firmly into a dystopia is the execution of praise or punishment for aligning one’s self with a particular brand, and the material privileges that accompany it. Even users who are not banned are met with a message encouraging them to tweet something positive.
The tweet in question is framed as the users and heaps praise onto the IHOP brand and their new burgers. In a late-capitalist dystopia, this would represent the ways that consumers are expected to show their allegiance and in doing so, advance the economic ends of the company. That said, Stephens 46 perhaps to downplay the antagonism of the entire campaign, the hashtags
#IHOPMadeMeSayThis #Ad. Still, this campaign highlights the often-fraught dialectic between consumers and producers, between freedom of expression and corporate constraint.
To be clear, I am not arguing that IHOP expects any consumer to abandon their notions of what makes a hamburger vs a pancake. Nor do I believe that IHOP has completely disregarded consumer opinion. My argument is simply that they allude to these extreme scenarios as a means of expressing their frustration over consumer agency and power through social media. This frustration is symbolized by an excess in semiotic meaning whereby irony and sarcasm hide the true affective nature of this campaign. Shame and frustration are the two affects that feature prominently in these sets of ads. I discuss them within the framework of postmodernism because they are two emotions that brands typically try to avoid inducing within their consumers. However, in this case, the subversion of emotion works in tandem with the subversion of the semiotic process.
Postmodern Affects
I want to take this moment to highlight the emotional aspects of postmodern advertising.
Across these adverts is a theme of antagonism for the consumer that seeps through in the form of irony and sarcasm. However, these, what I call, postmodern affects, are performed in ways that expose this tension between consumer and producer. IHOP uses the same spokesperson for this most recent campaign ad campaign: a white woman in professional attire, wearing bright red lipstick and a smile plastered across her face. As she talks, she maintains the seemingly forced smile across her face. It is this image that most embodies the spirit of this project: companies recognizing their disadvantage in this new ethos, slowly adjusting to it while hiding their discomfort or frustration behind a strained smile, all the while they are working to regain their Stephens 47 dominance. The strained smile represents the two poles of customer service and communication: on one hand, companies can go with the customer is always right ethos or, as in recent trends, utilize irony and even insults as a way of capitalizing off of social currency produced by users online.
The commercial ostensibly positions the company as a victim of this new postmodern character of communication. The smile here functions as a bridge between the expected affective orientation of customer service workers and the desire to have more control over the industry of culture by large corporations. These observations anticipate the tensions I address more directly in my chapter on affect theory, but I believe the emotional tone of late capitalism is an integral part of how it sustains itself. These ads represent the balance companies must strike in a medium of communication that increases user agency.
Secondly, I want to discuss the function of shame. In the context of the ad campaign, shame is a rhetorical tool that relies on the imbalance of power. The ads attempt to reverse the shame projected upon them during the initial name change. Shame occurs as a result of exposure, of feeling that one has violated some rule. Agnes Heller (1982) writes, “In the case of shame, the authority is social custom (ritual, habits, codes or schedules of behavior) represented by the eye of the others” (p. 215) The definition works because IHOP, in changing their name, violated a social code of intelligibility. Social media became an outlet through which shame is promoted because people used Twitter to call IHOP out on the ridiculous scheme. However, this new ad campaign fires back at those who dare shame them. For instance, at the beginning of the first ad, when the spokeswoman says that Chandler told them to stick to pancakes. Shame, then, works to limit people and institutions by, in this case, commenting on their choices and agency. IHOP frame itself as the victim to create a narrative in which they rise above the fray and triumph over Stephens 48 criticism. The implications of this are that implicitly, corporations see their consumers as both people to please, and people against which they must defend themselves. They balance both of these perspectives by posing toeing the line between humor and antagonism.
In addition, IHOP is essentially making use of a new phenomenon in marketing called troll marketing. David Griner (2014) describes the tactic of troll marketing as "brands are feigning questionable judgment, only to reveal soon after that it was all just a joke or (in the case of Barbie) much smaller in scope than people were led to believe." To be clear, both this ad campaign and the previous were examples of troll marketing. They pretend to do something as drastic as changing their famous moniker only to turn around and change it a month later after admitting it was all a ploy. Furthermore, this campaign uses the same tactics by pretending to have a huge announcement resulting in yet another instance of IHOP trolling its customers.
For instance, one of the ads on their Instagram features a crew painting an ad for their new “pancakes” on the side of a building. The caption alludes to how the company has taken its customer's "passionate suggestions to heart.” Painters are seen meticulously crafting the parts of the advert. Slowly the video reveals parts of the ad, first the IHOP logo, then the phrase
“Introducing our new Pancakes.” The editing of the video exemplifies their dedication to the sign, shown by the multiple times it is sped up to fit within the 30 second ad. By the time the sign is revealed, however, we see the image of three hamburgers described as pancakes.
The essence of troll marketing is misdirection which causes the person to waste time.
This wasted time is meant to produce frustration within the recipient. Troll marketing risks producing negative affects like resentment and betrayal. I consider the concept within a postmodern framework because it goes against traditional notions of product advertising and Stephens 49 consumer relations. However, within a late capitalist economy, brands are desperate to push the boundaries of advertising, even if it risks alienating some customers.
The affective undertones of the campaign are important because the ads are drawing on postmodern advertising strategies that include irony and deception. As a result, the truth is not communicated through a neat organization of signs and signifiers, and that includes emotional responses. When viewed through the lens of subversion, the affective performances of sincerity and transparency become symbolic of the frustration corporations feel over a heterogeneous, fragmented consumer class.
However, I highlight these strategies specifically because they expose this shift in communication structure that grants users/viewers/consumers more agency through social media.
The way IHOP reacts is by absorbing the critique into their marketing and advertising strategies.
Still, what’s more sinister is the future value of this kind of strategy. If all critique can be co- opted without change, and even further still, can be used to attract more consumers, then companies will always have a bulwark against criticism, without shifting power towards consumers. They may fake it for a time, as IHOP did. However, even this moment of consumer victory risks being nullified by savvy PR and marketing teams.
I start with the IHOP case study to show how companies use postmodern advertising to comment on the shifting power relations between consumers and producers. By citing negative tweets in these ads, IHOP indicates an ironic hostility towards consumers and the opinions they express on social media. These ads act as a way to reassert their dominance through the medium of television. Now I turn to the CGI Colonel to discuss the use of postmodern advertising as it pertains to a once-living spokesperson. My argument is that social media is an enticing medium Stephens 50 for the chicken brand to develop their playful ethos, but it is to the detriment of the Colonel’s personal identity.
The Postmodern Colonel: A Case Study
My goal for this case study is to show how social media aids in the transformation, and thus commodification, of the image and persona of Colonel Sanders into a simulacrum of himself. Their Instagram provides a playground for the revived Sanders, who embodies various characters and professions. The technological ability to extend the narrative capacity of figures, dead or alive, means that the once sacred figure of the trusted, reliable Colonel has been commodified as its own brand. The number of Colonels the brand has indulged in is evidence of their well-established postmodern marketing strategy whereby every demographic shares in the legacy of the original spokesman to such a degree that the original Colonel has become simply a backdrop for all of the parodies and initiations.
The social media representations of the Colonel position him as defying death and embracing life in ways reminiscent of cyborg. This claim is best exemplified through the penultimate revival of the Colonel through CGI technology in April 2019. The CGI Colonel was created for an ad campaign that was created to critique the shallow nature of online influencer culture. In this marketing campaign, KFC embodies the essence of postmodern/late-stage
Figure 13. “I’m back America” KFC Ad Stephens 51 capitalism as it both makes a critique of our current society, while itself embracing the hyper- commercial aspects of the postmodern era.
This section of analysis draws from KFC Instagram posts to show the brand's use of postmodern marketing strategies. I will highlight various captions and photos to discuss the process by which the Colonel is given new life and subjectivity through his proclamations of "I" and "Me," built through both continuities and disjunctures as he traverses various environs, personas and periods.
In May 2015, 35 years after the death of KFC founder Colonel Sanders, the brand released a commercial whereby the Colonel proclaims, "IM BACK AMERICA." Touting his recognizable small black tie, glasses and, of course, his world-famous mustache and goatee, the Colonel appears to have risen from temporary death, come back to lament that not enough consumers are eating his world-famous chicken.
However, about 15 seconds into the commercial there is the sense that not all is quite right with the Colonel. The Colonel's laugh doesn't ring quite as sincere. And he appears like a befuddled elder, confused by double-sided tape and cargo pants, though his singular focus on chicken seems to have been retained. He claims he has come back to make sure his chicken was
"as tasty and delicious as it ever was." But by the end of the commercial, signs point towards this new Colonel being more like a self-aware parody of himself as he announces, "It's STILL finger- licking good." It is clear that the current advertising model has taken liberties in recharacterizing the brand’s former spokesperson. And this commercial foreshadows the trajectory the brand has taken over the last few years with their postmodern characterizations of the Colonel. Stephens 52
The marketing is an intentional strategy on the part of KFC according to George Felix, director of advertising for KFC U S., who is striving towards two goals: More sales daily and better brand perception over time. During the 2018 Restaurant Franchising and Innovation
Summit in Louisville, Felix admits "And it sounds silly, but we thought we're going to treat Col.
Sanders kind of like James Bond. ... If we embody all the spirit and values of the Colonel, we're going to get that brand back” (Whitehead). Felix's comments represent an anxiety that is the product of the postmodern currents running through our society. The tension between authenticity and play, between tradition and creativity has resulted in companies trying out different advertising strategies. This is readily seen by the fact that KFC continues to summon the Colonel from the grave, metaphorically speaking, in different iterations from Jim Gaffigan to
Rob Lowe and Reba McIntyre. The parodies of Sanders already threaten to overshadow the man who embodied the ethos of the company.
These representations contrast that of the original Colonel whose social currency and
Figure 14. KFC “Sunday Dinner” Ad
Figure 15. “KFC School” Ad Stephens 53 popularity were built off of perceptions of honesty and authenticity. In a 1968 commercial entitled "Sunday Dinner" the Colonel is featured personally and meticulously packing his famous bucket with chicken for any potential family.
Another ad that highlights the training KFC cooks go through, with the announcer confirming "There really is a Kentucky Fried Chicken school." In the ad, various workers are quizzed on their knowledge of the Colonel's recipe and quality standards. The announcer claims
"Looks like you've learned to make great chicken" Then we see the Colonel who, as if placing his stamp of approval, says "Only way to serve our customers right." Earlier depictions of the
Colonel frame him as genuinely interested in his brand, as his face was the most recognized association with the company, rather than a man obsessed with creating as many different versions of chicken as possible, as appears to be "his" current postmodern value system.
The recent Colonels depart from the subdued, methodical Sanders who took pride in his chicken and exemplified a clear passion for his business. Now, each Colonel is a different celebrity who has made their name or fortune in another industry. The prioritization for cross- promotion contrasts the public image of the original Colonel whose whole persona rests on his being associated with one product. Whereas the original Sanders embodied the ethos of trust and reliability that was supposed to be the brand’s claim to fame, the contemporary Sanders is shaped by the anxieties associated with branding and corporate trust in the age of late capitalism. For instance, the fact that each iteration of Sanders is a celebrity speaks to the market segmentation that companies must overcome to maintain a broad appeal. It makes sense then, that KFC would play with the Sanders identity to reach various demographics. Stephens 54
Reba McIntyre’s depiction of Sanders is a useful example. A range of publications reported on the announcement, from CNN to The Hollywood Reporter, allowing KFC to capitalize on the neoliberal fascination with firsts and at the same time attempting to increase the diversity of their consumer base. But to place this within a more theoretical context, it is further proof of our postmodern moment that a fake Colonel Sanders is something to which one might aspire, that receives headlines shows how invested our culture is in keeping up the fallacy. The impulse to play, to exhaust the referent until it is mere blasphemy in the face of a simulation is what Baudrillard was warning of in “The Procession of the Simulacra”.
In fact, the fact that new Sanders is “announced” is part of the precession of the simulacra of Sanders as the parody is often done by highlighting the differences between its contemporaries. This, in turn, transforms the idea and identity of the original Sanders into a commodity--one which the company can attach various characteristics and attitudes to achieve the brand identity they desire. In other words, the Derridean center is no longer Sanders himself.
The appeal of Sanders was in part due to his consistency over time (the historical center of which
Derrida speaks). But postmodern advertising has turned time into a hindrance--one that can be overcome with play. This is seen by the fact that KFC has cycled through so many Colonels.
Figure 16. Social Media Colonel Stephens 55
Figure 17. Social Media Colonel Introduction
1KFC's use of postmodern marketing strategies have found an even more suitable home on their social media. In many ways. Their introductory ad is a 9-photo mosaic of a traditional, albeit younger-looking Colonel, each segment containing a recognizable signifier of the original
Colonel Sanders such as his string tie and of course a picture of him holding a bucket of his fried chicken. The first picture of the collage, posted on August 15, 2017, proclaims that there has been an imposter Colonel pretending to be him and that he is the real Colonel. One post reads "I take it as a compliment when those famous Hollywood actors dress up and pretend to be me,
Colonel Sanders." Furthermore, he says "And I've come back to dress up and pretend to be me… which isn't really pretending since I'm really me." This caption is telling of the commodification of the image and human life in late capitalism. This presumably "real" Colonel is claiming that he has "returned" to an environment in which he must dress up as his commodified image to perform himself. This rhetorical move exposes the depth of exploitation the Colonel's image has undergone.
In now proclaiming originality, KFC is calling attention to the way it has commercialized the image of Colonel Sanders for over 20 years. This, however, is a rhetorical sleight of hand. The claim to originality distracts from the fact that KFC has entered a new era in Stephens 56 the commodification of the Colonel's liking through social media. One of the first posts after the collage is a two-sided photo of the living Colonel Sanders in his unadorned office. It's labeled with the hashtag #tbt which stands for Throwback Thursday, an Instagram tradition where users share old photos of themselves on social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram. By sewing these two pictures together, he is, in effect, fusing his former and current self. These photos provide continuity between the once-living Colonel, and the social media representation.
What is also important to highlight is that, even though this Sanders refers to the imposter on television who frequently dress up as him, they are not included in any of the
Instagram posts after August 2015. Thus, the Colonel of the television, appears to be of a separate universe. While bolstering this Colonel's claim to originality, this postmodern strategy also gives Instagram a new terrain in which to explore the life of this Colonel. In fact, the
Instagram posts that follow from 2015 to 2019 create a narrative about the life of the revived spokesman that speaks to the role of technology in co-opting life and image in late capitalist society. Furthermore, the narrative is one of growth and exploration, resulting in a Colonel identity that blends historical and contemporary representations of the spokesman. The theme of reality runs throughout the KFC Instagram posts and the Colonel shows a quality of self- awareness in his constant questioning of what is real and not. The narrative created through these posts symbolizes the way critique is absorbed and monetized in late capitalism.
Earlier, I mentioned how in his introductory collage, the Colonel maintains a self- awareness by calling out celebrity imposters. This strategy speaks to the commodification of the image in postmodern culture. However, I want to underscore the way this potential critique is Stephens 57 further co-opted and monetized through the various Instagram posts which call attention to reality as a technological production. While he calls out others for being fake, he himself engages in activities and strategies that depart from the living Colonel Sanders.
All of his various transformations are driven by commercialism. This narrative represents the Colonel's life such that it is intrinsically bound up with the product. There is no separation between the man and the product himself. No longer is the image the exclusive property of himself but has been commodified for the use of exhaustive corporate branding. The metanarrative of the Instagram posts. KFC as a fungible celebrity. A colonel who is not only self-aware but consenting towards the exploitation of his image. Even the Colonel’s usage of “I” and “me” is supposed to confer a sense of individual agency as he propels himself through space and time in accordance with his own desires. Furthermore, it creates continuity between the living Colonel and this online one, a rhetorical strategy needed to cement him as “real.”
I am particularly concerned with the meta-narrative that is created through the Colonel’s interactions via social media. The staging of the Colonel in different settings signifies the mastery over technologies of representations, as well as signifying the degree to which the brand has control over the image of one individual. This new Colonel has been updated in some ways, and he seems intent on exploring his existence in this new (post)modern world. On March 10th,
2016, KFC posted a picture of the Colonel stylized as a comic superhero here to “save you from even the greatest hungers” with his $5 Fill Ups. A similar post is made over a year later with, teaming up to create a promotion with DC Comics. The post shows him stepping confidently out of a burning building with a crisp white suit and silver hair, diamond-tipped cane in one hand Stephens 58 and a bucket of fried chicken in the other. On Mother’s Day 2017, KFC posts a picture of the cover of a romance novel, with a woman grasping tightly to the hunky Sanders.
Many of these posts seem experimental (i.e. “What if the Colonel were in this reality or that”) in that they aren’t part of an advertising campaign. The advantage of social media is that it is less costly and requires less commitment to create a set of advertisements, allowing the brand to experiment with less risk of damaging brand perception. KFC has garnered a reputation for being outlandish in their marketing so the kind of schizophrenic narrative produced through their social media is more readily accepted. The inconsistent narrative trajectory indicates that there is no larger purpose for the existence of this Colonel other than the concept of play.
Another explicit way the metanarrative of the KFC Instagram page exhibits the mastery over technologies of representation is through the insertion of the present into the past. Earlier, I discussed the way KFC sews the image of the living Colonel working in his office, with a newer
Colonel in his office, and how this pastiche is a postmodern strategy that allows one to play with
Figure 18. #TBT Colonel Photo representations of time and which is used to legitimize the simulacrum of the mechanically reproduced Colonel. The Colonel is engaging in what Lee Humphreys (2018) calls “media accounting,” a concept she develops in her book The Qualified Self. This term can be described Stephens 59 as “the media practices that allow us to document our lives and the world around us, which can then be presented back to ourselves or others.” This post, I argue, is an example of a media accounting that gives the social media Colonel the appearance of reflexivity, thus increasing his claim to subjecthood. By posting this photo, he is claiming ownership over the real Colonel’s experiences and absorbing the real into that which is simulated. Later in her book, she develops the term “remembrancing” used to describe “the creation or use of media traces as part of our memory work regarding ourselves, the people in our lives, and the world around us. In this way, remembrancing is not just static cognition, but something one actively does and engages in.
Fundamentally, remembrancing is about creating and engaging with media traces to help us remember.” This term is similar to Jose van Dijck’s (2007) “mediated memories” (p. 1) which is
“the activities and objects we produce and appropriate by means of media technologies, for creating and re-creating a sense of past, present, and future of ourselves in relation to others. All of these terms are useful for thinking about how KFC uses past images of the Colonel to legitimize the brand's contemporary performance. By integrating past photos, the brand is making a claim about the identity of the Colonel himself—that they have total control over it. No longer is the picture of the Colonel a symbol of himself, his hard work, and ingenuity. Now it exists simply to give credence to the technologically created Colonel.
Figure 19. Colonel and Photoshop Potatoes Stephens 60
Figure 20. Colonel and Photoshop Chicken
Similarly, in August 2017, KFC posted a 5-panel spread of photos combining classic pictures of the Colonel such as him riding atop his Cadillac in a parade, with photoshopped images of fried chicken, cookies, and mashed potatoes. The first picture shows him standing next to a piece of fried chicken that even has a shadow cast behind it as if to convince the viewers of its validity. Another shows him riding atop his car with his legs dangling in a bowl of mash potatoes; and another still, shows his awkwardly hugging a biscuit. The rhetoric of the caption makes the Colonel seem timeless. He talks about “how long it’s been” since “those days” and how he “can’t believe we actually grew up and how much we’ve changed.” This rhetoric frames the Colonel as not only living, but capable of growth and transformation. More explicitly, by making a claim to the original Colonel’s memories, he turns the once-living Colonel into simply a representation of the identity of “Colonel”, rather than the real person himself.
One of the major ways KFC exploits the image of Colonel Sanders is through its attempt to maintain him as a figure or signifier across time. They have accomplished this in part by rendering time as meaningless. By abducting the Colonel from the specific time and place in which he existed, the brand is displaying the process by which subjects become objects in a postmodern world. Walter Benjamin (1936) talks about the loss of historical specificity in The
Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction: Stephens 61
One might subsume the eliminated element in the term “aura” and go on to say: that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art. This is a symptomatic process whose significance points beyond the realm of art. One might generalize by saying: the technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition. By making many reproductions it substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence (section II). Though Benjamin is talking specifically about works of art, I believe his concept of the “aura” shows how Colonel Sanders, who was once a living person with definable features and an ethos, becomes commodified through his multiple reproductions. He was a person of his time, and by copying him through parodies, his aura, the quality that made him unique are lost in favor of a chaotic multiplicity. Social media as a space aids this process. In many ways, social media represents a timeless realm, or at least a realm not as beholden to the construct of time. As such, this revived Colonel can exist in and explore the modern world to his heart’s desire via his projections into exotic environs, which also serve the purpose of mimicking the passage of time and space that is the foundation of modern life. The only recognizable attribute shared with the original colonel is the obsession with chicken. But even this is perverse as the obsession is less with the chicken itself and more with the brand of KFC.
The height of KFC’s postmodern experimentation is their newest major iteration of the
Figure 21. CGI Colonel Stephens 62
Colonel—the CGI social media influencer. This campaign started in April 2019 after the Colonel
“decided” to “Turn [himself] into a digital, computer-generated influencer.” This Colonel was supposed to be a parody on vacuous social media influencers and their attempts to craft aesthetic lifestyles through modern signifiers that lack substance and don’t improve the lives of their followers.
If parody highlights difference and thus creates distance between objects, then the KFC
CGI Colonel is a critique of the vapid nature of influencer culture. However, this parody plays an integral role in the procession of the simulacrum of Colonel Sanders. I will begin with a description of the marketing strategy and its critique at which point my analysis will turn to the way the CGI Colonel himself embodies the very facets of influencer culture and late capitalism it attempts to critique KFC’s new CGI Influencer Colonel Sanders represents the height of Jacques
Baudrillard’s simulacrum. The theory posits that Western culture is increasingly composed of signs and symbols due to the development of reproductive and representational technology. The introductory posts are literally a pastiche of the new Sanders with most of the 9 frames containing some aspect of the CGI spokesperson such as his multiple rings and watch or his stomach tattoo which reads "Secret Recipes for success," a double entendre in reference to their claim to fame secret recipe, as well as a play on similarly obnoxious and out of touch slogans promoted by social media stars. In other words, he is literally made up of signs. He is pictured with the typical disaffected fuckboy pose, black tie hanging around his nearly fully unbuttoned collared shirt. It is clear that the new Sanders is supposed to appeal to a younger demographic, one that probably does not patron KFC as often, but who would recognize these contemporary signifiers. Stephens 63
The hipster Colonel is pictured enjoying the stereotypical activities of a social media celebrity such as doing yoga or boarding a jet or working out. His captions are vapid and a somewhat apparent way of humblebragging. He is so committed to the parody that he rarely mentions chicken, and even then, only in passing. He is mimicking the kinds of vague labor of people who are popular for being popular. In typical social media celebrity fashion, he does, however, promote other brands like Dr. Pepper and TurboTax as he traverses different environments from the board room, to a jet, or an adventure in nature.
These settings are also a comment on the excessively choreographed content produced by social media influencers. In one post he is pictured atop a horse to feel “connected” to nature. In another, he is sitting in a board room at the head of the table with what seem to be partners and advisors. His passions are just as banal as his representation of life. He says of going to the gym,
“Gotta sweat it out and push myself to be the best I can be. And you should too.” In a post that features him next to Joshua Tree, he says, “At Joshua Tree and feeling so spiritually awake.
Being out here really has me connected with no only nature, but myself.” Even his passion for chicken has eroded into lose references of a bygone era. Now his obsession has been replaced with performing the trappings of a virtual influencer.
However, the parody is the point. KFC has relied on a strategy of viral marketing to draw attention to their products. Mocking the lives of social media influencers is a unique way to both take a jab at a seemingly shallow subculture while simultaneously advancing their own interest.
In other words, KFC is calling out influencers for their simulated lifestyle, while at the same time
(outside of the context of the parody itself) participates in and advances many of the marketing strategies used by influencers. Stephens 64
For example, he acts as if the shallow aspects of influencer culture are different from the insidious nature of the advertising industry. The cross-promotional strategy with Dr. Pepper shows this. It is supposed to highlight the not so subtle ways that influencers sneak advertising into pictures, videos, and performances of social media. Yet an investigation of earlier KFC posts such as show that they have an extensive record of cross-promotional activity with brands like People Magazine, the aforementioned DC Comics, and Fear the Walking Dead. Their partnerships with Dr pepper, Casper, and Turbo tax, while appearing to be derision aimed towards influencers, could also reasonably be understood as a genuine cross-promotional ad by
KFC. And in the end, the impact is the same. Whether mocking or sincere, TurboTax was in a position to benefit financially based on the exposure.
It is understandable, then, if the irony was lost on consumers given that the CGI Colonel is an extension of the parody of Sanders himself. In other words, though there are signifiers that indicate who the parody is directed towards, KFC has developed a playful ethos to such a degree that it could reasonably appear to simply be another advertising stunt. As a result, the CGI
Colonel comes off less like a parody of influencers, and more like an experiment in the immortal
Colonel through mastery over technologies of representation. The God-like powers of capitalism are represented through the "autonomy" of the Colonel to transform into various versions of himself.
The parody makes a claim about the representations of life produced by influencer culture, calls out its simulated qualities, and in doing so makes a claim about the CGI’s own legitimacy to existence. The CGI asserts itself as a new standard for influencer labor by highlighting the flaws of human influencers while using postmodern techniques of pastiche to point out its own flexibility and versatility. The CGI's ability to traverse the limits of humanity Stephens 65 by switching from a simulated mask in some posts, to occupying a full CGI manifestation means it can move through time and space in a multitude of ways and thus deliver the same content traditionally produced by human influencers.
The Cyborg Simulacrum
My primary argument is that the CGI Colonel completes the transformation of the original Colonel's identity into a simulacrum. Baudrillard (2019) defines the procession of the simulacra in four or five stages and these stages line up fairly nearly with the transformation of the Colonel.
The first stage is a reflection of a profound reality. I argue that the original KFC ads and commercials represent this first order. Though mediated, the Colonel has relative control over the way his image is projected into mass culture. The second stage masks and denatures a profound reality. Baudrillard describes this stage as "the order or maleficence." I believe the television Colonels in their various iterations reflect this stage as they begin to manipulate his image more commercially. His liking becomes a mockery to be trotted out as a gimmick performed without integrity to the Colonel's real persona. The Colonel still exists, but only as a referent for imitation Colonels. Baudrillard's third phase of the simulacra "masks the absence of a profound reality." The social media Colonel aligns with b this phase based on its claim to originality. In his introductory posts, he claims he is aware of the fraudulent Colonels and that he himself was the true brand representative. His insistence that he is the real hides the fact that there is no Colonel but rather the concept of the Colonel which has been distilled into a commodifiable product. And finally, THE CGI Colonel reaches the climax of the simulacra in that it bears no resemblance to the original Colonel Sanders affectively and materially. He is the Stephens 66 embodiment of the hyper commercialism assemblage of postmodern capitalism, made up of empty signs, exhausted from any meaning or association with the original icon.
Figure 22. Virtual Influencers
Figure 23. Colonel and Tom Green
His transformation into a simulacrum coincides with his transformation into a cyborg.
Another postmodern theorist, Donna Haraway, provides another useful frame for thinking about the implications of the new KFC Colonel. In her essay "A Cyborg Manifesto" Haraway (1991) discusses the way Cyborgs interrupt Western notions of stability and rationality. More specifically, she argues that Cyborgs can either be an extension of the capitalist, patriarchal impulse, or a radical approach to the concept of life and identity. The depictions of the CGI
Colonel straddle these two poles but ultimately resolves this tension in service of late capitalism appropriation. Stephens 67
Haraway defines a cyborg as "cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction" (p. 149) seeing in it, the potential to break down 3 crucial socially construed boundaries: that between humans and animals, human and machine, physical/non physical objects. The CGI Colonel fulfills at least two of these breakdowns. Pictures of this iteration of the Colonel utilize both full CGI technology and blended CGI/human components. Take these two photos. For instance, the photo on the right shows a CGI face projected onto what appears to be a real human body standing next to Tom
Green. To the left is a photo that seems to use CGI to create the Colonel's entire body. He is actually standing next to a virtual influencer. Virtual influencers laid the foundation for this CGI
Colonel’s performance because he draws inspiration from technology but was created to perform the role of an influencer. The combination of human and machine, in this case, represented through a computer-generated image, means that every picture of the Colonel is a new product.
Each configuration offers him new abilities and ways of communicating. He essentially moves about variously adjusting himself to interact with different environments.
The freedom this Colonel enjoys represents the postmodern condition of identity. All of these transformations are a testament to how identity is commodified through technology. The real freedom is by corporate executives who can wield the original Colonel’s image in a way that does not honor him. Postmodernism does provide a level of freedom to the average person. Play functions as a method of sociality and bonding. However, when economic entities take hold of a product like identity, they do so with a strategy of hyper-exploitation. For years after Sanders sold the company, he complained to multiple outlets about the quality of KFC’s food, including the New York Times (1976). A lawsuit was even dropped against him when a franchise accused him of saying their gravy tasted like wallpaper. To continue to use his liking as part of the brand Stephens 68 is in direct opposition to the sentiments KFC has expressed. He gained fame for his personal ethos, which served as a guarantee of the quality of service. However, the current brand strategy includes a whirlwind of chaotic ads one of which features an anthropomorphic Aunt Jemima bottle.
KFC sees social media as an efficient site for the commodification of the Colonel. As I have discussed, social media has influenced the dialectic between consumers and producers.
These platforms have given each party new ways of identity expression. The CGI Colonel is simply an extension of the same advertising logic applied to television. KFC intends to use the
Colonel as a fungible identity, in service of whatever temporary campaign they are employing.
Both examples I use show how companies use social media as a space for experimenting with new forms of identity. IHOP uses the ads on Instagram to perform an ironic hostility towards their customers. I argue, the antagonism they display is tempered by its existence in a postmodern environment where such a tactic would not be taken as abrasively and even fits within other strategies by companies to seem edgy or use shock value. As compared to KFC, they more explicitly acknowledge the shift in power afforded through social media. However,
KFC’s control over the Colonel’s image still symbolizes their master over technologies of representation. Their use of the CGI reiterates the commercialism inherent on social media.
In the first case, IHOP’s form of play pushes the boundary of what is appropriate for a consumer/producer relationship by utilizing postmodern semiotics to induce negative affects in their consumers. The strategy of trolling represents their unwillingness to succumb to criticism by the very consumers they seek to please. In the second case, KFC uses play by introducing the
Colonel to a new mediate environment through their Instagram page. KFC uses the page to Stephens 69 exemplify their mastery over technologies of representation showcased by their co-opting of the living Colonel’s image.
My second chapter uses the Wendy’s RT Challenge as a case study for investigating affective investments between consumers/consumers, consumer/producers. I argue that though
Wendy’s wants to encourage an atmosphere of play, emotional precarity exemplified in the comment section represents a larger uncertainty about the neoliberal socio-economic system. My final chapter shifts focus to a critical race analysis of historical corporate representations. This form of play is centered on commodification and appropriation of racial signifiers and it manifests itself in particular ways on social media. Stephens 70
CHAPTER 3: AFFECT THEORY
The Retweet Challenge
The challenge itself was simple—Carter Wilkerson had to amass 18 million Retweets to win the prize of a year supply of chicken nuggets. Wendy's is utilizing a strategy of viral marketing defined as “unpaid peer-to-peer communication of provocative content originating from an identified sponsor using the Internet to persuade or influence an audience to pass along the content to others” (Lance & Guy, 2006, p. 29). The numbers one must achieve to reach virality are always contingent on several factors but if Wilkerson achieves even a 1/10 of the goal, then it will have been a viral sensation for Wendy's. This viral strategy is nothing new for
Wendy’s in particular and modern corporations in general. As I will discuss in my next chapter,
Wendy’s has utilized many various performances of engagement to cultivate their savvy, relatable, and often ironic persona online. Users have taken notice and enjoy Wendy’s witty retorts with other fast-food companies or consumers. This trend has resulted in Wendy’s gaining
3.7 million followers on Twitter a number far and above many other fast-food chains. Even their
Twitter bio which reads “We like our tweets the same way we like to make our hamburgers; better than anyone expects from a fast food joint,” indicates a desire to accrue financial as well as social capital through their engagements with other social media users. Still, the way Wendy’s advances their economic goals through strategies of sociality reflects the neoliberal moment by commercializing good feelings.
My argument for this chapter is that the Wendy’s RT challenge is representative of contemporary emotional conflicts within the economic and cultural regime of neoliberalism. The structure of the challenge and the resulting discourse mirror themes within neoliberal thought including the emphasis on the individual, the extension of market logic to everyday life resulting Stephens 71 in the eroding boundaries between work and leisure time as well as a focus on efficiency, and the focus on positivity. These tensions ultimately produce the affect of precarity which represents an uneasiness, doubt, or hesitation to invest oneself emotionally in an outcome. I draw heavily on the comparison between New Sincerity which serves as a contrast to the postmodern ironic sentiments. I will begin with an explanation of this challenge through the lens of neoliberal gamification, then proceed to a discussion of Wilkerson as the quintessential neoliberal individual. Following that, I will analyze the impact of positivity as a product of neoliberal discourse and how it is represented through anti-feminist sentiments president in the comment section. I will end this chapter with an analysis of the affective management strategies employed by Wendy’s. My goal in each section is to highlight the discourse between consumers and how it symbolizes the precarity of the moment regarding the agency of the individual and corporation.
Gamification
First, I want to address the competition as an aspect of neoliberalism and I want to do so through the lens of gamification. By gamification I mean “the extension of the principles and mechanics of game-play: rules, points, rewards, leaderboards, and so on into “real-world tasks.”
The primary component of this gamification is the participation of consumers and producers in the form of “play” (Woodcock 2018, p. 204) On social media, play is what creates values whether in the form of memes, videos, viral tweets, or other cultural products. It is primarily the spontaneity between users, driven by a desire to socialize, that makes social media unique, however, that creativity can be co-opted in forms of behavior that are similar to play but serve a commercial purpose.
Roger Caillois’s (2001) distinction between paidia and ludus as forms of play is helpful for thinking about how play is incorporated into neoliberalism. Of paidia and ludus, Caillois Stephens 72 writes "At one extreme an almost indivisible principle, common to diversion, turbulence, free improvisation, and carefree gaiety is dominant. It manifests a kind of uncontrolled fantasy that can be designated by the term paidia. At the opposite extreme, this frolicsome and impulsive exuberance is almost entirely absorbed or disciplined by a complementary, and in some respects inverse, tendency to its anarchic and capricious nature: there is a growing tendency to bind it with arbitrary, imperative, and purposely tedious conventions, to oppose it still more by ceaselessly practicing the most embarrassing chicanery upon it, in order to make it more uncertain of attaining its desired effect. This latter principle is completely impractical, even though it requires an ever greater amount of effort, patience, skill, or ingenuity. I call this second component ludus” (13).
The everyday activities of social media users are characterized by the paidia impulse. The creation of hashtags in response to current events such as 2017’s #NiggerNavy which formed after Yahoo! tweeted a misprinted headline or the use of response memes or gifs are examples of paidia. The randomness of Wilkerson's request and the challenge itself is a feature of paidia.
However, given that this challenge has an objective goal and rules, it does possess elements of ludus. More specifically, Wendy's takes the playful ethos of social media and disciplines it by directing it towards a particular goal. It takes naturally occurring phenomena like sharing and transforms into a methodical, calculated business decision. This strategy speaks to the eliding division between work and play. Fuchs (2013) writes "Users are productive consumers who produce commodities and profit – their user labour is exploited. But this exploitation does not feel like toil, it is rather more like play and takes place during leisure time outside of wage labour
– it is unpaid labour and play labour. As a consequence, labour time is extended to leisure time and leisure time becomes labour time” (p. 16). Stephens 73
As this division collapses, user-generated content becomes an unpaid commodity for companies to exploit: "In addition to the perception of empowered users across a variety of technologically mediated settings, ‘web 2.0’ reflects a new web-based marketing approach that strategically employs user-generated content in the production and targeting of commercial messages." (Manzarolle 2010, p. 462). In this way, by showing support for Wilkerson (play) their online actions further the economic motives of Wendy's (work).
The tensions between paidia and ludus as expressed through the kinds of actions users engage in on social media result in part from creative and cultural work which features distinctly within the neoliberal economy and which ultimately produces precarious subjects. In this case, I believe the term “prosumer” best describes this uncertain position. For this project, prosumption
“involves both production and consumption rather than focusing on either one (production) or the other (consumption)… especially those associated with the internet and Web 2.0” (Ritzer
2010, p. 14). Everyday examples include using self-checkout at the grocery store, or using a kiosk to order food at a restaurant. Many people regard these options as conveniences that serve them in saving time or energy:
Traditional prosumers being handed an empty cup and being forced to fill it – some-times over and over – at the soda fountain in a fast food restaurant not only gives them the possibility of more soda at the same price, but also empowers them so that they can decide how much, if any ice, they want, as well as giving them the ability to create unique concoctions of various soda flavors (p. 25).
Still, as much opportunity is afforded the prosumer, companies have the potential to benefit unequally from this structural engagement. Neoliberalism’s ability to co-opt positive social behaviors between users towards an economic ends places the user as generating excess value that winds up in the hands of producers. Social media users are often aware of this as it relates to Stephens 74 journalism. Sites like Buzzfeed and Upworthy especially, use tweets from users, often without their knowledge meaning that users are being drawn into the process of commercial production, generating value without a possibility of economic benefit. Yes, users enjoy the freedom that comes with producing content for an audience of friends and followers, and this is to not be discounted. But as Fuchs argues, “ …social media has become a field of play” between users who interact in ways that produce spontaneous value. Neoliberal approaches to the economy have produced subjects that at once can be producers and consumer—prosumers—through the alchemic transformation of their leisurely activities into a commercial strategy. This strategy is ultimately exploitation of time, as it turns the radical potential of free time into another capitalistic enterprise.
My argument is that users sense the precarious state, and even more specifically, they connect this precarity with time itself—whether the time they have invested is wasted or not. As a result, the focus on time turns into an obsession with efficiency, which represents another aspect of neoliberal ideology. As de Lissavoy (2013) notes, "Demanding a reconstruction of social relationships on the basis of competition and efficiency, neoliberalism expects public life generally… to understand its principal elements and activities either as inputs or products” (423).
This efficiency is not based on equality or social good but rather private capital accumulation through "deregulation of business, privatization of public activities and assets, elimination of or cutbacks in social welfare programs, and reduction of taxes on businesses and the investing class” (64). What this results in is a system whereby consumers generate value for an ever- smaller group of people, while benefiting less and less from the value they create.
I want to connect the drive for efficiency with the decreasing return on investment experienced by the neoliberal subjects in the market with Wendy's and the free advertising Stephens 75 created on their behalf. Efficiency in this context is about whether users feel the value they generate is rewarded in kind. In this case, that means whether or not their efforts are making it more possible for Wilkerson to reach his goal. But efficiency also refers to one element by which the success of Wendy's strategy is measured as a product of revenue over time as compared to production cost, which in the context of social media, is very little.
In other words, users express sentiments indicating that they are unsure whether or not their actions are being considered equitably but because of their precarious position as prosumer they are unable to secure that certainty, take for instance these sets of tweets. These calculations serve as ways to structure their affective investments. By adhering to a rationalist logic, users can
Figure 24. Tweet Convo 1
Figure 25. Tweet Convo 2
Figure 26. Tweet Convo 3 Stephens 76 determine whether to place their hopes into Wilkerson or to retreat into cynicism. Take for example the following set of tweets:
The above tweets make a technical calculation regarding the possibility of Wilkerson reaching his goal. These tweets signify just one of the ways that users are regulating the concepts of possibility and fairness. The user in Figure 24 indicates that she was curious as to whether or not 18 million was a number that could be reached until she googled the number of world-wide
Twitter users which far outweighs the amount Wilkerson needed. She hedges her bets and must secure a certain level of confidence before she can be hopeful or optimistic. The user in Figure
25 makes a similar transition once he googles the number of Twitter users stating: “Cmon people help them man get his nuggets” (2017). This phrasing indicates that the user thinks the odds are in Wilkerson’s favor to get “his nuggets” and since it is, in theory, a number that could be reached. Figure 26 depicts another kind of calculation that runs throughout the comment section, in which a user takes the number of retweets at the time they posted as a way of making a statement on the possibility of pushing past that limit. The user in this figure calculates the number of current retweets at 3.6 million, which is 1/5th of the way there and amounts to a certain percentage of the year’s supply of chicken nuggets. These calculations serve as a way to constantly evaluate the fairness of the challenge. These considerations feature heavily in tweets that are explicitly skeptical or dismissive regarding Wilkerson’s chances. These users are treading lightly before they fully invest in the possibility of Wilkerson reaching his goal. For them, they need some level of certainty, and that comes in the form of calculations and odds.
What is expressed, then, is an anxiety over the status of the prosumer in the neoliberal economy. In some ways, users agree that there is some level of exploitation occurring in this process. However, the tensions arise from whether Wendy’s will base Wilkerson’s success off of Stephens 77 his ability to reach the proposed number of retweets in the most literal manner, or if they will acknowledge the labor performed by both Wilkerson and other users by conceding some kind of prize, whether in the form of the full year’s supply or some fraction of it based on a number of retweets.
Furthermore, as a result of this skeptical approach, the idea of fairness is a major theme that traverses these comments. They are expressed through comments such as one asking
Wendy's which specific tweet to retweet such that Wilkerson would get the maximum impact of his petition. Many users see themselves as regulating how this game is conducted, fashioning themselves as referees who ultimately determine the equity of the challenge. And in many respects, they are correct. As I will discuss in my analysis of Wendy's Tweets, they have multiple investments in the rollout of this marketing scheme, not the least of which is making it appear fair and transparent.
Their long-term strategy is an increase in consumers /profit, however, this strategy is both enacted through and masked by the affective structure of communication. Put simply, Wendy's cannot appear to be leveraging their power in any way to disrupt Wilkerson's potential to reach the stated goal. The fix cannot be in, as would be the postmodern position, as that would surely instigate a negative affective relationship to the brand. One of the first tweets Wendy's sends out is in response to a user who was enlisting others to help Wilkerson because he only had 5k retweets. Without prompt, Wendy's responds saying they will use another tweet of Wilkerson's as the metric since it has more retweets. Add the smiling sunglass emoji and you have a formula for authentic-looking consumer engagement. That they voluntarily choose the other tweet is a recognition that they prioritize how users view the structure of the game. Additionally, they earn some social capital by seeming to not, at the very least, being a hindrance to Wilkerson's pursuit. Stephens 78
Evidence of how invested people were in this challenge are comments from people watching or “checking back” to see the results:
@Lindsay_Henry: “I need an update on this guy. DID HE GET FREE NUGGS FROM WENDY’S OR WHAT?”
@slypig89: “I’ve been watching religiously…I haven’t been this emotionally invested since the UW Madison Snapchat saga” These comments are proof that Wendy’s marketing strategy is working. They are expressing an
Figure 27. Tweet Convo 4
Figure 28. Tweet Convo 5 investment of personal time and energy in both their promotion of Wilkerson and their lingering Stephens 79 desires to see him win. This waiting is in itself, a type of precarity because it involves the deferment of pleasure or excitement until such time that Wilkerson reaches his goal.
Furthermore, this waiting is extended by the fact that, as far as most users might have assumed,
Wendy’s was not going to decrease the required number of retweets, meaning if users were hoping he would reach 18 million, they did so knowing it would take a significant amount of time. Yes, there is room for faith, but it is the very battle between faith and pessimism (or even ignorance) that produces the feeling of precarity. Checking back works to confirm whether or not their original emotional investments have paid off. It also confirms that their status as prosumers produces a good they can benefit from, even if it simply a feeling of positivity. At this point, users’ faith in the neoliberal system, the system that currently produces the relationship between consumer and producer, may be reaffirmed both because their efforts were recognized, and because of the relaxation of the original game parameters. In neoliberal gamification, measurements serve as an arbiter of equity and fairness, which in turn structure the affective engagement of consumers and brands.
Neoliberalism and Individualism
In the previous section, I argued that neoliberalism co-opts the play that occurs between users on social media and disciplines it towards a commercial end, thus creating subjects who act as both consumer and producer. This state of precarity, or uncertainty, is expressed through intense calculations and measurements that determine the affective orientations of users towards particular outcomes—in this case, the odds of Wilkerson reaching his goal. For this section, I want to talk about neoliberalism’s emphasis on the individual and how Wilkerson embodies the characteristics of the ideal neoliberal subject. His everyman identity is used to inculcate users Stephens 80 into a sense of comfort and support for both Wilkerson and the Wendy’s brand, who by extension, gains social currency through their wager with Wilkerson.
First, regarding the individual, "Neoliberalism as an ideology valorizes autonomy as a state of being and as an ethics of self-interest and personal responsibility exclusively” (Wrenn,
2017. p. 499). If we think about the RT challenge as a microcosm for social mobility, then the individual is responsible for exercising their presumed agency to reach a certain class or economic status. Furthermore, "the individual is taught that to have a responsibility for the care of others diminishes one’s own identity, constraining the possibilities of the responsible individual. If, under neoliberalism, the market mentality dominates all other spheres of living, then that collective social identity is circumscribed by neoliberalism as well” (p. 501) The result of this focus on the individual is that attention is drawn away from structural injustices. The individual, then, is the foci of affective investments in neoliberal economics meaning the individual stands as confirmation of the fidelity of the system. The individual encapsulates all that is possible and achievable within the socio-economic system.
In More Beautiful and More Terrible: The Embrace and Transcendence of Racial
Inequality in the United States, Imani Perry (2011) discusses the effect of neoliberal exceptionalism as it relates to race:
For exceptionalized Blacks, the Barack Obamas and the Oprah Winfreys of the world, the rhetorical shape of their successes are often “success against odds” stories that operate as positive, yet exceptionalizing racial narratives. Their stories can say, “If you work hard, racism will not affect you” or “Look at the ascent of this person; clearly there is no racism.” Rarely are they deployed to say, “African Americans are doing great things for this nation.” But they could (p. 47)
Perry’s observations are of particular use because it highlights the way the neoliberalism makes
“exceptions” out of marginalized people to reify itself as a fair and equitable system. This Stephens 81 exceptionalism is supposed to override the precarity of neoliberal economics, where insecurity and anxiety describe the affective experiences of a significant number of workers. Consumers and workers use the image of the exception as a reaffirmation of their faith and serves as a site of personal affective investments.
Wendy’s capitalizes on the strategy of exceptionalism by selecting Wilkerson as worthy of an opportunity for elevated social status and celebration. We can also think about Wilkerson as the quintessential neoliberal entrepreneur. He is tasked with finding 18 million people who would freely help him towards his goal. On one hand, Wilkerson shows his entrepreneurial spirit by even asking in the first place, and then again when he so readily accepts the challenge. The work he does in the comment section by interacting with other users and tagging celebrities puts his efforts on display. At one point, Wendy's even tweets that he has moxie, meaning determination, or will power. On the other hand, it is reflective of our neoliberal economy that his individual efforts are celebrated because capitalism emphasizes the power of the individual.
This is symbolic of the way our culture often celebrates those who overcome the inequality of our economic system. Rather than addressing systemic issues, we highlight their ability to endure systemic bias. His entrepreneurial spirit transforms him into a micro-celebrity of sorts.
Microcelebrity is another lens to view Wilkerson in because it shows, again, how he used his human capital to advance his cause. This term, coined by scholar Crystal Abidin, is used to describe a host of smaller personalities, who have carved spaces of notoriety for themselves whether online or off. As Angela Cirucci argues, the structure and affordances of social media mean it tends to make subjects into micro-celebrities. She says, “friending, liking, posting images, etc. – may be more founded in celebrification than it is in socialization, merely due to the norms and expectations promoted through the space’s template.” Cirucci is interested in how Stephens 82
“The guiding structures and values that support microcelebrity practices are also guiding
“regular,” everyday users through a process of unintentional celebrification” (p. 42). Though it is only temporary, through this challenge, Wilkerson gains a following that is supportive in his efforts. As his tweet spreads, so does he and his story and the various narratives attached to him.
The structure of social media makes it such that he can gain notoriety within a few hours based on hashtags and trending topics. His exceptionalism is underscored more by the fact that he was unknown, and yet was able to find a way to mobilize his own human capital to encourage people to follow him.
However, a tension appears to exist because although Wilkerson is “exceptional” due to his individual entrepreneurial spirit, he is still seen as capable of representing the hopes and dreams of a subset of consumers. This tension is resolved in some ways through the affective intensities produced from the New Sincerity movement. New Sincerity relies on a logic of altruism and authenticity, thus even though Wilkerson is the only consumer who stands to gain from this challenge, users may feel encouraged to participate because of their attachments to him. Like workers in the labor market, consumers demonstrate a willingness to place their hopes
Figure 29. Tweet Convo 6 into a singular figure as a way of dealing with the precarity of modern capitalism. Stephens 83
The conversation below demonstrates the kind of optimistic investments some users have in the outcome of the challenge. Wilkerson's success, according to the user, is more valuable for its symbolism. "The Hometown Hero" overcoming the Goliathan forces of a commercial entity to come out on top. The user mentions that Reno would probably give him the key to the city.
Even when the other user expresses doubt about the possibility of it happening, the opposing user is not speaking in realistic terms. Their affective investments are more abstract than the specifics of the challenge itself. It is about reentering the power and influence of the individual and communal rather than massive corporate or governmental institutions. When they say that Reno could even give Wilkerson the key to the city, it represents a reoriented value system where local and community recognition is more important.
Furthermore, they frame Wilkerson's goal as the American Dream. While this could be read as irony induced hyperbole, I believe an alternative reading is helpful here as well. It seems ironic that in today's society of ever-increasing focus on luxury and wealth, that the feeling of satisfaction from life would come from chicken nuggets. By framing the American Dream as a year’s supply of chicken nuggets, this comment represents the intersection of postmodern skepticism about such concepts as the American Dream, and New Sincerity which positions life's simple pleasures as the dream. So here the irony is not used to impose a pessimistic tone on the retweet challenge, but to actually legitimize the pursuit by connecting it with a larger more salient goal of the American Dream. Extending this comparison more, it also true that abundance is a theme of the American Dream--an abundance of wealth, land, and opportunity.
However, this user's comments subvert the traditional understanding of the American
Dream by positioning a year's supply of chicken nuggets as a supplement to that dream. While his comments to some may represent a blasphemous subversion of a sacred concept, I argue that Stephens 84 the comments represent a disavowal of the thus far debunked notion of the American Dream in
Figure 30. Twitter Story Screenshot search of something more attainable albeit more ephemeral. Interestingly enough, even Twitter utilizes this hyperbolic language on their trending topics page shown below: Even calling him a
“man” ironically elevates his task to that of a Herculean status. noteworthy that Twitter uses this language when promoting this tweet. It frames Wilkerson and his mission as universally relatable. Wilkerson’s mission, which characterizes his identity as an everyman. is used to induce support for his cause, despite the impossibility of shared benefit. Users who share the tweet presumably have some kind of emotional orientation regarding the challenge or the actors involved. By sharing, they are signaling to their own followers their particular affective attachments. According to Ho (2010), this affection is rooted in altruism, a quality that is integral to the success of the challenge. Even though retweeting is a basic function of Twitter, the act of sharing a post on which you are not the recipient of the prize requires a level of altruism. The collective efforts to help Wilkerson succeed represent a particular emotional zeitgeist that is embodied through the New Sincerity ethos. Altruism, a trait that runs counter to capitalist Stephens 85 impulse, is a feature of New Sincerity and acts as a bulwark against the selfish and exploitative nature of late capitalism.
Neoliberal Positivity
Finally, the last aspect of neoliberalism that is represented through this challenge is the obsession with positivity. This positivity is an extension of the emphasis on the individual and the personal responsibility logic where users are led to believe they contain within themselves the power to change their material circumstances or mental circumstances. Positivity works to reduce the precarity caused by the uncertainty of difference. This focus on happiness is, as
Catherine Kingfisher (2013) notes, “Driven in part by the newly emergent sub-disciplines of positive psychology and happiness economics, and highlighted in local, national, and international fora, these new engagements with happiness signal a paradigm shift in orientations to governance – to work on society and work on the self.” This happiness has pervaded virtually every aspect of our culture from self-help books on positive thinking to its alternative manifestations in the form of wellness and fitness cultures.
Sarah Banet-Weiser (2015) discusses girl empowerment as fitting within a similar neoliberal context. She argues that “GEOs [girl empowerment organizations] emerge in force in the twenty-first century in part because girls are seen as ‘in crisis’ in the contemporary moment, a crisis that finds purchase in education, policy, personal self-esteem and what is being coined a gendered ‘confidence gap” (p. 182). This gendered perspective will become more relevant later, but what I aiming to show is that neoliberalism perpetuates an ideology of personal responsibility that constructs the market as a solution to disparities in the emotional qualities of individuals.
Despite economic and social issues causing negative psychological impacts, “the future of successful capitalism depends on our ability to combat stress, misery, and illness, and put Stephens 86 relaxation, happiness and wellness in their place. Techniques, measures, and technologies are now available to achieve this, and they are permeating the workplace, the high street, the home and the human body” (p. 10)
I am tempted to make a distinction between New Sincerity and the positivity culture I am referencing, though they may end up being more similar than different. Even though New
Sincerity “emerged in the 1990s as a response to the decline of postmodernism and the rise of neoliberalism” (Odell 2019, p. 448), one could argue that it has found itself co-opted by the system it attempts to resist through shallow platitudes offered as a solution to structural discrimination and violence. As Scharff (2016) says, “Some contours of entrepreneurial subjectivity, such as having a positive attitude, are depoliticizing. When positive attitudes are valued at the expense of anger or despair, critique and the impetus to change something other than the self have little use-value” (p. 113). Furthermore, Jackson and Nicholas-Roberts (2017) describe the tension between New Sincerity and postmodernism as “Wallace’s desire to generate sincere affect without dismissing postmodern irony’s critique of transparent communication, and the affectless self-consciousness that this critique apparently creates (2).” In other words, New
Sincerity attempts to discuss the joy found in life while acknowledging but not addressing the structural inequalities that exist. Though just a sub-set of my argument, throughout the following examples, I will hopefully generate a clearer picture regarding the differences and similarities of
New Sincerity and positivity culture and whether New Sincerity can serve as a liberating or conformist belief system.
The following express, in some way or another, a tension between hope and doubt, optimism and pessimism, and ultimately New Sincerity and postmodernism. The focus on positivity extends from a neoliberal discourse that says possibility rests in the mental capacity of Stephens 87 the individual to believe or have faith. When they bear out, they have the potential to create affective utopias. However, as I will articulate drawing from the anti-feminist comments present under Wilkerson’s post, these utopias are often about whose voices they exclude. Differences in opinion regarding faith, logic, and possibility create a precarious atmosphere where these competing affects structure the discourse between users and themselves as well as their communication with Wendy’s.
I begin with a lighthearted exchange that nonetheless demonstrates the way conflict between hope and pessimism. One user wishes that Wilkerson stopped one short of the 18 million retweet mark. Another user responded with a screenshot of an article stating that
Wilkerson, despite not reaching the goal, gets his nuggs anyway, to which the original poster responded "rats."
@joeontour: “I genuinely hope it stops one short. I’m willing to bet you do too” @TILolmirein: “Unlucky you @joeontour: “Rats” The OPs comment is a bit sardonic in nature as it hopes Wilkerson progresses as close to the goal as possible, only to fall short by one tweet. The scenario he projects is ultimately one
Figure 31. Tweet Convo 7 where grassroots hope and optimism are defeated by insurmountable economic forces. Ironically Stephens 88 enough, the user employs the language of New Sincerity i.e. "genuinely" to communicate his doubt about Wilkerson's prospects, going so far as to say he's willing to bet which is another sign of his ironic sincerity) that Wilkerson does fall short by one. The upshot in this scenario however is in favor of proponents of New Sincerity, as Wilkerson receives the nuggets, not based on having reached the goal, which he failed to do, but because he tried! He put forth the effort and was rewarded according to how sincerely he engaged with a challenge that even he must have known was not likely to be accomplished.
It is also fascinating to observe the cynicism at "play" in the comment section. Within the comments, some users expressed doubt about the chances of the tweet reaching the requisite amount, claiming that it would be nearly impossible to beat the likes of Ellen whose selfie received almost 3.5 million retweets. One user, Jon Acuff, NYT best-selling author expressed some doubt about reaching the goal. Others chimed in saying "records were made to be broken."
This comment fits within the framework of New Sincerity because it values this achievement for the simple pleasure of helping someone get chicken nuggets.
It is also important to juxtapose the tweet of Wilkerson vs The Oscar’s Selfie as they represent different modes of virality. Ellen and her selfie crashed the internet earning thousands of retweets a minute as one point. The selfie, taken at the Oscar's and adorned with likable figures like Bradley Cooper and Meryl Streep, quickly became the most retweeted tweet at the time in part for its quirky and relatable authenticity, embodied through Ellen, despite its obviously sophisticated setting. This image of Hollywood condensed within a picture and spread freely and quickly across the internet is representative of a celebrity fueled culture where recognition of stars and figures provides a stimulus for sociality. Furthermore, these celebrities have a built-in infrastructure that allows for their media to go viral. In other words, while the feat Stephens 89 is impressive, it is still within the realm of what is "possible" and thus not representative of any sort of unique combination of effort and quality.
As compared to the Oscar Selfie, Carter Wilkerson represents the everyman--instead of ornate dreams of making it big in his career, Wilkerson's mission is a simple one--not to become famous or rich. Furthermore, Wilkerson’s diminutive status as a high schooler with glasses, curly hair, and visible acne frames him as a relatable, and thus worthy of positive affective investments. Furthermore, his being a white male makes him, at least in the American context, as universally empathetic. In contrast to my next chapter which discussed the use of racial performances as a way to symbolize “coolness” or modernity (by Wendy’s themselves),
Wilkerson rests on the opposite end of the spectrum, embodying a persona of authenticity and
Figure 32. Local News Tweet sincerity.
Interestingly enough, Wilkerson does garner some level of fame, as his local news station posted a story of Wilkerson being interviewed shortly after the beginning of this challenge. So, the invocations of the hometown hero is not unfounded.
It is the very simplicity of this goal that inspires other people to support him in his efforts.
And beyond support, the words of encouragement posted by users positions Wilkerson's win as one they are personally invested regardless if they get to share in the prize or not. Wilkerson's eventual success can be interpreted as a moment whereby grassroots efforts by users resulted in Stephens 90 the overturning of a particular model of social media stardom. Still, Acuff persists adding that he would give the user who tagged him 100 dollars if Wilkerson reached his goal. Even his financial offer is littered with doubt as he doesn't expect that he'll have to cough up the money.
However, one comment under the tweet captures the tension between the folksy optimism of users and the perceived obsession with celebrity culture. Which one has the more power to move culture? Who user added "Not everyone likes those celebrities. Everyone likes when random dudes on the internet get free nuggets for a year." The user's position is that Wilkerson can reach his goal because he and his desires are more relatable to the average person than a selfie with people whose combined net worth span the billions of dollars.
It is clear that within the space of the challenge, and the more specifically the space of the comments, users see this as a kind of Utopia where good feelings like faith and sincerity reign. I want to contrast the precarity produced from differences in opinion—skepticism vs. hope—and the Utopic discourse conveyed in the comments. The following statement from a user sums up the larger implications of this strain of positivity:
“This reminds me of old times…better times, when I believed in absolutes, black and
whites, when I hadn’t been forced to recognize the greys to survive yet….before 200
followers and before 280 characters. This reminds me of a time…when I last smiled with
genuine intention” (2017).
Their tweet indicates a desire to return to a simpler time, one defined by a belief in absolutes. While it is not clear what specific time the user is talking about, it is problematic that they believe a world of absolutes is better. However, this also speaks to the precarity users feel in a dynamic political and social environment. The image of such a world is nearly child-like, and he even alludes to recognizing the grey as a survival skill, meaning to grow up, one has to accept Stephens 91 the world is not as simple as was perhaps taught. Still, they express delight in the possibility of a return to such a state of innocence. But there is an alternative interpretation. A more generous reading of this user’s tweet is as an expression of a desire for unproblematic joy. That said, New
Sincerity is necessary because it reminds us that happiness can and should be strived for even during a contentious cultural climate. One can be hopeful and optimistic without being ignorant or purposefully blind to important issues.
Finally, before I turn to the section of Wendy’s strategy of affective management, another interesting phenomenon that played out in the comment section included people debating the logic of feminism. It is easy to miss the origins of this issue but it actually began when
Wilkerson tagged @MeninistTweets under his tweet. Meninist is a subversion of feminism and refers to people who advocate on behalf of men and who generally mock feminism. It mostly has a pejorative association which explains why people reacted so negatively to him tagging a page
Figure 33. Carter Tagging Celebrities
Figure 34. Sarcastic Patriarchy Tweet
Figure 35. Pro- Feminist Tweet Stephens 92 like that. As a result, a debate ensues about social justice under a post about chicken nuggets.
Figure 36. Feminist Tweet Question I point this out to discuss how the introduction of a controversial topic interferes with the intended affective structure of this dialogue. Other users have invested in this challenge as a kind of utopic space where people of disparate political and social interests can come together in support of chicken nuggets. Some users are bewildered to find out that such an intense conversation is occurring under this tweet. Some users noted the contrasts between the light- hearted efforts of Wilkerson and the serious political discussion about feminism. The comment that says "Already we brought politics into this" is a common refrain offline and online. If New
Sincerity is an optimistic attitude towards life and society, then the invocation of feminism or anti-feminism, in this case, is a reminder of the polemical debates that structure cultural discourses. The kind of deterministic undertone of “we brought politics into this” is indicative of a particular emotional orientation. This perspective says that even in such a positive and affirming space, the politics of difference always exists as a specter representing the potential for conflict.
Sarah Ahmed’s “Notes from a Feminist Killjoy” has many insights to offer about the figure of woman as an interrupter to joy. She says, “Sometimes being a feminist killjoy can feel like you are getting in the way of your own happiness; and if happiness means not noticing the injustices around us, so be it.” The act of noticing and calling out is two step-process involving intention. In this case, it means users could have chosen to ignore the fact that Wilkerson tagged
@Meninist, or could have chosen not to acknowledge it, and by doing so, introduce a negative Stephens 93 affective charge within the discourse. There is an impulse to designate this space as politics-free, but in speaking of the specific consequences of this purposeful ignorance, Ahmed warns,
Just think of the labor of critique that is behind us: feminist critiques of the figure of "the happy housewife;" Black critiques of the myth of "the happy slave"; queer critiques of the sentimentalisation of heterosexuality as "domestic bliss." The struggle over happiness provides the horizon in which political claims are made. We inherit this horizon.
Additionally, Ahmed’s discussion of the Black woman in (white) feminist politics serves as an anchor to think about the “intrusion” of feminism into this Utopic space. She observes,
“The angry black woman can be described as a killjoy… she may even kill feminist joy, for example, by pointing out forms of racism within feminist politics.” Ahmed’s point works wells as a point of comparison between the feel-good sentiments produced in the RT challenge, and the seemingly objectively positive prospect of equality for women. These descriptions are incomplete—gaps--, and it is when those who are made absent by these gaps appear that the affective politics of positivity are disrupted.
What is the larger meaning of the observations I have brought to bear? Is this simply another example of the toxicity of social media and its tendency to promote anti-feminist politics? In part, yes. Social media like Twitter, Reddit, and more insidiously, 4chan, and 8chan, have given a platform to misogynist to organize online. As much as the comments above cast the feminist comments as an interruption, incels, meninist, and other male-oriented hate groups are often the ones who disrupt the joy and fun of feminist activities (see: gamergate). But the previous example also speaks to the belief in the possibility of a unified cultural discourse. For me, Lauren Berlant’s Cruel Optimism (2012) speaks to the tensions that exist between these particular users. I want to argue that what produces this precarity is the idea and awareness of Stephens 94 difference. This difference in either identity or viewpoint creates uncertainty regarding allegiance and loyalty. Berlant describes cruel optimism in these very terms:
Whatever the experience of optimism is in particular, then, the affective structure of an optimistic attachment involves a sustaining inclination to return to the scene of fantasy that enables you to expect that this time, nearness to this thing will help you or a world to become different in just the right way. But, again, optimism is cruel when the object/scene that ignites a sense of possibility actually makes it impossible to attain the expansive transformation for which a person or a people risks striving; and, doubly, it is cruel insofar as the very pleasures of being inside a relation have become sustaining regardless of the content of the relation, such that a person or a world finds itself bound to a situation of profound threat that is, at the same time, profoundly confirming. (p. 2)
Wilkerson’s challenge requires a certain amount of loyalty and because users may identify with him (for the reasons stated earlier), by seeking to disrupt his potential, other users may view this as an affront to their efforts, and more importantly, the affective investments they have placed into Wilkerson and the challenge itself. Managing this loyalty is difficult when the challenge ostensibly requires 18 million retweets. As the comments are a necessary component of spreading this challenge, it also requires the mingling of people with different opinions. To state it plainly, the very factors that make it necessary for Wilkerson to win, are the very factors that provide a challenge to his success.
While this utopic space has many challenges to it including the affects of doubt and pessimism, cultural orientations like postmodernism, and the invocation of anti-feminist politics, it is the job of Wendy’s to manage the overall affect of the comments and the challenge itself. In this final section of the chapter, I discuss the strategies Wendy’s employs to manage the emotions of users commenting on the post which ultimately shapes their overall perceptions.
Managing Affect
Perhaps the first hurdle Wendy’s must overcome in their effort to manage affect is the outrageous number they propose. This number is surely responsible for some of the anxiety Stephens 95 expressed in the earlier section on neoliberal calculations and efficiency. Because users have no reason to think Wendy’s would ultimately give Wilkerson his nuggs, some users become obsessed with the literal number of retweets at any one moment. Additionally, because the number is so high, this might create hostility between users and Wendy’s as they see the company as setting him up to faith with an impossibly high task. Thus, it is the role of Wendy’s, if they seek to accrue the social capital available to them via social media, they must align themselves as closely to as possible. They pose themselves as a temporary antagonist in the form of the challenge itself, only to occupy the position as a cheerleader.
Increasingly this is becoming a task that must be mediated through the digital world. In
Affective Labor, Michael Hardt (1999) argues that immaterial labor has become a feature of capitalist exploitation. Emotional or affective labor is categorized as immaterial "even if it is corporeal and affective, in the sense that its products are intangible: a feeling of ease, well-being, satisfaction, excitement, passion-even a sense of connected-ness or community” (p. 96) during the execution of this challenge, which occurs over the span of days and weeks, Wendy's must consistently monitor the sentiments of user comments. Though affective labor is associated with the service industry and in-person interactions, increasingly "that contact can be either actual or virtual. In the production of affects in the entertainment industry, for example, the human contact, the presence of others, is principally virtual, but not for that reason any less real” (p. 96)
As an ongoing affair, the Wendy's SMM most monitor, as much as possible, for a negative sentiment that may impact the spirit of the challenge or the brand itself. Many of the comments from the Wendy’s account represent their attempts to maintain an atmosphere of levity, despite user cynicism. It also is indicative of the relationship that consumers have with producers. Stephens 96
In some ways, the proposition to reach such a high-number backfires as the high number becomes the foci of the challenge for some users rather than the affective experience Wendy’s is attempting to generate. They spend a lot of time trying to manage the doubt that users express.
Despite knowing that Wilkerson reaching 18 million retweets is extremely unlikely, they must perform "sincerity" to give the impression that Wilkerson had a chance. There are numerous instances of Wendy's responding to people expressing doubt. They write comments like "that's the spirit there" or "it can definitely happen." These comments are a periodic reminder that the bet is in fact REAL, but also position Wendy's as almost altruistic in their attempts to aid
Wilkerson. In reality, Wendy's has a stake in the number of retweets as that translates into free advertising for them. But they are also assuming an affective position that aligns with Wilkerson himself. It allows Wendy's to appear accessible and down to earth like most of its consumers. If, for instance, Wendy's responded with a more cynical tone, it might have encouraged others to retweet Wilkerson more to prove them wrong, but it might have produced a negative affect of resentment towards Wendy’s for proposing such an impossible challenge.
In some cases, they directly draw from the language of New Sincerity to reply to consumers.
1. @BenBriggs34: “@Wendy’s I bet @McDonalds would give him the nugget for the effort. Quit slacking. (2017) @Wendy’s: “Just be patient, have faith, and let a beautiful thing happen” (2017) 2. @calekiekhaefer2: @Wendy’s lower this for this man (2017) @ Wendy’s: “He’s doing well. Don’t doubt the hustle” (2017) And another user even compliments the way Wendy’s is managing expectations. On that same thread user @Seth_Kaplan writes, “Wendy’s is playing this perfectly” (2017). After posing such a challenge, it might have seemed cold and almost cruel to abandon Wilkerson in his efforts to meet the goal. In some ways, this constant encouragement is a manifestation of knowledge they already possess. If it is true that Wilkerson was going to receive the nuggets all along, and that Stephens 97 they knew that, then their behavior in the comment section makes sense. Knowing that
Wilkerson probably will not reach his goal, they have to perform sincerity such that they are not depicted as unfair. Their unwillingness to budge on the number is not about being stingy, but rather they know this number will serve as a motivation. It’s almost as if they placed the number that high such that it would be impossible to reach because the point of the tweet was not to reach the goal, but all the free advertising, creative communication, and levity that it brought. In other words, there are no opposing sides, just a continuum of positive relationality. It also ultimately makes them look good if, despite Wilkerson failing to reach his goal, they are seen as encouraging others to participate. It is especially beneficial for the brand since they did give
Wilkerson his prize even after failing to meet the goal.
Further proof of this continuum of relationality is how the brand aligns itself with
Wilkerson through the phrasing of “our boy.”
@Wendy’s: “It just keeps climbing. Our boy is gonna make it all the way”
This language again invokes the hometown hero who has temporary left to slay the evil foe. This language creates a personal connection that shows the brand is not antagonistic to Wilkerson. In fact, when one user implies Wendy’s is nervous about the tweet reaching even 1 million retweets, they coolly respond, “It’s over 2 million” and thus dispelling the notion that they are anything other than in full support of Wilkerson’s mission. Another user responded to Wendy’s and found the “our boy” phrasing humorous. @allygroom wrote, “’our boy’ lol I love it. Like give him a commercial at this point…maybe one where its just him being surrounded by nuggets.” This language of adoption brings Wilkerson, Wendy’s and their consumer base together into a closer affective relationship by implying the universality of the desire to see
Wilkerson win. Stephens 98
The best maneuver employed in this entire spectacle is the company promise to donate
$100,000 to Dave Thomas Foundation for Adoption if he beats the Oscar Selfie. By making this offer, it is clear that the overall goal of Wendy’s in proposing this challenge is the accumulation of as much goodwill and social capital as possible. While offering Wilkerson the chance of a lifetime is one aspect of that goal, a direct donation of such magnitude sends a positive message about the brand—that they value real/offline issues as they do play. It also makes them somewhat more trustworthy as, even though some users are skeptical about whether Wendy’s will hold up their end of the bargain, it’s more believable that they would do so behind the weight of such an altruistic claim.
Ultimately, what makes this such as successful campaign is that Wendy’s has mastered the art of “playing it cool” and appearing nonplussed despite criticisms that the number was too high. Their ability to manage affect like anxiety and precarity contributes to the overwhelmingly positive view of the challenge. I used this case study to show another way style of play that businesses engage in. This kind of challenge risks being reduced to numbers and calculations, however. Users are aware of how they are exploited on social media. This, however, does not mean that they are unwilling to engage in a challenge like this. Given the right circumstances and the right person, users will divert their time and attention towards a spectacle like this.
Furthermore, by creating a fun, easy-going atmosphere, Wendy’s possibly endears themselves to other consumers who see them as social.
This case study clearly exemplifies the communicative dialectic between consumers/producers. But more importantly, this dialectic is a microcosm for the affective investments people have in the neoliberal economic system. A challenge like this serves to renew hope and desire, persuading us to believe that we, may one day, be as lucky as Wilkerson. Stephens 99
CHAPTER 4: CRITICAL RACE THEORY
Introduction & Background
For this section, I want to focus on the way that racial performances (or lack thereof) by corporate social media accounts represent a larger dialectic between tradition/modernity and consistency/play. Over time, restaurants have adopted signifiers of Black culture to promote the image of a cool, modern corporation, and thus attract a younger audience. However, some brands have can more reluctant to adopt these racial performances, instead of banking on notions of authenticity to stand out from the crowd. Still, in doing so, restaurants like Chic Fil A who have refused to join the fray of savvy social media accounts, mark themselves as white through their unwillingness to participate in the postmodern ethos of social media.
To explicate these ideas further, I want to talk a bit about the way that Wendy's, a white company with similar reach as CFA, has embraced Black cultural signifiers to appeal to a younger audience. I want to highlight their racial performances because they stand in such contrast to a company like CFA whose claim to fame is their universal consumer experience across franchises. This consistency has been their strength. However, their unwillingness to adopt a different persona online is part of why the brand arguably lost the rhetorical battle with
Popeyes.
My rationale for discussing how Wendy's has transformed itself from a white girl with pigtails to the sassy Twitter user who happens to have a mixtape is that in seeing how racial signifiers contribute to the brand's cool persona, we can better understand a brand like CFA who has chosen not to take up the task of postmodern racial performance on social media. Lastly, I will analyze the @ChickFil_aATL Twitter page, which is a parody page of Chick-Fil-A, to see Stephens 100 how their racial parody exposes the tensions between historical fixity and postmodern representation.
The Whiteness of Wendy’s
For this section, I will attempt to answer the question: “What makes Wendy’s a white company?” In the context of this chapter, I want to investigate the ways corporations have coded themselves as either white or Black using various signifiers like logos and mascots. Furthermore, this argument helps to set up the following sections which evaluate the way Wendy’s has transformed itself not necessarily from a white company to a Black one, but rather from a family-oriented restaurant to one whose focus is on a younger, modern audience. I argue that the achieve this by co-opting the discourse and behaviors of Black users. But first, I want to turn to the relationship between corporations and race.
In her article “Corporations are (White) People: How Corporate privilege Reifies
Whiteness as Property,” Amanda Werner (2015) traces the way corporations have aided in the social stratification of racial groups in America:
When white supremacy was explicit in law, corporate privilege played a supporting role, reaffirming the Jim Crow regime and allowing whites to maintain economic dominance in a post-slavery world. Yet as white supremacy was forced into an implicit role with the advent of formal le- gal equality, corporate privilege filled this void by transforming into something far more pervasive and much more explicit (p. 134)
As a result of the connection between economic privilege and racial disparities, the corporation as an American construct has the default position of white. Their existence is bound up in racial formation itself, as racial notions of race were often based on the desire to continue practices of discrimination towards Black people, thus paving the way for the social elevation of other groups like Irish and Italians. Stephens 101
The characterization of corporations as people based on the Citizens United ruling gives even more form to the whiteness that forms the ideology of corporate dominance. Of this phenomenon, Werner warns, “The trouble with the current corporate legal regime, then, is not simply that we have allowed corporations to become people; instead, it may be that we have allowed people to become corporations--maintaining historical oppression from behind the corporate veil” (p. 134). By declaring corporations as people, the legal system is disguising the fact that there are people with racial identities and political motives that run these supposedly neutral engines of the economy, thus enabling them to continue the exploitation of Black people and culture rooted in white supremacist notion. These ideas render Blackness as a site of abstraction because Black bodies are seen as fungible, as replaceable, and therefore offering no particular value outside of what it can provide for whiteness The appropriation of Blackness has been a recognizable marketing strategy for decades, but I want to think about this specifically in the context of social media. Thus far, I have explained how the notion of the corporation is itself rooted in whiteness, but now I want to think through the explicit ways that corporations like
Wendy’s have coded itself as white.
To understand the use of the Black aesthetic, I want to think about how Wendy’s has coded itself or been coded by its consumers through the lens of whiteness, only then can we understand their departure from this representation. For one, the restaurant along with its icon, a white girl with freckles and pigtails, was named after the owner's daughter. Naming the restaurant after a family member shapes it affectively and racially. The name choice and iconography are supposed to appeal to the standard family. During the 1970s, white families were the privileged demographic in the market so early Wendy's ads reflected that. Their 1979 commercial which is aimed at families who occasionally may not feel like cooking at home Stephens 102 features two white families enjoying a hamburger around a television and dining table respectively. There are Black people in Wendy's ads, and there are no fewer than in most brands besides perhaps McDonald's which has made it a priority to market to Black communities. That said, it is apparent in their early marketing campaigns that white people and families were the primary demographic.
Additionally, the earlier days of the company were spent fostering a persona of authenticity. This was accomplished in part due to the close connection between the brand and its founder, Dave Thomas. That image was inevitably bound up in a white aesthetic of his family, pictures of whom hung in the lobby of his restaurants. He, much like the Colonel, took pride in being the personal representative of his product, ultimately appearing in over 800 ads, more than
Colonel Sanders himself and more than any owner to date.
A constant within Wendy's historical and contemporary rhetoric is the freshness of their products. Differentiating themselves from competitors like McDonald's and Burger King who have used or continue to use frozen. Besides their famous 1984 ad in which three elderly women pose the timeless question "Where's the Beef." The ad takes a jab at competitors who offer a thinner cut of beef than themselves and remains a culturally intelligible way of asking about the substantive quality of a product. Wendy's focus on "Old Fashion Hamburgers" evokes a sense of authenticity through consistency over time. The elderly white women in the ad are positioned as the beacon of authenticity as they judge other restaurants for their lack of quality compared to other fast food places. The utilization of this kind of rhetoric frames the company as existing in a particular place and time, which is shaped by the politics of whiteness. So committed is the company to their particular aesthetic that when they changed their logo in 2012, it was the first time since 1983. Stephens 103
None of the characteristics of Wendy's I have henceforth described are meant to imply that the company is racist, or at least more so than your average large-scale American company.
But I make these observations to show that the company has invested in a particular image in which whiteness is a prominent signifier and to discuss the implications of their deviation from it. Their modern social media strategy seems aimed at appealing to younger user/consumer sense of identity. Their 2020 Wendy’s twitter bio even reads, “We like our tweets the same way we like to make our hamburgers; better than anyone expects from a fast food joint.” This is a subtle nod to how Wendy’s has dominated the social media game, and as a result, garnered attention from a younger consumer base who is interested in what experiences a brand can offer them, outside of simply the product itself.
This strategy requires Wendy’s to perform its knowledge of culture. If it is trying to accrue social capital via hip/modern communication and marketing, then it must make choices that align with that goal. For them to perform this knowledge, they must have a gateway to obtaining information about Black culture.
Here, I am interested in the ways that associations between rap and hip hop create corporate avenues for identification with their consumers. As Baz Dreisinger (2008) reminds us,
“Although rap music rose like a phoenix from the ashes of the South Bronx in the 1970s, it was not until the mid-1980s that white critics and audiences took notice and then became prime consumers of it” (p. 113). The commercialization of this genre ran counter to its ethos as the music resists “a counternarrative to black middle-class mobility” and “it also represented a counternarrative to the emergence of a corporate-driven music industry and the mass commodification of black expression” (Neal 2004, 363). The commodification of Black expression depoliticized its radical nature but also gave white listeners a particular look into a Stephens 104 mediatized Black cultural life. Dreisinger continues, “The more white youth shopped in the “rap” section of their local mall’s record store, the more critics bemoaned the hazardous effects of the music. The implication is both clear and familiar: music has transformative power, and listening to “black” music can make whites behave in “black” ways” (113). Here we see the tension between wanting to explore the position of the other without being absorbed within it. However, this provides the basis for appropriation.
As Teresa J. Guess argues observes, “...whiteness is a location of structural advantage, of race privilege. Second, it is a "standpoint," a place from which white people look at ourselves, at others, and at society. Third, "whiteness" refers to a set of cultural practices that are usually unmarked and unnamed (1). For whites, rap and hip hop allowed them to explore how the other half lives. Of course, this is a reductionist viewpoint that essentializes Black experiences, but these music genres allowed whites to change their viewpoint, if only temporarily. As white people began to consume Black genres more, rap and hip hop were even more commercialized as corporate entities ranging from fashion to cars and restaurants began integrating hip hop as part of their branding. These strategies created narratives around Black life as well as white experiences. Naomi Klein makes this point in her excellent book No Logo when she says, “Like so much of cool hunting, Hilfiger’s marketing journey feeds off the alienation at the heart of
America’s race relations: selling white youth on their fetishization of black style, and black youth on their fetishization of white wealth.” In other words, the integration of Black expression into branding strategies from white companies was a tradeoff wherein both Black and White fantasies were projected to mass consumers. Stephens 105
Wendy Raps?
Because of their association with Black culture, some businesses like Nike and Adidas assumed a level of authenticity within Black communities and thus legitimized their use of Black figures in their advertising. To continue the discussion on authenticity, I want to turn to the
Wendy's album "We Beefin" which features 5 tracks aimed at dissing their competitors like
McDonald's and Burger King. Tracks are titled "4 for 4$" a reference to their popular value meal, and "Rest in Grease."
Much like the Black tradition of signifying and playing the dozens, the idea of the "Beef" in Black spaces is rooted in particular cultural discourses of play and seriousness. This is especially true if we see the mixtape as part of a playful dialectic between more or less equal across, without the intent to seriously defame the other. Yes, they are highlighting differences between themselves and other brands, but more than anything, the album seems born out of a playful postmodern ethos. I've alluded to this phenomenon occurring before outside of Black spaces. When Outback and Texas Roadhouse were trading metaphorical blows on Twitter, they were participating in a Black tradition of "Playing the Dozens" whereby individuals trade insults back and forth (Rackham, 2018 March 21). With its focus on wordplay and irony, rap is an appropriate venue for the continuing of a tradition like signifyin’. For instance, in their song
“Rest in Grease” they take shots at McDonald’s claiming “ Them lil tweets don't phase me,
McDonalds be so lazy, I know the reason you hatin' me 'cause I'm fast food's First Lady, It's queen Wendy up in this thang, You can't beat us serving them thangs, Y'all too chicken for this beef, I'ma leave you resting in grease.”
This diss track utilizes traditions from Black language such as the double-entendre when
Wendy’s says McDonald’s is too chicken for this beef. The wordplay is meant to imply that the Stephens 106 chicken McDonald’s serve is not up to par with the beef Wendy’s uses, however, it is also clearly a direct reference to the “beef” between the two restaurants as general competitors.
Furthermore, the title is in reference to the fact that they are both fast food restaurants. Rest in
Grease, then is a play on Rest in Peace, and is used ironically since Wendy’s, through their diss track, aims to be the one to bring down those golden arches. Lastly, It is also important to note how in this case, rap allows the business to perform a level of hostility and aggression that they might otherwise not be able to. Brands generally avoid calling out their direct competitors except in veiled allusions. However, by utilizing a Black cultural form, Wendy’s is able to adopt the ethos of rap, thus making it more appropriate for the kinds of antagonistic performances they engage in online.
Though there is a rich history of the commercialization of Black culture, I want to turn to how this process occurs online. What qualities of social media or the way Black communities behave online that make it a space ripe for exploitation? For one, in the increased presence of
Black people on social media contributes to the opening of racialized spaces. This presence is the culmination of many factors. Andre Brock (2016), for instance, “found that Twitter’s adoption of the Short Messaging Service (SMS; “texting”) protocol played into the increasing numbers of African Americans buying smartphones with broadband access; these users were already literate in computer-mediated communication thanks to early adoption of alphanumeric two-way pagers and Push-To-Talk mobile telephony. I also used CTDA to illustrate how Black Twitter (digital) practice draws upon cultural referents and discourse conventions (“signifyin”) drawing from African American culture” (p. 1013)
Meredith Clark (2016) adds, “Black Twitter’s actions, modeled in episodes characterized by satire, petition, and shaming, have demonstrated that the Black digital presence is one that Stephens 107 demands recognition by other users and the mainstream news media.” Whereas communication on Black Twitter is primarily for social purposes, it has also become a valuable peek for those looking to gain an understanding of Black cultural traditions. In Distributed Blackness: African
American Cybercultures Brock (2020) discusses the complicated nature of Black presence on social media:
while I recognize possibilities for emancipation through radical and decolonizing digital practices, my pressing concern for Black technoculture is to make manifest the vitality and joy of Black uses of ICTs. While these libidinal impulses may become commodified or surveilled, they are paraontological—that is, the embodied cognition they express preexists the platforms on which they are published, visible, and deemed appropriate for consumption. The digital mediates culture—in this case Blackness, but otherwise typically white Western—in ways that allow for sociality despite commodification (Ch. 6)
Here Brock acknowledges that Black people occupy a precarious position online. The freedom afforded to Black communities to organize online, whether for celebration, political causes, or everyday interactions, is constantly at risk for being exploited by those with economic motivations, especially since social media platforms themselves are commercial entities.
Because of the transparency of social media when it comes to certain communities, there are many opportunities for Wendy’s to display their knowledge of Black culture. So, when
Chance the Rapper pines that one day soon Wendy’s bring back their spicy chicken nuggets,
Wendy’s saw an opportunity to cash in on this modernized image.
Figure 37. Spicy Chicken Nugget Return Stephens 108
Wendy's responds with the following set of tweets that presented a similar wager as Wilkerson
Wilkerson, promising to bring the spicy nuggets back if their Retweet of Chance's post received
2 million likes. There was massive disapproval of the decision to take the nuggets off the menu in the first place so it is no surprise that Twitter users rushed at the opportunity to contribute to its return. Chance acts as a vehicle for Wendy's advertising, possessing over 7 million followers at the time and accruing over 225 thousand likes on his post alone. While the appeal of
Wilkerson was his seemingly relatable sensibilities, Chance the Rapper's appeal is his connection with a popular music genre. The tweet ended up acquiring over 2 million likes and thus reaching its goal but more importantly, it positioned Wendy's as having their finger on the pulse of consumer desire and finding a way to amplify that through a popular Black artist.
Chance even implied that his forthcoming debut album would drop the same day as the nuggets, though that ended up not occurring. Still, it is clear that over the last few years, Wendy's has strived to expand its appeal to include a younger audience, and endearing themselves to an audience of a minimum of 7 million hip hop fans is one way to do that.
Similarly, in July 2019, Wendy's declared their lemonade the official drink of "Hot Girl
Summer," a reference to Meg the Stallion and her alter ego "Hot Girl Meg." The term Hot Girl quickly became associated with being a carefree, confident, sex-positive Black woman. Women uploading pictures of themselves enjoying themselves in various locales with the caption
#HotGirlSummer, and it later became a single she performed with veteran rapper Nicki Minaj.
Seizing on the opportunity to showcase their knowledge of Black culture, Wendy's post the tweet which eventually gained 25,000 retweets 100,000 likes. And people in the comments seem to approve. Stephens 109
These comments show that Wendy's consistent effort towards an entertaining, savvy social media presence has paid off. On one hand, people recognize the creativity of the social media manager as these comments indicate knowledge of Wendy's past attempts at humorous tweeting. On the other hand, as a result of this history of engagement, this kind of racial tourism becomes more believable and/or acceptable. And users see it as an opportunity to play along as well. One user overlays Wendy's icon over the face of a well-known gif that is used to show when a person makes a mic dropping comment. Another user comments that they appreciate
Wendy's "ghetto" presence on Twitter. The perversion of Wendy's from a smiling, white girl with red hair and pigtails, to a Hot Girl, occurs through Wendy's (the company) racialized
Figure 38. Mic-drop Wendy’s GIF performance.
Given the preceding observations, it is also relevant to think about the persona of
Wendy's as a cyborg with various biological, technological, and corporate appendages. Again, I reference Haraway's cyborg (1991) which represents an amalgamation of parts--human, animal, and technological. In our mediatized environment, Wendy's is more of a concept rather than a direct corporate identity. As the company as developed its online persona, it has incorporated Stephens 110 affective and racialized qualities that differ from its offline representation as a red-headed white girl.
Perhaps as a way to match the company’s effort at a more human online representation, other users have created their interpretation of this new social media savvy icon:
The image above is another tweet posted under Wendy’s post announcing their mixtape. The picture shows a young, teenage Wendy sitting at her laptop, basking in the glory of her viral marketing campaign as bubbles of the Twitter bird icon float from the laptop and burst into ephemerality. This image reflects the newer iteration of Wendy’s as a hip, modern icon. The affective qualities mirror consumer perception of the brand. The picture still represents Wendy in the most traditional way with her blue and white striped blouse and Where’s Waldo undershirt and of course her iconic red hair and pigtails. The image, thus, reflects the way Wendy’s leverages their whiteness, even while performing Blackness.
As a continuum of this image above, I want to think through the implications of these
Figure 39. Cartoon Wendy’s Tweeting various appendages in online spaces. Jennifer Gonzales (2000) outlines a useful definition of online appendages:
“Finally, the appended subject describes an object constituted by electronic elements serving as a psychic or bodily appendage, an artificial subjectivity that is attached to a supposed original or unitary being, an online persona understood as somehow appended Stephens 111
to a real person who resides elsewhere, in front of a keyboard. In each case a body is constructed or assembled in order to stand in for, or become an extension of, a subject in an artificial but nevertheless inhabited world (p. 27)
Gonzales’s definition invokes Haraway’s cyborg, as well as Derrida’s historical center. I want to think about Wendy’s as a cyborg made up of racialized appendages that legitimize its use of
Black culture. The image above is a practical example of Wendy’s as a cyborg. The image literally shows Wendy’s head and face overlaid onto a Black male body surrounded by other
Black men. Not only does this image show Wendy’s as possessing symbolic qualities of
Blackness, but the guys surrounding “her” also represent the way Black people generate this legitimacy for Wendy’s. Through its association with people like Chance the Rapper and Meg the Stallion, Wendy’s has taken on the appendage of Blackness in its communication and representation.
The persona of Wendy's, while in some ways attempting to depart from this traditional image also benefits from this innocent quality because it provides the site for subversion. They are not completely abandoning their roots as a white company (via ownership, exec boards), but rather journeying into the world of postmodern performance similar to KFC's contemporary marketing strategy. They are expanding rather than subtracting the signifiers that construct their online perception.
Though KFC has utilized this strategy longer through television advertisement, Wendy's has capitalized on their presence on social media where they have more space to construct notions of the self. The avatar for instance is one method of self-description. In the case of
Wendy's, they rarely change their profile pic from the picture that adorns billboards and restaurants. This also works as a returning point. No matter how far they depart from this origin point of whiteness, they can return to it in a relatively authentic manner. But the consistent photo Stephens 112 also provides a reference point against which one can judge difference. Thus the actions they take, whether the user of racialized language or behaviors can always be juxtaposed against the innocent white figure of the Wendy's icon.
But like the KFC Cyborg, she resembles the all too familiar assemblages of techno- capitalism rather than embodying the agency and freedom from binary identities that Haraway envisions. Instead, she stands in for the power of capitalism to commodify racial identity by abstracting the value of Blackness in this specific context, while ignoring it in others.
Now that I have explicated the way that Wendy’s has attempted to depart from its inherently white corporate identity, I want to shift focus to evaluating the whiteness of one
America’s most profitable food chains, Chick-Fil-A (CFA). As opposed to Wendy’s, Chick-Fil-
A has maintained its popularity through a refusal to change or “play” like its competitors. While postmodern performances of identity have gained social capital for companies, it is CFA’s consistency in communication and marketing that make it the powerhouse brand it is. On the other hand, Popeyes fully leans into a postmodern identity by co-opting Black language in a way that may gain them social capital or temporary Twitter clout, but which ultimately exposes the tenuous nature of representational politics.
The following sections discuss the use of Black language in what became dubbed “the chicken sandwich wars.” I argue that the “wars” between CFA and Popeyes put on display larger racial and cultural tensions in America. The presence or absence of Black language speaks volumes about the identity strategies each brand employs.
The Whiteness of Chick-Fil-A
My argument about the whiteness of CFA is not based on any direct comments or controversies from the brand itself, but rather it’s consumer base, language, and the beliefs of its Stephens 113 owners. From a simple economic perspective, CFA’s are generally found in middle to upper- middle-class neighborhoods. As a result of historical discrimination, these neighborhoods are usually majority white or accessible to white people. Like Starbucks, the existence of a Chick-
Fil-A may be a sign of changing demographics. Though vastly more popular, CFA exists on a different price scale than its competitors. They do not have a value menu like McDonald's or a 4 for $4 like Wendy’s. These economic factors no doubt influence their customer demographic, just as Popeyes locations in Black neighborhoods influence their racial demographics.
Chick-fil-A’s social outreach also contributes to its framing as a white company.
Although homophobia is not exclusive to white Christians, they have been a primary anti-LGBT political force in America. Evangelicals like Jerry Falwell Jr. and Billy Graham have been the face of homophobia in mainstream Christianity and CFA’s founder S. Truett Cathy even shared a stage with Mitt Romney at Jerry Falwell Jr’s Liberty University. In 2012, Dan T. Cathy, son of the previous owner, was embroiled in a controversy over comments about same-sex marriage which included him lamenting the attempted passage of same-sex legislation. At the same time, reports arose about the company’s millions of dollars’ worth of donations to anti-LGBT organizations made by the Chick fil A foundation. Once these facts came to light, many people decided to boycott the chain and many more decided to support the restaurant in earnest, evidenced by the 12% growth they experienced after the controversy ended (Couret, 2012).
People jumped to Facebook and Twitter to express their views around the polarizing series of events and to announce their stance on the boycott. That CFA’s growth expanded during this controversy is proof of customer fervor for the brand. It is their willingness to take a stance in opposition to what some view as a growing consensus that endears people to the company. And while it would be difficult to determine, the kind of fervor for corporate free speech, the Stephens 114 battleground upon which this controversy was fought, is one usually associated with white conservative communities.
Another aspect of CFA’s branding that is an extension of Cathy’s religious belief is its exceptional customer service. In almost every ranking, every year, CFA dominates other businesses when it comes to their superior customer service, which is rooted in the Golden Rule of Christianity of “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” However, their emphasis on civility and kindness can also be viewed through the lens of race, as civility has historically been used as a way to remain neutral or inoffensive in the face of injustice. As former president of the National Communication Association highlights in his presidential address, “Such a sense of civil society is meaningless in that it merely serves to perpetuate the dominance of those already in positions of power. It is one thing to play nice with the cultural other; it is quite another to accept that person as an equal-an inescapable condition of being civil in the first place” (McKerrow, 2019). I will apply a more explicit critical race framework to the notion of civility when I analyze user-made videos of corporate brands. That is not to say that being civil or kind in a business setting is wrong, but rather that the kind of civility they emphasize is part of a legacy that exempts corporations from taking a strong stance on social issues (besides homosexuality of course!).
Because of Cathy’s anti-same-sex marriage stance, as well as the conservative ethos of its business model, CFA has also garnered a reputation for being pro-police and thus racist. Luckily, unlike most competitors, Chick Fil A has managed to avoid any major race-based controversies, however, that does not mean that consumers would be shocked if such an incident occurred.
These associations also make it easier to believe in other particular negative claims regarding the company such as possible racism and support of police. Stephens 115
In fact, In July 2016, shortly after the murder of Philando Castile by police officers, a
Facebook post from a CFA franchise in Tennessee, which showed 4 employees wearing a shirt that reads "Back the Blue" began circulating social media. The picture created such controversy that a local branch of Black Lives Matter held a protest in front of that CFA. However, the photo was a hoax of sorts, as the Back the Blue phrase was about a local football team whose school colors included blue. Furthermore, the shirts were made by a high school student and only worn on that one day at that one location the year before.
Figure 40. Chick-Fil-A Back the Blue That said, it is interesting that such a photo would spread so quickly and believably across the internet. Law enforcement tend to have an affinity for the brand so it may not be hard for some consumers to believe CFA would take such a hard stance. Still, their emphasis on civility and kindness, one rooted in Christian theology, inherently means the company is less likely to speak on contentious issues, especially race and policing. Ironically, aside from the anti-
LGBT stance taken in the early part of the decade, the brand has avoided inserting themselves into polarizing national debates and yet, Snopes had to write an article debunking the rumor and photos (LaCapricia, 2016).
Whether by intention or reputation, CFA is understandably conceived as a white company, especially in contrast to Popeyes which is widely known to have a monopoly in Black neighborhoods. Though it is owned by Restaurant Brands International, a conglomerate that also Stephens 116 owns Burger King and Tim Horton among others, between the ad campaigns that use an instantly recognizable spokesperson, and their origins in Louisiana, the company has solidified itself as an unashamedly Black brand. Despite this fact, their social media presence does not necessarily reflect a Black sensibility or humor. In fact, though Popeyes is a bit more tongue-in-cheek with their tweets, they are not necessarily indicative of inside knowledge of Black culture. Most of their tweets revolve around puns or showcasing their knowledge of mainstream popular culture.
For instance, a tweet on April 16th which reads “If you got Popeyes delivered more than once this week…you’re doing amazing, sweetie ” The latter part of the sentence is a reference to a line from Keeping Up With the Kardashian’s and is used as a popular response gif on social media.
A couple of tweets posted months before the chicken sandwich wars also exemplify the typical behavior of the account:
@PopeyesChicken: “Work hack: Bring fried chicken instead of donuts”
@PopeyesChicken: “New boo ‘doesn’t care for’ fried chicken. Was fun while it lasted”
While they do strike a humorous tone, it is not the type of humor one could tie directly back to
Black spaces. It is only when Popeyes see the potential for a marketing goldmine that they up the rhetorical stakes.
Chicken Sandwich Wars
More than anything, the "chicken sandwich wars," as they humorously came to be known as, between Popeyes and CFA was a battle of language. A spectacle perfect for social media, the late 2019 summer/early fall competition between these brands was one of linguistic representation vs reality. When Popeyes announced their new sandwich in a tweet, the move seemed innocent enough: Stephens 117
Figure 41. Popeye’s Chicken Sandwich Tweet
The first tweet does not utilize a particularly noteworthy aspect of Black language, instead imitating a frantic customer raving about the sandwich. However, when Chick-Fil-A responded
Figure 42. CFA Response Tweet a week later with a not so thinly veiled critique of their competitors, things got real:
There are more acts in this spectacle, however, and this rhetorical exchange is the first shot fired in a battle for sandwich supremacy. As more positive reviews began pouring in for
Popeyes’s new sandwich, of course, the company who claims to be the purveyor of the original chicken sandwich would have something to say. Still, it outside the norm for CFA to respond to, much less throw shade onto a competitor. Shade is a rhetorical maneuver, born out of Black ball cultures in New York City, that refers to insulting someone or something without directly addressing that person or thing. Rather than exposing them with the sunlight of an obvious offense, shade is the ability to get a point across subtly and often without the person who is being Stephens 118 insulted noticing. Here, CFA is responding to the new trend without directly addressing the company itself. In fact, this explains the formulation of the post itself. Take, for instance, its focus on simplicity. As opposed to all the herbs and spices associated with Popeyes, CFA highlights the easily identifiable parts that make up their chicken sandwich. Furthermore, the caption reads “Bun + Chicken + Pickles = all the for the original.” The post relies on transparency as a rhetorical strategy to convey the straightforward process of making a CFA sandwich.
Centering the original as the rhetorical focus calls into question the need for the “other.”
In this case, the other is represented by a company with a mostly Black consumer base, creating an alternative for that group. The language of tradition and originality is particularly charged in our political and cultural landscape. In addition, the formula is overlaid on a picture of the founder S. Truett Cathy in his office, bun in one hand, pen in the other, personally perfecting his product. Of course, the picture is supposed to represent the longevity of the CFA brand, beginning with the founder and passing onto his son. Their rhetorical move is to emphasize their strength over time, which is aided through the consistency in ownership structure and marketing/communication. But the black and white photo also represents a kind of Utopia in which CFA rightfully dominates all chicken brands. Interestingly enough, Chick-Fil-a opened in
1946 and Popeyes in 1972, so CFA’s claim to originality (at least compared to Popeyes) is somewhat true. Still, employing the language of originality stands in opposition to the basis of
Black cultures which often involve remixing and recreating. Multiple Black cultural genres including rap and hip hop derive from the ability to build upon already existing structures. This ability is a source of pride for a group that historically has had creatively adjust to their circumstances. Stephens 119
While I do not think it was CFA’s goal to throw “shade” in the sense that they probably weren’t trying to enter into a back and forth with Popeyes, they dealt the first blow and Popeyes, seeing an opportunity to bolster their sassy online persona responds to CFA’s jab with what
Figure 43. Popeye’s Responds to CFA became a viral retweet:
The response quickly made the rounds, being reported on by sites ranging from Eater (a subsidiary of Vox) to the New York Times. The brand was praised for its quippy reply and for its marketing strategy which further pushed the brand into the spotlight. A New York Times (2019) article entitled “15 Minutes to ‘Mayhem’: How a Tweet Led to a Shortage at Popeyes” conveys the urgency and importance of their response. “They started a war in 15 minutes” the article begins:
At 1:43 p.m. on Aug. 19, Bruno Cardinali, a marketing executive for Popeyes Louisiana Kitchen, got a WhatsApp message from a colleague: That morning, one of Popeyes’ fast- food rivals, Chick-fil-A, had tweeted what appeared to be a thinly veiled critique of the new fried chicken sandwich that Popeyes had started offering nationwide a few days earlier.Mr. Cardinali quickly convened a group of marketing officials in a small room on the fifth floor of the Popeyes headquarters in Miami. A high-speed brainstorming session ensued, and before long, the team settled on what seemed like the perfect response: “... y’all good?” Stephens 120
Cardinali clearly understood CFA as one of its direct competitors. To gain the upper hand on a company that has reigned supreme for years, they had to fight them on terms they knew CFA could not participate in. Popeyes is a more experimental brand and thus are far less hesitant to take risks, especially when their product was getting so much buzz. Their response, which comes directly from Black communities, undermines the brand, and makes them look worried. As I stated, CFA’s post could be considered shade, and by asking the rhetorical question “y’all good?” Popeyes is suggesting that CFA would not have made the post if they were truly confident in their sandwich, especially given the fact that Popeyes had not addressed their competitors directly until that moment.
The way Black language diffuses into popular culture means this phrase would have been instantly recognizable to both CFA and Popeyes consumers on social media. The power of that phrase gained Popeyes 25,000 followers overnight. The use of this language not only mirrors its consumer base, but also implies an aggression (even if it’s ultimately playful) that some consumers may want to see. Popeyes is providing entertainment along with a delicious product.
Additionally, Popeyes’s willingness to defend their product reflects the cultural tensions between
Black and White consumers. On social media, debates frequently ensue about the different cooking methods/abilities of various ethnic and racial groups. I believe these chicken sandwich wars are an extension of that and serve as a microcosm for larger cultural tensions between races.
A viral post that circulated around this time by Nadiya Ali exemplifies perceived differences between Black and White cooking styles:
Okay let me break it down for the people who haven’t had a chicken sandwich from either Chick-fil-A or Popeyes.Chick-fil-A’s sandwich tastes like it was cooked by a white woman named Sarah who grew up around black people. The flavor is definitely there, but Sarah cares about your cholesterol so she’s careful about the breading and grease content.Popeye’s sandwich tastes like it was cooked by an older black lady named Lucille Stephens 121
that serves on the usher board and has 12 grandkids that call her “Madea.” Madea don’t give a shit about your cholesterol because God’s in control. I hope this helps.
The Facebook post describes the affective investments Black people have in both the chicken and the brand itself. While Ali acknowledges that Chick-Fil-A is tasty and has flavor, it is the authentically Black production process that makes Popeye’s special and relatable. She says,
“Black folks don’t cook like that” referring to what she believed to be an overemphasis on measurement and preciseness. “Our recipes are a little bit of this, a little bit of that. We season until it’s right. That’s what Popeyes tastes like.”
There is a long history, both positive and negative, of associations between Black people and chicken. In Building Houses Out of Chicken Legs, Psyche A. Williams Forson (2017) discusses the history of some of these negative representations such as the image of Chicken
George, racist postcards, and literary depictions. But she also notes how cooking is an empowering task, especially for Black mothers and wives who use cooking as a way to communicate cultural pride: In their ability to control the ‘‘symbolic language of food’’ and to dictate what foods say about their families, women often negotiate the dialectical relationship between the internal identity formation of their families and the externally influenced medium of popular culture. In this way, they protect their families against social and cultural assault as well as assist in the formation and protection of identity” (p. 92). Whereas this history continues to be contentious today, Forson-Williams chooses to highlight the way cooking has empowered Black women and by extension, their families. Furthermore, perhaps unintentionally, these representations contributed to the perception of Black people as authorities on what constitutes good chicken. Stephens 122
Referencing Ali’s post, the language used to describe the sandwiches, and the inventive responses created the spectacle of corporate feuding. And as with any social media event like this, other brands were drawn into the fray. One final example I want to highlight is Popeyes’s response to social media favorite, Wendy’s. In an exchange where Wendy’s downplays both
Chick-Fil-A and Popeyes, the latter brand struck a homerun against using Black language:
@Wendy’s: Y’all out here fighting about which of these fools has the second-best
chicken sandwich.
@Popeyes: Sounds like someone just ate one of our biscuits. Cause y’all looking thirsty.
To remain relevant amongst a battle between two corporate giants, it was a wise move for
Wendy’s to chime in. But Popeye’s again shows that it can wield Black slang as a form of humor or a rhetorical weapon. The term “thirsty” comes from African-American communities and is used to describe a person who is desperate for attention and performs in such a manner. For instance, a guy might be described as thirsty if he is constantly hitting on random women. In this case, Popeyes uses this language to call out Wendy’s for jumping into a conversation that did not require them and for trying to co-opt the attention Popeyes was getting to push their own brand.
Just as there is an impulse to promote a kind of sincere positivity through New Sincerity philosophy, there is a postmodern impulse to corrupt that which is saccharine. As I've mentioned,
CFA does not have a radically different persona on Twitter than in brick and mortar stores.
Where other restaurants see social media as a way to stand out among the bevy of options presented to the modern consumer. However, nature abhors a vacuum and where Chick Fil A fails to entertain, a parody account with the handle (ChickFil_aATL) appeared to fill the void.
This final section will discuss the existence of the parody CFA account and how alternative racial performances account for its strategic humor. Stephens 123
#OurPleasureNigga
Here, Blackness is used to contrast the perceived whiteness of Chick fil a, which manifests through their sanguine attitude. Essentially they perform what CFA would be like if they were a company like Popeyes. Their trademark hashtag is #OurPleasureNigga and contains within it the tensions that make this parody work. In fact, their first tweet after returning was
"Our Pleasure Nigga" and it garnered over 1000 retweets and 8200 likes. Apparently, the account had some people fooled into thinking it was the real CFA, based on the 7 next to its name which is meant to resemble a verification mark. This first tweet served as announcements, that they were, as the kids say, back on their bullshit, ready to entertain users with their dark comedy.
“Our pleasure” reflects the genuine desire of employees to create a positive experience for consumers. It is surely reflective of a brand like CFA whose brand is built largely on its customer service. However, this page subverts this gesture of kindness into a hilarious slogan.
By adding nigga, an intensely racialized (and often racist) phrase, this account is playing with the identity of CFA, imbuing it with qualities that are contrary to it. For one, despite its conservative reputation, CFA does not have a history of racial discrimination or biases towards employees or customers. So, the irony lies in imagining this brand communicating so casually with a word that would bring downfall to any real company. Furthermore, the word is used both negatively and indifferently indicating a natural ability to utilize Black language. Again, none of my argument rests on the account owner being Black but rather that the ethos of the account is one that is based partly on familiarity with Black language. Here are some posts in which the word nigga is used pejoratively::
@ChickFil_aATL (2020): "Stop snitching nigga" said in response to a customer complaining about the lack of face masks at a CFA location. Stephens 124
@ChickFil_aATL (2020): "Nigga order a bigger size next time" said in response to a customer complaining about the number of fries he received.
Figure 44. Parody CFA Tweet 1
Figure 45. Parody CFA Tweet 2
However, others use it indifferently, as a mere descriptor:
@ChickFil_aATL: Nigga gripping it like that shit bout to run away.
@ChickFil_aATL: “Don’t come through our drive thru doing all that coughing shit my nigga” Stephens 125
The use of nigga indicates familiarity with the term. In other words, this account does not seem to be using nigga for the sole purpose of being subversive or for shock value. Based on this evidence, the persona of this account is supposed to be that of a Black person who was in charge of Chick-Fil-A. Using humor specific to Black people, this account parodies a company obsessed with their image and subverts it by adding to it qualities that are at odds with the real company.
Other Black cultural signifiers inform us of the racial performance at play. An April 7th post, for instance, responds to a user with a clip from the Black radio show The Breakfast Club.
A post on April 22nd shows a Black lady in an orange shirt that resembles Popeyes's uniform with the caption "Checking out the competition." Another tweet reads "We don't fuck with 12 no cap ” (2020). Finally, one of their most recent posts shows a video of a white employee of what looks like CFA showing his tattoo to a car full of people. The person recording says "My boy said YSL for life, you know the what the fuck going on” (2020). That tattoo reads YSL which stands for Young Stoner Life, a phrase coined by Atlanta-based rapper, Young Thug. The caption also ends with #Slatt. This acronym stands for "Slime Love All The Time" which was popularized by Thug as a term of affection for his YSL crew.
Given these Black cultural signifiers, what meaning can we gain from the racialized performances on this page? I want to think about this page as inhabiting a similar space as the trickster in African American folklore. Though the comparisons are not exact, I think it will expose how the subversion that occurs on the page fits within a longer tradition of black humor.
In The Signifying Monkey (1988), Henry Louis Gates attempts to develop an African American
Literary historical legacy. He begins by his discussion of Esu—a stand-in for several tricksters in various African cultures. Esu “serves as a figure for the nature and function of interpretation and double-voiced utterance…”(p. xxi). Gates begins with this metanarrative to show how the Black Stephens 126 rhetorical strategies have generally included obfuscation and inversion. As Cris Mayo argues,
“incongruency drives humor”(p. xxi). The effectiveness of this parody account rests on its ability to exploit racial differences. The use of Black rhetoric and its incorporation of Black cultural products contrasts with the real CFA. By interpreting this account through the trickster lens, we can uncover the sophistication and underlying meaning of this performance.
Gates makes a distinction between Esu and his trickery and that of minstrelsy: “The trickster figure and the related practice of signification problematize commonsense social categories, while minstrelsy plays with categories to hyperbolically reify them and deny their complexities” (p. 22). Rather than simply reflecting or lightly mocking the civility that CFA emphasizes, the page infuses aspects of Black humor to contrast the perceived authenticity of
CFA with the internal psyche of its workers, and specifically that of a Black worker. The worker this page symbolizes does not trade kindness for aggressiveness but instead fuses them both to create a new kind of authenticity that is an amalgamation of company values and personal affects. “Our pleasure, nigga” is the quintessential phrase that represents what should be a tension. However, this page continues a legacy of Black cultural synthesizes that generates new forms of play in this online sphere. Stephens 127
CONCLUSION
For my conclusion, I want to begin by reiteration the subject and findings of this project.
This dissertation evaluates the advertising and communication strategies of fast food companies on social media through the lens of postmodern, affect, and critical race theory. I chose to evaluate fast food companies because of their increasingly dynamic approach to consumer engagement on sites like Twitter and Instagram. Each chapter illuminates some aspect of the way that companies are approaching the postmodern concept of play as a method of identity building online. I will briefly recount my findings from each respective chapter before discussing some of the larger implications of my observations. Then I will turn to a brief analysis of the Ben &
Jerry’s Ice Cream brand to think about how values such as sincerity and transparency work against the postmodern behavior of other brands online. Finally, I will discuss the future direction of this project and some possible research avenues.
Review of Findings
The Postmodernism chapter explored the discourse produced from the IHOB name change campaign in the spring of 2019. I analyzed ads from the Instagram page that preempted the announcement of their new line of hamburgers, as well as the actual product advertisement. I found that the ads communicated a hostility that tempered by irony, and that this was representative of their frustration over the medium of social media.
Whereas television gave restaurants like IHOP greater control over crafting their reputation, social media gives each consumer some leverage to affect the perception of a business. IHOP acknowledges this anxiety in its ads by featuring tweets from Twitter user’s who disapproved of their name change. By using postmodern techniques of communication such as Stephens 128 irony, sarcasm, and play, IHOP temporarily capitulates to consumer criticism only to co-opt it as part of a meta-narrative of corporate power through advertising. Though they eventually agree the name change was a publicity stunt, it is important to recognize their tactics as a way of downplaying consumer criticism and reinforcing corporate hegemony. As a result, their strategies have the potential to rob consumers critique of their political potential.
In the “Postmodernism” chapter, I also draw on a recent iteration of the KFC Colonel
Sanders, the CGI Colonel. I discuss the evolution of the Colonel from the original living Sanders to his contemporary representations performed by celebrities both on television and social media.
My essential point is that with the introduction of the CGI Colonel, KFC has completed the transformation of the Colonel into Baudrillard’s simulacra. This (post)modern Colonel is a parody of social media influencers, and yet, this performance masks the fact that they participate in the same hyper commercial efforts they critique.
In my “Affect Theory” chapter, I take on the Wendy’s RT Challenge which occurred on
Twitter in Spring 2017 to assert its significance as a microcosm for affective investments in contemporary neoliberal social and political issues. I analyze comments and tweets from users between themselves to observe how they perceive Wilkerson’s chances at success. Their expressions of either doubt or hope are contextualized through the framework of postmodernism and New Sincerity. I juxtapose these two philosophies because they both speak to some kind of affective orientation, with postmodernism correlating with doubt or negativity, and New
Sincerity aligning with faith and optimism. Both of these positions, I contend, are ways of dealing with the precarity that is brought on by the neoliberal condition. I expose the neoliberal undercurrents that construct this challenge, specifically the extension of market logic and competition into everyday encounters, the focus on the individual, and the emphasis on Stephens 129 positivity. Wendy’s plays a part in offering some security against this precarity, as they attempt to manage the affects of consumers in the comment section, encouraging them to stay positive
Finally, in chapter three, “Critical Race Theory,” I discuss how companies incorporate racialized performances into their social media strategy. I start with the position that companies as a general category of commercial entities maintain an ethos of whiteness both implicitly and explicitly. Historically, companies have acted as agents of white economic mobility and have also contributed to the shaping of American family consumerism through their depictions of white nuclear families. Fast food companies like Wendy’s have coded themselves as white in the past, and yet on social media, they have begun adopting signifiers of Black culture as an attempt to craft themselves as cool and modern. In particular, their foray into rap and hip hop, whether by releasing a mixtape or collaborating with Chance the Rapper on the return of their spicy chicken nuggets, has earned them social capital and a reputation as one of the most entertaining restaurant brands online. While Wendy’s has extended its persona beyond the white, red-haired girl on its billboard’s, Chick-Fil-A on the other hand, has chosen to maintain the white, religious, conservative identity of its original owner. Not only do I contrast them with Wendy’s, casting them as oppositional to the postmodern representational strategies of other customers, I argue that the chicken sandwich wars represented larger cultural tensions between White and Black people in America. The exchange between each restaurant and that of its consumers serves as a peek inside cultural differences around food, language, and taste.
Implications
Now I would like to discuss some implications of the arguments I have put forth. This has been a project concerned with communication and corporate power in late-stage capitalism, a term I have used interchangeably with postmodern capitalism. If it seems as if concepts within Stephens 130 postmodernism weigh more heavily than the other two critical lenses, it is because fundamentally, I believe postmodern notions of identity, economics, and technology have been the primary factors motivating the behaviors I have outlined. I have been particularly interested in how social media creates new modes of representation for users/consumers and businesses and how both play with their identity. I think, conceptually, postmodernism has much to offer from the perspective of the consumer. User’s take advantage of the affordances of platforms like
Facebook and Twitter by uploading avatars, trading memes, and gifs, and participating in creative exchanges. Social media is a space where irony reigns and subversion creates joy.
Conversely, postmodernism has also produced methods of deception in terms of corporate representation. When taken to its extreme, the postmodern impulse to play can be used to distract consumers from shortcomings, bad press, or even corruption. I want to take a moment to talk about a few examples of these strategic distractions by drawing from some of the restaurants that have been the object of this study.
I have already talked a bit about how the Colonel’s image has been commodified to such a degree that it fits within the schema Baudrillard lays out in his Simulacra and Simulation. The difference between the original Colonel and the current representations which all purport to be the “real” is so vast that the Colonel himself has been reduced to a set of hyperbolic signifiers mobilized towards commercial ends. The ethos of the brand has changed from one that was about pride and expertise, to one which clearly expresses anxiety about how to represent itself.
The use of the Colonel raises interesting questions about virtual influencers and the intersection of labor, identity, and technology.
In 2019, Owen Myers penned an article entitled “’It’s ghost slavery:’: the troubling world of pop holograms” where he discusses the cultural and ethical implications of the use of Stephens 131 holographic technology. He cites the use of Base Hologram, a company that promised to bring
Whitney Houston back to the stage using holographic tech. Sister-in-law Pat Houston thought
Whitney would have appreciated her audience getting an opportunity to enjoy her music in such a manner. However, Dionne Warwick, singer, and cousin of Houston disagreed, calling it stupid.
He asks the question at the heart of the larger debate over these technologies: “Would Houston really have loved it, or is this simply a cold-blooded maneuver to squeeze every drop of cash from her legacy?” Other popular outlets like CBC and the New York Times have written on the use of Tupac, and Elvis Holograms. The Verge features an article entitled “You Won’t See A
Robin Williams Hologram Until At Least 2039,” explaining that Williams made provisions that upon his death, his liking would not be used in advertisements or performances.
I cite these examples, not because they are a perfect match, but because they exemplify the importance of identity and the work it does in the postmodern era. So salient is the concept of identity and so intecgral is it to the success of businesses that they have developed technology to extend the labor of their representatives. This opens up new territory, perhaps beyond what
Baudrillard’s concept might be able to contain.
Regarding IHOP, another implication of these communication strategies is that it ultimately ends up favoring corporate entities rather than consumers. Take IHOP and the way they absorb critique and transform it into a marketing strategy. In a world where everything is commodifiable, and where the media industry shapes so much of mainstream perspective, it is worrisome when a company can appropriate consumer criticism, disarm it and then use it for a promotional strategy. And even though their bancake list represents a neoliberal impulse for efficiency and measuring by determining access to products based on calculations of loyalty. Stephens 132
Furthermore, the bancake marks people in the and way criminals are often marked in sensationalist publications, with a large red stamp marked over the user and the offending tweet.
While I have referenced these technologies of allegiance as separate from social media, they are in fact, part and parcel of how IHOP made their calculations. By combing through user tweets, they can detect aberrations in loyalty and create an archive, a history of personal affects, based on the user's tweets. The dolling out of special privileges based on allegiance would amount to a kind of corporate fascism and IHOP seems to have no problem invoking this symbolism even momentarily as a means of reestablishing dominance over the producer- consumer relationship. It also shows that social media are inherently precarious, not simply because of the exploitation that occurs through the appropriation of cultural products, but because sites like Twitter and Facebook have the potential to aid in larger projects of corporate surveillance and Hegemony. Thus, for all the talk of social media as a liberatory technology, its liberatory potential lies in how users subvert the inherent qualities of these sites which are often.
Since Wendy’s formed the basis for about half of my total analysis, it is useful to combine the implications from the phenomenon I describe in the chapter on affect and critical race theory. I want to return to the Chance the Rapper’s tweet where he wishes for Wendy’s to bring back their spicy chicken nuggets. Similar to the anti-feminist discourse occurring in the comment section of
Wilkerson’s tweet, there were some users who took issue with the company’s recent stand against the Fair Food Program, an initiative signed onto by many of the top restaurant brands, which puts into place protections for farmworkers in supply chains of these respective businesses. A website dedicated to encouraging consumers to boycott Wendy’s reads, “For over seven years, hundreds of thousands of farmworkers with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers
(CIW) and their consumer allies have demanded verifiable protections against sexual violence, Stephens 133 forced labor, and other human rights abuses in Wendy’s supply chain by joining the Presidential
Medal-winning Fair Food Program” (Boycott Wendy’s).
These tweets, much like the feminist tweets present during the RT challenge, disrupt the affective space Chance sets out to create. Of course, these critiques are less about him and more about Wendy's, however, these comments use the same tactics as Wendy's by hoping to align themselves with a notable figure and thus attracting more people to their cause. These comments break the suspension required by these performances. The shock and awe of the spectacle is broken down in the face of the reality of Wendy's business operations. Their interactions on social media are facile but effective attempts to mask their offline behavior that has a material effect on people regarding labor, sexual violence, and workplace safety. These comments are so forceful because not only do they directly call out Wendy's, thus reminding us that they are a real company with power and influence that few of us can match, but also because the comments migrated to Chance the Rapper's post. The spread comments spread like a contagion, an apt metaphor considering the viral marketing strategy Wendy's aims for. Perhaps the new wave of corporate social media management initially offered a way for Wendy's to traverse different identities and break the bonds between the real and the virtual, however recent social and political events have created an atmosphere in which "play" might communicate a refusal to acknowledge systemic injustices like police brutality and state violence. All of the major brands I have discussed have issued some kind of statement regarding police brutality, protesting, or racial equity. It will be interesting to think about how long this pause in "play" will last. For the time being, none of these brands have reverted back to their postmodern ways.
While the competition between Wendy's and Popeyes was dubbed the chicken sandwich wars, it might have been more appropriate to call it a battle, because though Popeyes enjoyed Stephens 134 major success and millions in free advertising via Black Twitter, Chick Fil A manages to come out on top over the long run. Quirky, ironic tweets might not be CFA's specialty but what they lack in creative communication, they make up for in their superior customer service and employee experience. The reality of the two brands was highlighted when just two weeks after
Popeyes announced their chicken sandwich, they completely ran out of stock. Some thought it was as a PR move to increase consumer desire for the product, but as (...) says, they simply had to stop because “there was no alternative” (Bellany 2019 November 5). Now, this, in some ways, is an indication of consumer satisfaction. However, there were more than a few people upset over arriving at the store only to find out that it would be weeks before they restocked their now- famous sandwich. And when Popeyes tried to mock CFA for promoting a special for National
Sandwich Day which fell on a Sunday, they were met with backlash of their own. Popeyes retweeted a CFA corporate email explaining the blunder, with the caption "seriously… Yall good?" which was of course a reference to their initial viral tweet.
And while Popeyes attempts to increase their own creative content to catch up with the likes of Wendy's or Burger King, they continue to undergo scrutiny for their offline corporate tendencies especially their treatment of employees. It is a generally accepted fact that Popeyes does not have a reputation for good customer service. And the chicken sandwich wars threw a spotlight on how corporate greed negatively impacts workers. Articles posted on Mashed,
Medium, and Vox all discuss the overworked and exhausted nature of working for the chicken company. The Vox article underscores the trying experience of a Popeyes manager: Wanda
Lavender, a 38-year-old Popeyes manager, told me she doesn’t get paid enough to deal with all the customers who lined up for sandwiches this past week. She earns $10 an hour managing a
Popeyes in Milwaukee. She told me her legs are still numb from standing for 10 to 12 hours a Stephens 135 day — she had to spend her birthday making chicken sandwiches instead of taking the day off.
One of her employees quit. An angry customer even threatened to shoot her staff” (Campbell
2019, August 28). In fact, the entire affair could be read as a cycle of exploitation in which Black
Twitter spread knowledge of the sandwich far and wide for free to other consumers who then traveled to stores run by underpaid workers to wait in lines that stretched outside, only to find out the product is sold out and who may end up buying something out of convenience. The only clear winner is Popeye's and even they cut off their own success. This spectacle is a case study in how overvaluing one's online persona comes into conflict with the primary operations of a business. While the virality of the tweet earned them both physical and social capital, the company failed to meet the fervor they generated.
Future Directions for Research
Upon the completion of this project, I am looking to expand and develop my dissertation into a published monograph. I will strengthen my research in the dialectical management of social media. I plan to extend my dissertation to focus on the implications of emotional and identity labor executed by corporate social media managers:
• How do they fit within traditional corporate spaces?
• What is the role of individual creativity vs. organizational efforts?
• How do they measure and translate social capital into financial capital?
• Does gender impact the perception of this kind of labor?
As I extend my dissertation into a book manuscript, I would like to conduct interviews with the social media managers to incorporate how their incentives and understand their Stephens 136 perspectives. Additionally, focus groups interviewing consumers about their reception of certain communication strategies would be enlightening. Critical theory has its place in making particular arguments; however, interviews would aid in filling in theoretical vacancies, especially regarding forms of labor and capital. Getting an insider perspective is crucial to bridging the gap between political economy and culture, both of which are necessary for a fuller understanding of how new media is contributing to the dialectics between consumers and producers. I am also interested in the implications of race in this kind of labor. For instance, the person who came up with the “you good?” response from Popeye was a Black woman. What implications does that have for thinking about appropriation, performance, and identity work?
Although only a tangential part of this project, pages like the Nihilism Arby’s and
@ChickFil_aATL provide an avenue of research as well. The way users co-opt the image of corporate entities and subvert them for humorous purposes is a fairly recent occurrence and develops as a response to restaurants adopting a postmodern ethos. How these pages perform the identity of their respective parody restaurant is tightly bound up with some of the phenomenon I have discussed.
Finally, given the social and political atmosphere as of Spring 2020, it will be interesting to see how these companies adjust to the constraints the world is imposing on their creative marketing. Will they, as many of us have, eschew the threat of coronavirus, and promote platitudes about racial equity to resume their commercial interests? Will the corruption, racism and violence that has occurred over the last few months fade into the backdrop? Only time will tell. Either result will prove useful for thinking about online corporate representations in the era of postmodern capitalism. Stephens 137
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we look like babies. So crazy the way time flies. It seems like it was only yesterday.
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[Instagram photo]. Retrieved from
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@KRNV. (7 April 17). Share the story!. [Tweet]. Retrieved from https://t.co/dSewomCcL7.
@KyleDaters: (2017 April 8).
If you don’t get at least one nugget for every retweet I’ve
lost faith in Wendy’s . [Tweet]. Retrieved from n/a.
@KyleDaters. (2017 April 3). This guy would be a hometown hero, the underdog, who took on
Goliath and got 1.5 million nuggets. Reno would give him the to the city. [Tweet].
Retrieved from.
@Lindsay_Henry. (2018 April 27). I need an update on this guy. DID HE GET FREE NUGGS
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@lychaxo. (n/a). I know! 3.6M rt is 1/5th of the way there! That's the equivalent of 10 weeks
and 3 days of free chicken nuggets!. [Tweet]. Retrieved from
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@meghantraylorr: (2019 July 12). Love how the world can be so messed up but when it comes
down to it, everyone on twitter will come together for free food. I LOVE US .
[Tweet]. https://twitter.com/meghantraylorr/status/1149782212218429442?s=19.
@mrcodella. (2017 April 7). @Wendys I think you should adjust that number to 1.8 million, the
guy deserves it!. [Tweet]. Retrieved from
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@mugtang. (21 April 17). Me: I want some chicken nuggets. Feminist reply: [red-haired
woman with glasses saying "patriarchy"]. [Tweet]. Retrieved from
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@NavoSchmavo. (2017 Nov 12). This reminds me of old times... better times, when I believed
in absolutes, black and whites, when I hadn't been forced to recognize the greys to
survive yet... before 200 followers and before 280 characters. This reminds me of a
time... when I last smiled with genuine intention. [Tweet] .Retrieved from
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NerdRage42: (2017 April 7). Not everyone likes those celebrities. Everyone likes when random
dudes on the internet get free nuggets for a year. [Tweet]. Retrieved from
https://twitter.com/NerdRage42/status/850439816940371968?s=19.
@NTrinity_. (2018 March 23). [gif of Wendy's sitting in front of computer with Twitter birds
flying from screen]. [Tweet]. Retrieved from
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@OF_Alex_. (2017 April 6). good thing they didnt give u a certain time to get them by, some
day ur gunna be 30 yrs old & finally get those 18mill rts hmu, i retweeted. [Tweet].
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@Popeyes. (2019 August 17). Chicken. Brioche. Pickles. New. Sandwich. Popeyes.
Nationwide. So. Good. Forgot. How. Speak. In. Complete. Sandwiches. I mean,
sentences. [Tweet]. Retrieved from https://t.co/14kXBv4jJw.
@Popeyes: (2019 August 19). ... y’all good?. [Tweet]. Retrieved from
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@Seth_Kaplan. (2017 April 6). Wendy's is playing this perfectly. [Tweet]. Retrieved from
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@ShainaLesniewic. (2017 April 6). Cmon people help the man get his nuggets. [Tweet].
Retrieved from n/a.
@slypig89. (2017 April 9). I've been watching religiously...I haven't been this emotionally
invested since the UW Madison Snapchat saga. [Tweet]. Retrieved
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n/a.
@summerkristine. (2019 Jun 14). How am I #bancaked for saying that the whole thing is rad but
I’m sad there’s no veggie burgers? And why are there still no veggie burgers? [screenshot Stephens 154
of user's bancake tweet]. [Tweet]. Retrieved from
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@TheChosenOneToo. (2017 April 8). Jesus man. Get a life instead of trying to ruin other
people's. He's not trying to justify anything- just tryna get some nuggs. [Tweet].
Retrieved from
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@Tllolmirein. (2018 August 1). Unlucky you . [Tweet]. Retrieved from
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@Twitter. (2017 May 9). It’s official. Carter, your Tweet is the most Retweeted of all time.
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[Tweet]. https://twitter.com/Twitter/status/862098695357046784?s=19.
@Wendys. (2017 April 8). Attempt? It's still climbing. He's going to crush that record. [Tweet].
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@Wendys. (2017 April 7). Don't worry, we stand by the tweet. [Tweet]. Retrieved from
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@Wendys. (2017 April 6). He's doing well. Don't doubt the hustle.[Tweet]. Retrieved from
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@Wendys. (2017 April 7). He's going to do more than that. Just watch. [Tweet]. Retrieved from
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@Wendys. (2017 April 6). Hey, this tweet is still out here growing. Don't doubt the potential.
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@Wendys. (2017 April 14). If he beats Ellen's tweet we are donating $100k to @DTFA to help
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@Wendys. (2017 April 7). It can definitely happen. [Tweet]. Retrieved from
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@Wendys. (2017 April 11). It just keeps climbing. Our boy is gonna make it all the way.
[Tweet]. https://twitter.com/Wendys/status/851790591247753216?s=19.
@Wendys. (2017 April 9). It's over 2 million. 09 April 17th.
https://twitter.com/Wendys/status/851195851972202498?s=19.
@Wendys. (2017 April 6). Just be patient, have faith, and let a beautiful thing happen.[Tweet].
Retrieved from https://twitter.com/Wendys/status/850092618881130496?s=19.
@Wendys. (2017 April 6). Nah, not afraid. It would honestly be pretty awesome if he got that
many. [Tweet]. Retrieved from
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@Wendys. (2017 April 7). That's the spirit right there. [Tweet]. Retrieved from
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@Wendys. (2017 April 6). Why settle? He's gonna beat that and more. [Tweet]. Retrieved from
https://twitter.com/Wendys/status/850138519708340224?s=19.
@Wendys. (2019 May 4). Y’all keep asking, so here’s your chance. The people in charge say if
you guys can get our tweet (this one right here) to 2 Million likes, they will bring SPICY
CHICKEN NUGGETS BACK. Let’s freakin’ do this!. [Tweet]. Retrieved from
https://twitter.com/Wendys/status/1124763246370676737?s=19/. Stephens 156
@WevaMC. (2017 April 17). "in a few years" He is already at 1 million retweets lmao"in a few
years" He is already at 1 million retweets lmao. [Tweet]. Retrieved from
https://twitter.com/WervaMC/status/850380407061303299?s=19.