Laura's Presentation

Laura’s topic is, in terms of medium, closest to mine, and yet we’re exploring two very different phenomena. I greatly appreciated the insight from Baym with regard to repetition in the creation of internet humor and solidarity. The idea of the way that humor is an interstice in a text that is ostensibly about something else (for example, the daily show summaries) I think has a lot of value for my own research—much of what I’m looking at has a great deal to do with the ways in which individuals add their own voice to the text at hand.

I thought, too, that Laura’s request for us to reexamine Becker was a good one. Much of what happens in internet discourse is about repetition—what gets repeated and what does not, as well as what is picked up as relevant to the conversation and what stances are taken towards that information. Repetition has a lot to do with the creation of meaning on the internet.

Most interesting about Laura’s data were the ways meaning was being created out of very, very little. For example, the wall posts about Michael Moore might have been taken in a completely different way had the person not have been a conservative. I also was fascinated by the transformation of the word “Sicko” from a movie title to a possible reference to Moore himself. The ways in which single turns like that can be manipulated is a really fruitful area to look at on Facebook, and it seems like that is an area Laura is beginning to cue into in her analysis.

One of the things I wanted to know more about in Laura’s presentation was the way intertextuality functions in the socialization of these older FB users. I wasn’t completely clear on that, and I didn’t entirely get that reverse socialization out of the data we looked at (although we eschewed an entire set of data, so that may be why). I have a feeling much of this socialization happens in the responding to texts, for example, the example Laura gave of people going, “There’s a button for that” to someone who simply replies “I like this” to a post. I would be very interested to see some of that in action.