Cheers! Lonely Otakus: Bilibili, the Barrage Subtitles System and Fandom as Performance

My book, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture, was released earlier this year in a translation intended for the Chinese market. My translator, Xiqing Zheng, also recently completed a dissertation, Borderless Fandom and The Contemporary Popular Cultural Scene in Chinese Cyberspace. Given my ongoing interest in transnational studies of fan culture, I asked if I might publish a small excerpt from that dissertation here -- in this case, dealing with a form of fan participation that has been taking many parts of East Asia by storm in recent years. 

Cheers! Lonely Otakus: Bilbili, the Barrage Subtitles System and Fandom as Performance

by Xiqing Zheng

Barrage subtitle system is started by the Japanese website Niconico douga ニコニコ動画 —a site for otaku community, the ninth most visited website in Japan in the year 2016. The comments on a barrage subtitle streaming website, instead of appearing under the video in a special “comment” section, appear directly on the video screen. Synced with the video, the comments would appear at certain playback time when the video is played. The default setting makes the comments displayed in black font and white color, flying over the video from the right to the left at a random height; but fonts and special effects can be specified in advanced settings.

The phrase “barrage” is popularized by several anime directed by Yoshiyuki Tomino富野由悠季, including Mobile Suit Z Gundam (機動戦士Ζガンダム Kidō Senshi Z Gandamu 1985-1986) and Aura Battler Dunbine (聖戦士ダンバイン Seisenshi Danbain, 1983-1984), in which a line “The barrage on the port side is too thin! What should we do?” grew viral in the otaku community. Besides, Toho project, a phenomenally popular shooter game since the late 1990s allows bullets to form complicated patterns—a barrage so complicated that it later becomes a spectacle in the gaming community (see Lin and Gao for more information). With such background, netizens on Niconico chose this word to describe heavily commented scenes on a Niconico video as “barrage,” that resembles a scene with flying bullets across the screen in video games. Later this name is given to all the comments on the screen.

Chinese otaku established several video sharing sites, directly imitating Niconico; the most influential ones are AcFun and Bilibili. Here I will primarily use Bilibili as an example. Founded in the year 2009, it is now the most influential and popular barrage subtitle website in China. “Bilibili” is the nickname for a popular female character Misaka Mikoto御坂美琴 in the light novel and anime, A Certain Scientific Railgun (To Aru Kagaku no Reirugan とある科学の超電子砲, 2009-2010, 2013). Since it was originally designed to be majorly catering to the Japanese ACGN otaku, Bilibili has a specific section for all new Japanese animations. Besides, it provides sections for the DIY fans to showcase their talent in singing, dancing, music performance, painting, fan video editing, video game playing, etc., all in the realm of Japanese ACGN culture (acronym of “Anime, Comic, Game, Light Novel”). Because of Bilibili’s growing popularity, it now reserves sections for all types of popular culture, including, for example, American TV series, films, talk shows, Chinese TV dramas, variety shows—the contents incorporated into the website actually reflect the diverse interest and versatile talents of the otaku community.

After the success of Bilibili, the barrage subtitle system became known to the mainstream. Many Chinese online streaming websites, including the mainstream Tudou, Tencent, now support barrage subtitles, yet “Site A” and “Site B” remain the most important websites for the otaku community. According to an interview, Chen Rui the manager of Bilibili says, that he is not worried about the mainstream websites adopting the barrage subtitle feature at all, because what matters is not the configuration, but the content. The content does not only refers to those videos uploaded, but also the interactive barrage subtitles posted by the viewers. The chemistry of these otaku-oriented sites comes from the videos, the viewers, and most importantly, the interaction between the websites and the otaku users.

 Otaku, as it is currently used in daily practice, refers to lovers and heavy consumers of Japanese manga, anime, games, and light novels. The word otaku is an honorarium word for “your house,” and thus “you,” was used by a group of Japanese sci-fi fans in the 1960s for addressing each other inside the community. The word gained wide public attention when a critic, Akio Nakamori, ridicules these heavy consumers of totally unrealistic and childish media products, with the word “otaku.” The otaku culture came to Chinese mainland together with the Japanese manga, anime and game, as early as in the 1980s. For a certain period of time, Japanese anime obtained a position close to mainstream children’s entertainment until in the mid-2000s, when the government shut down the legal broadcast of Japanese anime in children’s programs around the country. The boundary between the mainstream and the otaku culture is therefore blurry and flimsy in China, yet still tangible. Less mainstream ACGN products first came to China in the form of pirated copies of Chinese translations legally produced in Taiwan or Hong Kong. Then online fansubs and fan translators become the major cultural mediators, who translate almost everything in this area. Only recently that the Japanese anime are again screened legally in China, with online video streaming websites purchasing legal rights from the Japanese anime producers. It is not difficult to imagine that most Chinese young people are more or less familiar with the Japanese ACGN culture. Naturally, most of the earliest Chinese fandoms are built on Japanese ACGN culture, even the fandom structures and activities are imitated from Japan through Taiwan’s mediation. With such a heavy influence from Japan, the “popular culture” understood and accepted by young generations in China then automatically involves Japanese ACGN culture. Therefore, the community of ACGN fans in China is not as clearly defined as it is in English speaking countries, where Japanese media traditionally lies in a comparatively marginal and subcultural realm.

While Japanese ACGN culture had been influential, the title of otaku is not widely adopted until about a decade ago. Most early Chinese fan websites and forums are female oriented. Until around 2005, the internet is much friendlier to text than to other forms such as picture and videos. This could be an important reason that in China, male fan culture, which heavily relies on visual elements, becomes observable much later than the female fan culture, which is sustainable on texts. With the entry of the male fan culture, the otaku community gradually evolves into an interest-based community that loosely develops around a certain set of original media products (typically Japanese ACGN culture, but has certain deviation), a community that is inherently heterogeneous but also share a similar set of vocabulary, logic and virtual space for residing. Currently, the otaku community in the Chinese-speaking world relies on several central websites for information and interaction. Barrage subtitle websites are of the most important components of their lives. Gender matters in this community, as the dualism between otaku male and fujoshi female is always present in the daily conversation, but mostly, they coexist comfortably in the same space with their shared interest.

The barrage subtitle system is a perfect presentation and embodiment of otaku’s desire in community and companions. This system, if not intentionally disabled, does not only make communication possible when people watch videos, it makes communication obligatory. Once it is sacrilege to interrupt the flow of image and time on the film screen, now it is the urge to communicate over the image that draw the audience together at these websites. It is not exaggerating to claim, that barrage subtitle system creates a new mode of watching, as well as a new mentality and meaning of being audience. Activities on the barrage subtitle websites have constituted an affective social ritual, performance and interaction in a virtual space; the video watching experience is itself a performance that confirms the social identity of being an otaku. Far from being void, boring and nonsense, these performances build up an alternative community in the virtual space. Such communications are observable in every aspect of the internet culture, yet it is extremely important for online otaku culture because it is—at least in China—a youth subculture that still yearns for collectivity and identification. For a virtual community consisting of people with their own interests in front of their own small screens, the importance of instant communication in multiple voices can never be underestimated.

Ultimately, barrage subtitle websites deeply integrate users’ input for the final view of each video uploaded, much more than websites without such a system. Viewing experience then becomes literarily a process of inserting oneself into the streamed material and the audience community, rather than a silent voyeur in the darkness. In many ways, barrage subtitles convey comparatively little (if any) content that would add on to viewers’ knowledge. Explanation and “encyclopedia” subtitles and translation subtitles also exist, but very limited compared to the tons of seemingly meaningless and senseless subtitles. As Hamano Satoshi observes, many barrage subtitles on Niconico come not from reason, but direct affect. Since the configuration of barrage subtitle system ensures a direct link between the comment and the commented, commentators need not elaborate their feelings into a long sentence, but only need to type out their immediate reactions and feelings. Hamano suggests that such comments represent a fragmented, or in his words, modular mode of consumption (5). I suggest, however, that the fragmented comments towards the specific details inside the videos visualize immediate reactions and close reading, inherent in fans’ viewing actions, but usually hidden when viewers are supposed to give generalized impressions and evaluations of a video. In other words, the consumption process does not become fragmented because the barrage subtitle system, it is fully articulated and presented in a directly visible way, something repressed in a traditional video streaming websites as YouTube. The fully presented consumption process therefore easily take the reading strategies and community conventions, constructing a space of discussion for close reading details that the otaku community relies upon in reaching consensus for further elaboration. In many ways, once the hidden and repressed process of close reading visualizes, it could be the most representative narrative that generates pleasure and intensifies allegiance.

With the development of the new media, especially the internet, we as the audience are encountering screens with videos on a daily basis. Theatrical experience these days becomes somewhat a nostalgic ritual for cinephilia, or a bait of spectacle, designed specifically the high-grossing, visual and audio effect laden blockbusters. While barrage subtitle websites, just as other types of online video-streaming websites, belong to the multiple screen culture in the contemporary daily life experience, barrage subtitle system revokes the collective aspect of theatrical film viewing in an unexpected way. The word “pseudo-synchronicity” accurately grabs the artificial sensation that all the audience for the same video are able to see the comments made by other viewers as if all these people are viewing the same material together. The experience on barrage subtitle websites challenges the iconic image of a contemporary viewer sitting lonely in front of a computer screen. However, the watching experience on barrage subtitle websites is still drastically different from the experience of watching films in an old fashioned movie theater, because the general silence and awing respect for the material on the screen totally disappears. The shared experience of watching, and especially the sharing synchronicity is expressed not through the shared silence and more permissible reactions such as laughing, but rather through actions that deem very impolite in a film theatre experience: speaking (or typing), which means uttering something significant to one’s point of view at the specific moment of the media material. The sense of shared interest and community comes from uttering comments that would trigger other people’s reaction or add on to someone else’s reaction. The viewing experience on barrage subtitle website is intrinsically multitasking, because with the barrage subtitle flying over the video, one not only response to the video itself but also the comments made by other viewers. The amount of reading required on a barrage subtitle website is almost a blasphemy for the streaming content, especially for the heavily commented videos.

When I talk about the conversational experience in barrage subtitles, however, it does not mean that the comments necessarily correspond to one another logically. Sometimes the content of comments is insignificant compared to its visual existence. What matters is that there are people who also watched the video and feel also the urge to express themselves at a particular point in time. When it comes to exciting moments, or significant moments, viewers would collectively post comments, stylized or randomly, to enhance the emotional intensity of the particular moment, be it humorous, sadness, or passionate. I will raise two examples below.

A fan remixed video of the domestic Chinese animation film, Monkey King: The Hero Is back (2015), combined with a song titled “Wu Kong” by Dai Quan, is so popular that it has been played for about 2.7 million times in less than one year after it was posted in June 2015. As I examine the video in May 2016, during the three minutes playback time, one sentence keeps appearing in the barrage subtitles, “Qitian dasheng Su Wukong, shen ru xuantie, huoyan jinjing, changsheng bulao, haiyou qishi’er bian 齐天大圣孙悟空，身如玄铁，火眼金睛，长生不老，还有七十二变,” which means “Great sage Sun Wukong, Equal of Heaven, with a body like black iron, golden-gaze fiery eyes, immortal, and seventy-two transformations.” Numerous barrage subtitles containing this sentence scroll across the screen, or appear in a vibrant color at the center of the screen, or form a colorful screen of texts over the screen (Figure 1). Posting this sentence in barrage subtitles have become a ritual. This line is one of the most famous in the animation film, that a little fan of Sun Wukong, a little monk keeps repeating his own legend to the depressed Monkey King. The collective repetition of an iconic line directly refers to the high-grossing animation film, and towards the intertextual network consisting of numerous texts derivative from the ultimate source of the story, the vernacular novel Journey to the West, a book often dated back to mid-Ming Dynasty around the 16th century. In the animation film, the little monk and fan of Monkey King recites fluently this line, celebrating his personal hero in a mode that many Chinese children do. By repeating this line, the audiences are reprising the iconic scene of the film, referring to a similar childhood experience and impersonating the little monk in the film. The intertextual network that the fan video relies on goes far beyond the animation film, but to a collective childhood experience. Moreover, Monkey King is the all-time popular hero for Chinese children. Through several fandoms and fads since the late-1990s, including Stephen Chow’s The Chinese Odyssey (1995) and Jin Hezai’s Biography of Wukong, Monkey King himself through various metamorphosis, becomes a national hero that refers nostalgically to an almost nationally shared childhood as well as a national past and legacy. The target audience of the video and the community built up by the barrage subtitles are those who identify with this cultural nationalistic narrative told in the remix of the domestic animation and a song that borrows tunes from Peking Opera. 

Figure 1 Screenshot on May 6, 2016 of the Monkey King remix by Miaoxingrentingge at 02:56 as appeared on Bilibili

Another example displays the ritual for commentators directly through the pictorial quality of barrage subtitles. There is a transformation process, which is ridiculously long, but is presented exactly the same way in every episode, in the anime Penguindrum 輪るピングドラム (2011). From a certain episode on, whenever this transformation process begins in the video, viewers start posting ASCII art of little rockets in the barrage subtitle in various colors. The screen will be covered by flying little rockets rapidly scrolling from the right to the left of the screen during the whole process of character transformation (Figure 2). Frequent viewers of a particular series of anime build up ritualistic conventions in barrage subtitles showing a sense of community and collectivity, or more straightforwardly, the ability to type exactly the coded language agreed by the fans of this anime and by the otaku community.

Figure 2 Screenshot made on May 6, 2016, of Ep 03 of Penguindrum at 04:47, uploaded by 96 Mao@141.2cm as appeared on Bilibili.

In both aforementioned examples, barrage subtitles have transcended the function of verbal communication, turning into a collective performance and spectacle. Daniel Johnson suggests that these comments are “counter-transparent writings,” by which he describes the heavily coded language that “disrupt the viewer’s ability to understand what is being written through their use of wordplay and movement between linguistic and pictorial registers of communication” (306). Barrage subtitles, according to him, are often written in the subcultural dialect indecipherable for outsiders. As a result, such writings play two roles simultaneously, one is linguistic communication, and the other is pictorial registration. Both functions lead to communication that is partly exclusive towards the language community. The comments in the Monkey King fan video show their direct registration towards the insiders of the fan community. Through the continuous repetition of one sentence, the barrage subtitles create a space of common knowledge and a visual spectacle.

Barrage subtitle websites including Niconico and Bilibili are a space of affect for otaku audience, who constantly experience a sense of community through pseudo-synchronicity and through a subcultural dialect consisting of counter-transparent language and memes. The videos streamed online could be understood metaphorically as a theatrical play that constantly invites, or even forces participation from audience. Audience’s performance in this play then add into the play, turning a play without the fourth wall into a carnival. Not to suggest that the community on barrage subtitle websites is a utopia outside the commercialized and globalized world, I only suggests that barrage subtitles have the potential for alternative socializing and communication. It is a new media and form; only the technophobia would read the doom for meaning from it.

Reference

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Xiqing Zheng is an assistant professor at the Literature Institute, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Beijing, China. She received her doctorate in comparative literature from the University of Washington in 2016.  Her research interest includes fan culture, new media, Chinese cinema, translation, etc. Her current project is working on revising her dissertation, which is based on online fan subculture, mainly in China, but also in Japan and in the English speaking countries. She is the Chinese translator of Henry Jenkins' Textual Poachers. She is also a consultant of the Internet Literature Studies Forum of Department of Chinese Language and Literature, Peking University, and participated in writing a book of keywords on Chinese subculture, which will be published this year by Joint Publishing. An avid fan for more than ten years, she mainly serves as a fan translator online and occasionally creates fan fic and fan art.

The Ambivalent Internet: An Interview with Whitney Phillips and Ryan M. Milner (Part Three)

Late in the book, you consider Trump and his alt-right supporters. What can the book’s approach teach us about the newly elected American President and his often trollish conduct online and off. Even his supporters are telling us we should not take what he says, for example, in his tweets “literally” and suggesting that his words might better be understood “symbolically,” phrases that evoke the questions around authenticity and sincerity that run across your book.

Fun story: we hadn’t set out to write much about Trump. In fact in the book’s first draft, due to the press in June 2016, he was merely one among many public figures in the chapter on public debate. But as we revised the book during the late summer and early fall of 2016, Trump’s campaign took one bewildering, ominous turn after another. Trump’s behavior had always been…Trump’s behavior, but the things he was doing and saying were aligning more and more conspicuously with our underlying arguments. 

So we felt we had to carve out more space for his campaign, even if revisions at that point were meant to be light. We’re sure this drove our editor crazy, since we were making updates—often major ones, including discussion of the infamous Access Hollywood tape—as she was busy making her own editing passes of our manuscript (sorry Leigh). 

Working frantically to keep up, we asked if we could turn in the final edited draft by noon on November 9th (one day after the U.S. election, and one day after our original deadline) because we wanted to include the results. And then we all know what happened next. Trump the candidate—and we readily admit that we were writing about him assuming he would only ever be a candidate—became Trump the President. But that was it; we were out of time. We were also at a point in the process where we couldn’t impact existing pagination, or else we’d risk missing our spring publication window. Our compromise with the press was to change a handful of verb tenses, tinker with the structure of a few paragraphs, and insert a shellshocked footnote. And that’s how we accidentally wrote a political time capsule. 

Of course, subsequent months would reveal just how much overlap there was between Trump the President and the book’s main points. The most striking of these, as we’ve since argued, is the fact that Trump takes Poe’s Law to the highest office of the land; Trump is the Poe’s Law president. Who knows if he’s saying things because he believes them to be true, if he’s sowing calculated disinformation, if he’s just ranting about whatever’s on the television, or if he is, and we say this with some trepidation, “just trolling.” The fact that what Trump says may or may not be a lie, or at least may or may not be earnestly meant in the moment, is what makes figuring out how to respond to him so difficult. 

For us, and just as it is when confronted by Yiannopoulos’ logical gymnastics (“We’re obviously just joking, so the joke’s on you if you take us seriously, but also, please take us seriously, because the entire joke hinges on you not thinking it’s a joke”), the trick isn’t figuring out what Trump really means. Whether Trump and the administration more broadly is, to quote a recent game (“game”) played by Foreign Affairs, “stupid or nefarious?” (alternatively, “Veep or House of Cards?”), the result is the same. And so the result should be the focus. 

What do you see as some of the core tensions or fault lines within online political discourse? How does this reflect structural and systemic issues in contemporary democracy in this country?

As we maintain in the book, many of the tensions cited as unique to online spaces are so much bigger and so much older than the internet. The overlap between then and now, online and offline, is particularly striking when considering online political discourse. It is tempting, for example, to argue that online hostility, presumably caused by anonymity (or at least the ability to hide behind a computer screen), is why, to quote the title of Phillips’ book, we can’t have nice things. 

Before Twitter was even a gleam in the President’s eye, however, the American political system had long been marred by precisely the kind of antagonism, impoliteness, and incivility presumed to be the purview of internet pot-stirrers, as politicians, pundits, and private citizens alike stooped to a whole spectrum of identity-based antagonisms and schoolyard absurdities. It is also tempting to argue that the 2016 election was evidence of, to quote Milner’s book, a world made meme. 

On this point, we actually agree. But as we explained in an essay directly following the election, it wasn’t internet memes—like Ken Bone’s sweater, Marco Rubio’s baby chair, or Ted Cruz’ alleged serial murders—that most conspicuously characterized the election. It was age-old memes—regressive stereotypes, blinding misogyny, blanket anti-elitism, and good old fashioned fear of the other—that made 2016 the meme election. Digital media certainly influenced what people were able to share with whom and how, and what the stakes of that sharing might have been. 

But overestimating the role the online plays in online political discourse, in this election or any election, overlooks the fact that these discourses are, first and foremost, a reflection of the broader world that contains the internet, not a reflection of the internet that is somehow detachable from the broader world. Underscoring the point that incivility and misinformation are people problems, not strictly platform problems, a recent Pew report found that a whopping 40 percent of Trump voters cite Fox News as their main source of election information. 

Given the network’s obvious role as a right wing spin machine, its dominance suggests that even if it were possible to eradicate fake news online, there are much deeper wells of misinformation. Failing to address those wells, and further, failing to address the reasons why certain stories resonate with certain audiences, means concerns over fake news online can only ever be concern over symptoms, not causes. 

Of course, online political discourse is also subject to its own specific tensions; the “brave new world” side of the “nothing new under the sun” coin. Digital spaces and tools—from entire social networking platforms to these platforms’ specific affordances to the overall ability to search for indexed content, and on and on—have an immediately democratizing effect, allowing people from across the globe to connect with the issues, media, and people most important to them. These spaces and tools also have an immediately destabilizing effect, as they allow antagonists to find what they want, and who they want, often as quickly as they want. 

Ditto for the flow of information: the same online communication channels that can shed light on an issue or clarify the facts, the same channels that allow average citizens to participate in unfolding news stories, not just consume them, can utterly muddle the facts through the spread of false information and targeted media manipulation (see Alice Marwick and Rebecca Lewis for their analysis related to the 2016 election). 

This results in an internet that is equally capable of empowering and diminishing not just voice, but a basic sense of grounded, shared truth. Donald Trump and #ResistTrump, white nationalism and Black Lives Matter, falsity and truth—online all can correspondingly thrive, as participants use the same platforms, the same tools, the same materials, the same memes, the same everything, to accomplish their objectives. The only consistent difference is what impact these behaviors have, outcomes themselves dependent on an audience whose bounds can’t easily be parsed, whose identities can’t easily be tracked, and whose motives can’t easily be known.

As you note, some groups have different access to power and privilege which shape what gives them Lulz and what they can and do say online. A high percentage of the jokes you reference here are misogynistic, suggesting how often online culture gets directed against women, issues that have surfaced especially powerfully around recent online trends such as #gamergate. How might we apply your theories and methods to understanding the kind of popular misogyny that fuels this movement?

To appreciate the full impact of misogynist hate and harassment campaigns like Gamergate, you have to consider just how far back misogynist hate and harassment goes. This speaks, again, to the kinds of narrative seeds that folklore has cast across the generations. Pre-internet urban legends—stories presented as true accounts of things that happened in another town over, or to a friend of a friend—are one outcropping of such culturally normalized sexism. As we explore in the book, many urban legends are outright misogynist, for example the countless stories (some with direct ATU prototypes) of women and girls meeting gruesome fates for not adhering to expectations for how “good girls” behave, namely demurely—itself echoing a millenias-old injunction against women asserting themselves, especially in public. 

Other motifs are more subtle, but still maintain rigid gender hierarchies, including the tendency for women in these legends to be punished far more often than their male counterparts for stepping out of line, to be placed in constant danger, often requiring protection by men from the men that seek to harm them, and to be sexually pathologized at almost every turn, exponentially more often than men, whose sexual appetites are framed as natural. In short, what unfolded during Gamergate is much, much older and much, much deeper than Gamergate. Gamergate, like the memes Trump successfully harnessed, is a genetic outcropping of all the seeds that have come before. 

Claims about the pervasiveness of misogynist motifs, whether subtle or explicit, online or off, might seem at odds with earlier claims about the difficulty of positing the meaning and intention of folkloric expression. Our analysis is not a post-structuralist free for all, however; you don’t lose the ability to make claims (in our case, explicitly feminist and anti-racist claims) just because some of the data is unavailable. Personal meaning might be impossible to universalize, individual motives might be impossible to verify, but even then it is possible to extrapolate broader collective resonance from what is most frequently shared by individuals; if it doesn’t spread it’s dead, indeed. 

It is also possible to show how the recasting of these old seeds further clog the atmosphere with misogynist (or racist, or xenophobic, or anti-Semitic) messaging. This brings us right back to the claim that folklore is always a reflection of the culture in which it flourishes. It is critical to focus on the specific unfolding folkloric traditions themselves, and to explain as much about these traditions and their audiences as possible. But the question folklore ultimately addresses is what ends up being reflected, and how the reflections of today are rendered all the brighter, all the harsher, all the more revealing, when considered alongside the reflections of the past.

Whitney Phillips is an Assistant Professor of Literary Studies and Writing at Mercer University. She holds a PhD in English with a folklore structured emphasis (digital culture focus), as well as an MFA in creative writing. Her work explores digital media and technology studies, communication studies, cultural studies, folklore studies, literary studies, and critical race, gender, and sexuality studies. The MIT Press published her book This is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture in 2015, which she followed in 2017 with The Ambivalent Internet: Mischief, Oddity, and Antagonism Online (Polity Press), co-authored with Ryan Milner of the College of Charleston. She tweets at @wphillips49.

Ryan M. Milner is an Assistant Professor of Communication at the College of Charleston in Charleston, SC, USA. He investigates the social, political, and cultural implications of mass connection. He has published in outlets like Fibreculture, The International Journal of Cultural Studies,and The International Journal of Communication, along with contributing public commentary to Slate, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and The New York Times. His book on memetic media, The World Made Meme, was published by The MIT Press in Fall 2016. His research on memes informs his second book, co-authored with Mercer University’s Whitney Phillips; The Ambivalent Internet: Mischief, Oddity, and Antagonism Online, is forthcoming from Polity Press in Spring 2017. He tweets at @rmmilner.

The Ambivalent Internet: An Interview with Whitney Phillips and Ryan M. Milner (Part Two)

Much academic work on digital culture focuses on questions of meaning, yet as you note, it is often hard, if not impossible, to determine meaning and intent within online spaces and some of the groups you study refuse to ascribe meaning or sentiment to their otherwise overwrought content. So, if meaning is not your focus, what is?

Not being able to objectively confirm meaning or intent—even in individual instances of remix or sharing, to say nothing about the assessment of an entire memetic life cycle—might seem like a research roadblock. It certainly can be frustrating, particularly when the goal is to push back against a false claim or expose (what appears to be) a coordinated hoax, like the White Student Union Facebook groups. At the same time, not knowing who created what, what the(se) creator(s) meant to accomplish, or what a given text “really” means, forces one to stay empirical and focus on the things that can be known and confirmed. These questions can focus on logistic issues, like where the participation occurred and over what time period the resulting folklore traveled. 

Most critically when considering identity-based harassment, these questions can also focus on political and ideological issues. For example, who was empowered to speak as a result of an action, and who was silenced or minimized? Was this speech an instance of punching up, in which underrepresented groups were empowered to speak truth (and/or snark) to power? Or was it punching down, in which members of dominant groups further minimized already marginalized identities? What existing cultural norms were reinforced and what cultural norms were challenged? 

These questions are particularly helpful when attempting to unpack antagonisms that are—or seem to be, or are claimed to be, big question mark—couched in irony. White nationalists operating under the euphemistic banner of the alt-right as well as fascist apologists like Milo Yiannopoulos are conspicuous proponents of this approach. We don’t buy it, though. Whatever someone is trying to accomplish, however thick the layers of “lulz” they claim to be antagonizing under, does not matter to the final analysis. 

What matters to the final analysis is what seeds a person casts into the air. In the case of white nationalist antagonisms, these are seeds of bigotry and hatefulness. The more of these seeds there are, for whatever reason they may have been thrown, the more clogged the atmosphere becomes. And the more likely, in turn, that everyday people will end up with an itchy eyeful. 

Ultimately, this is the benefit of the ambivalence frame, and employing agnosticism when considering  motive. Saying that something can go either way, or has gone either way, or could go either way, might be true, but such a framing doesn’t—such a framing can’t—posit any further universalizing, broad stroke conclusions about any inherent personal or textual meaning. Whatever conclusions there are to draw hinge, necessarily, on what happens next. 

You explore throughout precedences for contemporary digital culture genres and practices within earlier moments of the history of folklore, but there is also a sense here that it matters that this is taking place through digital media. In what ways does the digital matter? What would surprise Alan Dundes were he to be able to read your book?

We’d frankly be surprised if any of the case studies we featured in the book surprised Dundes, who justified his 1966 analysis of latrinalia, i.e. anonymous bathroom scrawlings, by asserting that “the study of man must include all aspects of human activity.” Nor can we imagine he’d be surprised by the similarities between contemporary internet folklore and the folklore he collected in the latter half of the 20th century. People exhibited very familiar WTF-ness long before they were making internet memes. Indeed if there’s one thing that remains true across eras, it’s that human beings are pretty strange creatures, however or wherever this humanity unfolds.

Dundes’ and Carl Pagter’s 1975 study of Xeroxlore—jokes and images spread between and across American offices via copy machine in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s—provides one example of this overlap. A year before Richard Dawkins even coined the term meme, Dundes and Pagter were describing precisely the same kinds of memetic processes underscoring the quirky, crass jokes that have become so prevalent online. Like memetic jokes shared on the internet today, the humor of Xeroxlore stemmed from its resonant reappropriation. Office memos were cut and pasted together to mock incompetent bosses; existing “dumb blonde” jokes evolved into  “dumb secretary” jokes with the intent of demeaning a specific coworker, entire gender, or both at once; and sexually explicit drawings of pop culture staples like Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner, or Charlie Brown and Lucy, were traced, retraced, photocopied, and passed around with great aplomb. 

Trust us, anything you’ve done to PBS’s Arthur has been done by your memetic forebearers.       

But of course there’s an equally strong counterpoint (ambivalence and all). Age-old folk practices, and the age-old ambivalence that characterizes these practices, are sent careening into overdrive thanks to the affordances of digital media. The fact that it is exponentially easier now to find, modify, and share a specific text or image, coupled with the fact that more people have more access to the tools required for remix and poaching (these days you don’t have to be a white-collar office worker to degrade Wile E. Coyote), exponentially accelerates the spread and audience of ambivalent folkloric expression. For example, as prevalent—and potentially scandalous—as prurient Looney Tunes Xeroxlore may have been in certain offices in 1960s and 70s, lewd Arthur content become so prominent so quickly across so many different social media platforms in the summer of 2016 that the show’s producers had to issue a statement asking people to cut it out. 

People, of course, did not, and news stories about the statement only amplified the practice further. Such amplification also affords rampant decontextualization, in this particular case and more broadly. Xeroxlore certainly ripped texts from their original contexts, but still tended to ground those reappropriations within smaller, more insular, word of mouth collectives. 

Internet memes, on the other hand, can very visibly and very publicly turn someone from an actual person into an abstracted, fetishized object of laughter. Just ask anyone who’s ever become “internet famous” by virtue of someone else taking the wrong photo of them at the wrong time. That notoriety can spiral out in frightening ways, sometimes instantaneously. That is the one thing that might come as a surprise to Dundes, or any folklorist who worked in a pre-internet context. 

Embodied folklore like latrinalia, denigrating jokes, and workplace hijinks certainly had their own problems—ones Dundes assesses thoroughly—but the ethical stakes shift when those practices can spin hopelessly out of control with a few clicks of a button.

Are people often too nostalgic in their understanding of traditional folklore, given what you tell us here, that 80 percent of it is obscene? What are the consequences of this overly romantic conception of the folk?

When people talk about traditional folklore, a few things tend to happen. First, the word “traditional” is often used interchangeably with “old” (rather than with the act of passing down cultural elements to the next generation, which technically can happen across era and media). Second, these traditions—from dances to foodways to oral traditional tales—are frequently lauded as being purer or at least more authentic than contemporary mass mediated culture. This contrast is especially pronounced alongside assumptions about digital media, and how thanks to the internet, or anonymity, or Facebook, or whatever, everything is terrible now. 

The fact is, things were just as ambivalent back in the presumably halceon pre-industrial days as they are in our contemporary world. Yes the tools of communication are different. Yes these tools affect ethical stakes. But folklore didn’t suddenly get obscene or weird or harmful because it was mediated through a screen. 

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the Aarne-Thompson-Uther tale-type index, a massive collection of the most successful narrative elements in the history of human storytelling. As we discuss in the book, much of the content collected in the ATU—including stories of violence, murder, corpse-eating, assaultive sentient skulls, and various sexual grotesqueries—would be right at home on any 4chan thread. Much of the content collected in the ATU would also be immediately recognizable as the basis for literally every Disney princess movie (here’s some background on Beauty and the Beast, one of countless “animal as bridegroom” narratives collected in the ATU). 

Placing pre-modern folklore in its own little box risks downplaying these points of continuity. Again, yes, there are significant differences between folklore now and folklore from two hundred years ago. But as much as ours is a brave new world, there is also nothing new under the sun. The same tensions—between formal and populist elements, between the laughing us and the marginalized them, between those whose voices carry the loudest and those who fight every day to be heard—remain as pervasive as they ever were. 

Considering how and why helps isolate the cultural elements that are truly new, and what the implications of that newness might be. Folkloric nostalgia has a much more insidious consequence, however. The assumption that pre-industrial folklore was reflective of a simpler, purer past overlooks the kinds of regressive, damaging seeds—from racism to xenophobia to homophobia to breathtaking levels of paternalism and misogyny—these stories cast. 

Not just then, however, but now; contemporary stories across a variety of media continue to employ regressive folkloric elements, even those—like Disney’s latest crop of seemingly more progressive princess movies—that don’t as obviously forward problematic ideologies. These seeds are so densely concentrated, yet are such a common sight, that it is easy to mistake them for air. When restricted just to fictional narratives, these clouds might seem like nothing to worry about. 

Just whiffs of folkloric tradition; how quaint. Narratives aren’t just the stories we tell, however. Narratives are how we see the world. So when someone like Donald Trump shows up with the political equivalent of a box of Miracle Gro, feeding into too many people’s fears of the other, the different, the screw-em-they’re-not-me, then suddenly all these clouds of seeds take on a much darker cast.      

Whitney Phillips is an Assistant Professor of Literary Studies and Writing at Mercer University. She holds a PhD in English with a folklore structured emphasis (digital culture focus), as well as an MFA in creative writing. Her work explores digital media and technology studies, communication studies, cultural studies, folklore studies, literary studies, and critical race, gender, and sexuality studies. The MIT Press published her book This is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture in 2015, which she followed in 2017 with The Ambivalent Internet: Mischief, Oddity, and Antagonism Online (Polity Press), co-authored with Ryan Milner of the College of Charleston. She tweets at @wphillips49.

Ryan M. Milner is an Assistant Professor of Communication at the College of Charleston in Charleston, SC, USA. He investigates the social, political, and cultural implications of mass connection. He has published in outlets like Fibreculture, The International Journal of Cultural Studies,and The International Journal of Communication, along with contributing public commentary to Slate, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and The New York Times. His book on memetic media, The World Made Meme, was published by The MIT Press in Fall 2016. His research on memes informs his second book, co-authored with Mercer University’s Whitney Phillips; The Ambivalent Internet: Mischief, Oddity, and Antagonism Online, is forthcoming from Polity Press in Spring 2017. He tweets at @rmmilner.