Political parody and satire as subversive speech in the global digital sphere

Social Media and the Formation of Organizational Reputation

“…As the Findus incident illustrates, content diffused on social media often uses humor to express evaluations of organizations and/or their products (Kumar & Combe, 2015). Humor is believed to fulfill a social need to connect by helping to convey emotions and knowledge, sealing bonds between people (Martin, 2010).…”

‘Time to Ranch it Up!’: Ethics and satire in new media

“…Parodies may be seen as a kind of ‘subversive speech’ that use formal similarities to undermine the textual authority of the parodied object (Kumar and Combe, 2015). By directly imitating the form or style of a text, parody comments on it in some fashion.…”

Memes as games: The evolution of a digital discourse online

“…Satire and parody become currency in this space, especially in authoritarian regimes (Mina, 2014), where ambiguity was (and still is) the only way to dodge censorship executed by the gatekeepers of the public. Thus, memes are not only acts of individual expression, they are also acts of subversive speech in a “risky game where parody accounts, mirror websites, fake usernames, and proxy servers allow participants to slip under the watchful radar of state agencies, that continue to finesse their skills at controlling and stifling online speech” (Kumar and Combe, 2015: 212). Participation and collaboration are necessary prerequisites for the emergence and virility of memes, but the cost of playing the game is relatively small.…”

“…It would simply make no sense for organized communication to allow too much variation of memes, since this would dilute the strategic message. As Kumar and Combe (2015) note, processes of play in the digital sphere "create an alternative space for social and political critique, outside the institutions of traditional media due to the proliferation of networked devices" (p. 211). While organized communication is mainly concerned with traditional media relations and the main platforms of social media, such as Facebook or Twitter, memes can dwell in the endless depths of the Internet, and thereby avoid the limiting conditions of the mainstream public arenas.…”