Explorations in Media Ecology - Volume 19, Issue 1, 2020

Since 2016, a culture of participatory leftism has emerged on Facebook that has yet to be substantially documented. Scholars have established ideographic criticism of memes as a critical/cultural tool for analysis. However, there is little to no work on broader, systems-based analyses of alternative social media platforms, and the role they play in the creation and maintenance of political identities. These socially mediated communities, alternatively known as Leftbook (or Left Facebook), advertise themselves as places to learn about Marx, socialism and philosophies centred on labour, revolution and worker freedom. Research from traditional online group pages suggests there is a distinct split between neutral observers and harsh critics of Leftbook. These online spaces often result in odd, hilarious and peculiar behaviours that the untrained eye is quick to dismiss as meaningless Internet drivel. However, humour and satire have long been used tactfully by counterculture organizations/movements to communicate the absurdity of the status quo. For instance, Waisanen argued that unlikely sources of comedic rhetorical criticism creatively influence and critically reframe political discourse; guiding audiences towards new possibilities of insight and democratic civil discourse. Using Johnson’s explanations of memetics as a guiding theory, I discuss Burke’s various works on human paradox, identification, Dramatism and the comic frame to provide insight on notions of: identity performance, ‘slacktivism’ and burgeoning political resonance within this digital environment. I code preliminary themes of the post content of one Leftbook page, ‘Sassy Socialist Memes’, over the course of a month. My guiding research questions are ‘[a]s platforms such as Leftbook become environmental, how do they contribute to a mode of socio-political identity construction for members of the Left?’ and ‘[a]s extensions of political identity, how does the ‘Sassy Social Memes’ page impact experiences of political organizing and engagement?’.

In the wake of scandals at Cambridge Analytica/Facebook and Sinclair Broadcasting Group, the ethical implications of a digital economy for thought, word and deed come to the fore in political economy. Such questions require media ecological consideration for grounding ethics in the communicative domain between self, other and world. This theoretical exploration parses the historical intersections of studies in media ecology and political economy in an effort to understand both the medium of exchange and the ethical principle or techno-economic paradigm inherent to that medium. Media ecology is necessary for cultivating the ethical ground of political economy and reflectively engaging the implications of a hypermodern techno-economic paradigm for everyday communicative life. Further, media ecological constraints will be understood as perpetuating particular political and economic conditions in terms of the sensorial equilibrium of a noetic economy and the psychodynamics of human culture. After analysing the ethical demands of changing media ecologies, implications for the fields of political economy and media ecology in this hypermodern moment are presented. This exploration is offered as an initial foray into understanding the productive tensions of these two particular fields of intellectual inquiry and providing an adequate response to the questions of digital economics in this current historical moment.

This article probes into Trumpism using McLuhan’s idea of figure/ground analysis. To make visible the hidden ground behind a salient figure (or figures), the dichotomy of instrumental and environmental approaches to media effects is introduced. The widely used instrumental approach is rooted in the long-standing Lasswellian tradition of communication studies (‘who says what, in which channel, to whom, with what effect?’). The instrumental explanations of Trumpism are unavoidably reductionist, as they focus on figures and, therefore, overemphasize rationality and agency in media use. On the contrary, the environmental approach focuses on hidden ground and explores what environmental forces originate from new media’s proliferation and how these forces reshape habitat and inhabitants. To apply this view, the article examines the environmental factors within the news industry and social media that are favourable to Trumpism: the commodification of Trump by the media, the morphological conflict between broadcasting and engaging modes of agenda-setting, the built-in polarization of social media and others.