Ironic humor on social media as participatory boundary work

Abstract

This article explores the use of irony for boundary work in social media. It suggests that the combination of the polysemy inherent to ironic humor and new decontextualized digital environments entails greater potential for misinterpretation, thus turning humorous interactions into segregating tools. Using the case of left-wing mockery of a far-right-wing group in Israel, I trace the ways in which online irony serves as a means for social consolidation and differentiation. Findings indicate that the combination of medium (Facebook), keying (ironic humor), and content (social divides) works to empower one group and marginalize the other, potentially deepening existing social gaps. In addition, I show how this triangle leads to the construction of a new overarching social division between intellect (associated with left-wingers) and physicality (associated with right-wingers). Finally, I discuss the implications of social divides for our understanding of relations between irony and power structures in digital environments.

Persuasion Through Bitter Humor: Multimodal Discourse Analysis of Rhetoric in Internet Memes of Two Far-Right Groups in Finland

“…Previous studies of extreme movement rhetoric (e.g., Augoustinos et al, 1999) and their online rhetoric (e.g., Bostdorff, 2004;McNamee et al, 2010;Sakki & Pettersson, 2016) have suggested partly similar functions to this study. Nevertheless, while the earlier research focused mainly on textual persuasion (see, for example, Gal, 2019;Yoon, 2016), this study shows that the old rhetorical strategies are creatively adapted to a changing communication environment such as the mode of Internet memes. Furthermore, this study has demonstrated the possibilities of multimodal discourse analysis in exploring the different dimensions of rhetoric, combining textual, visual, and graphical elements.…”

“…In a similar vein, the study by Richardson and Wodak (2009) of the political leaflets of right-wing parties in the United Kingdom and Austria argues that multimodal elements should be read together in order to fully uncover their racist and anti-Semitic message, as the message of the verbal and visual support and complement each other. Gal (2019) has recently focused on the role of ironic humor in social media in the context of the political conflict in Israel and shows how multimodal messages are used as "boundary objects" to create a sense of communion and segregation. Furthermore, in their analysis of German far-right visual communication in Facebook, Forchtner and Kølvraa (2017) show how, by strategic visual self-presentation, the new far-right is able to redefine the traditional totalitarian Nazi ideology in a modern way such that it appears appealing within the much more rude, ironic, and humorous language of contemporary youth cultures.…”

Cognition in Situations

“…Consider two ways the interactionist approach can be adopted to advance debates in the sociology of culture. Studying how individuals hold implicit cultural associations in mind as well as styles of handling such associations can enable interactionists to contribute to debates about what drives an individual or group's network expansion or contraction (for examples, see Gal 2019; Lichterman 2005). From another vantage point, microsociological analyses of cultural reception can enable cultural analysts to theorize how reception communities are defined through complementary and antagonistic styles of symbolic interaction.…”

One Platform, a Thousand Worlds: On Twitter Irony in the Early Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic in Italy

“…In a successful ironic exchange, a sort of "conspiratorial pleasure" (Friedman & Kuipers, 2013)-a form of intimacy-builds between the addresser and the addressee. The derived affective bond, based on shared sets of knowledge, norms, conventions, and contexts, translates into a shared sense of belonging that, when missing, puts addresser and addressee on the opposite sides of a boundary (Gal, 2019). Given that most mainstream social media platforms are designed to nurture, datafy, and quantify public affect in the form of public emotions (Wahl-Jorgensen, 2019, p. 165), it is not surprising that social media discursive sociality has a strong affective dimension (Papacharissi, 2015) where irony can fit extremely well.…”

“…In a successful ironic exchange, a sort of “conspiratorial pleasure” ( Friedman & Kuipers, 2013 )—a form of intimacy—builds between the addresser and the addressee. The derived affective bond, based on shared sets of knowledge, norms, conventions, and contexts, translates into a shared sense of belonging that, when missing, puts addresser and addressee on the opposite sides of a boundary ( Gal, 2019 ).…”