On Internet Culture and Social Media
hello everyone
i am dr crystal everden and thank you so
much for having me at this tedx talk
organized by neon polly now most of us
may be very familiar with internet
culture and social media
but i happen to do this for a living i’m
an anthropologist of internet celebrity
influencer cultures as well as social
media pop cultures
and it’s my job to understand how young
people use social media
and how internet celebrities on social
media affect our society
and cultures i’ve been looking at this
industry in the asia pacific including
singapore from the mid 2000s
this has meant that i was right there at
the beginnings when we had the first
generation of commercial bloggers
it also meant that i was fortunate
enough to study the rise and the origins
of block shop cultures in singapore
and more recently i’ve been looking at
different forms of internet celebrity
and influencer cultures across many
different types of platforms
but above and beyond this i’m sure many
of us have a lot of misconceptions about
influences and influencer cultures
for one most of us may have this
stereotype or this belief
that influencers are just young
beautiful women
primarily on instagram here to take
selfies
and to push different types of product
placements and services to us
that may be the case for some of these
influences
we may also think of influences as
people who are usually
embroiled in scandals and in the
singapore landscape this often happens
through click bait on youtube
different types of twitter walls on
twitter as well as
instagram walls where people throw shade
or exchange comments with each other
over and over
but above and beyond this how can
influences
and the stories they tell allow us to
reconsider
our information diet and our world views
for one i would like all of us to think
about who
we are following on social media and
what types of influences we’re familiar
with
chances are if you rely on
recommendations from your friends
from algorithms on social media or maybe
even in the mainstream press coverage
most of the time the influences you see
may be quite homogenous
in singapore society this may be the
case that you primarily see
young beautiful chinese influences on
your social media
but going beyond this if we were to
spend time and effort
to scope through the different genres
and varieties of influences
you will see that they’re actually
critically important for representing
cultures at the margins case in point
here on screen i have four slides that
show you screen grips from various
videos
by a youtube influencer duo known as
munahirzi official
they are a malay arab muslim duo who
have been in the scene
since the early beginnings of youtube
culture in singapore
and by drawing on their network of
public figures fellow influencer friends
as well as friends and family you can
see how they unabashedly represent what
singapore society
and life as a young person can look like
away from the mainstream depictions of
influenza cultures influences are also
especially important
for giving us critical commentary on
society
you may be aware that some influencers
are really experts at humor
they astroturf all sorts of parodies
satire
critical commentary on singapore society
and politics
sometimes through the vehicles of
entertainment
other times through the vehicles of
entertainment that’s really a political
message
case in point here on the left you see
again youtube duo muna here’s the
official
together with some of your friends from
the music industry
coming together to put a parody video
commenting on the state of
racial discrimination in singapore this
occurred during a time period where
malay vendors were turned down from
hawking their wares
at various bazaars and shopping centers
because they were not the target
demographic
there was presumed to be chinese
spending consumers
case in point on the right we have the
siblings pretty please
an influencer as well as subash a
musician and rapper
who have come together to put together a
parody video
also commenting on the issue of brown
face in singapore
and how that is an instance of casual
racism that we tend to overlook
another part of my research looks at the
very fascinating world of
meme factories and as you can see from
screen
they can either be coordinated groups of
many people
coming together in a coordinated style
to produce
contents or they could very well be a
one-man
factory managing several types of social
media platforms
profiles and devices to push out meme
messages
most of us may think of memes as
hilarious images that entertain us
can you guess or remember who this meme
refers to
others of us may think of memes as funny
pictures that are circulating on social
media
especially on the very visual dominated
space like instagram
but above and beyond entertaining us and
being pretty pictures for us to go
through
in the style of instagram lectures what
can memes do for us
in singapore society how are they
important vehicles
for spreading information and
normalizing
new sentiments i wanted to think about
memes and meme factories as coordinated
actions
who can trigger new norms whenever their
actions happen in a concerted period of
time
and respond to a very coherent and
time-bounded series of issues
with a combination of them knowing how
to trigger algorithms so that their
keywords registers trending
a combination of knowing where to plan
these messages
on different social media platforms and
also employing sometimes
influences or influencer meme makers to
plan these on different parts of the
internet
it is not difficult for many of these
meme factories to set up a new topic
set up new trends or even normalize a
lot of new messages
that may be foreign and unfamiliar to
people
a lot of memes in singapore tend to
operate on platforms like
instagram as well as on facebook on a
space like instagram
apart from liking and commenting on
memes a lot of young people are also now
sharing them on stories and forwarding
them to their family members through
group chats like whatsapp and telegram
now meme factories are very critical
here because they play with the element
of
parallel languages these are all the
associated types of communication
often familiar on social media that are
not actual
written or spoken word so this can come
in the
versions of say emoji pictograms
emoticons sometimes even lead speak or
internet pop cultural speak the vehicle
of these peril languages
allows these meme factories to shape the
boundaries of a conversation in
singapore
here we see two examples from two
different meme factories in singapore
who were addressing the topic of sexual
assault cases that happened
on a very prominent university campus
there was a lot of discussion on how the
perpetrators on this university campus
got away quite lightly despite your
offense
and in response to this although there
were many murmurs
in the public forums and a lot of
members on different
internet spaces and common threats it
was really these sorts of memes
that catch onto the public imagination
circulate
far and wide that drive home the message
of whether or not
sexual offense should be taken lightly
just because someone may have
intellect or academic achievement
we also see meme factories in their
heyday from the mid 2000s being employed
as forms of vigilante activism
especially for citizens to seek
redress where they feel the state or the
police might have failed them
or might be taking way too long to be
respect responding to their requests
case in point this really milestone and
popular historical group on facebook
is known as smrt limited feedback
they’re a band of anonymous actors who
come together and often
respond to followers on facebook who
post about all the different offenses
that they spot in singapore society
and plead with these super informed tech
guys to do
something about this now sometimes this
may be thought of as good or trolling
as in the case of jovachu who was found
to be guilty of fraud or cheating some
customers at his shop in symlim square
but above and beyond trolling for laughs
and trolling for entertainment
there are actual benefits and actual
redress for the victims
involved in these cases case in point
the tourist who was cheated of his money
in this whole scam
eventually received a refund that was
bounded together
through fundraising by people who came
across his case
on social media in other instances
such meme factories on popular facebook
groups
are the drivers behind making visible
these very acts
that seem to be hidden by singapore
society due to the influx of a lot of
information
on social media and by making something
a public national conversation
they peer pressure or sometimes really
just pressure altogether the state
or the press to take notice and to
respond to them
so why should we care about internet
artifacts and actors like
influencers and meme factories
the truth of the matter is we are right
now living in a situation where there is
mass saturation and misinformation not
just on social media and the internet
but in
all facets of society and more now than
ever
influencers and meme factories are
experts in
shaping our attention amplifying and
suppressing
where our attention spans to be as well
as redirecting
and funneling foot traffic and eyeballs
to some issues over others so in fact
in this age of saturation and
misinformation both influencers and meme
factories are very critical
actors in shaping our media literacies
as well as helping us navigate the space
of social media
and the mass media a little bit easier
i want us to think about the actions of
these influencers and meme factories
as subversive frivolity i’m sure many of
us can think about the number of times
we tend to brush off influences as mere
vain young people
or we brush off memes as mere jokes or
humor on social media
but the fact is these types of formats
that they occupy
make them under-visibilized and
underestimated
people think of them as marginal
inconsequential
or even unproductive but is this very
underestimation of them
that gives them power because all of the
populist discourses that they have been
spreading and seeping into society
all of the sentiments that they’re
shaping all of the influence that they
have
is still ongoing it’s just that when
people look at them
they do not really take a second look
and all of this labor
work and power that they have slides
under the radar
so for that reason influences and beam
factories who are not taken very
seriously
tend to just survive longer in the
information ecology
because they stick and people are very
happy to
listen to their messages and to have
them hang around just a little bit more
you might also be aware that we are
living in a situation now where there’s
a lot of
scandals controversies and confusion on
social media
just about every other day there may be
someone who is being called out for an
issue a company whose social media
campaign has gone wrong
or a person whose misdeed or wrongdoing
was exposed because
of social media attention but we want to
be aware of when this can be very
fruitful
and useful for public conversation this
is when these are just
circuits and cycles of what
anthropologist victor turner calls
social dramas that’s right every time we
come across a scandal
whether by an influencer by a public
figure or by a meme that’s spreading it
surrounds
in social media we can think about the
life cycle of how these
visible artifacts occupy our imaginary
as well as take up space on social media
and they’re usually about four stages in
this typical life cycle
in the first stage we think about an
overt breach
this is when there may be a sin a
wrongdoing or a scandal that’s been
committed
that breaches the social norms that are
already in place
and governing society whether society
and the laws of influencer cultures
of everyday societies all of different
religious and cultural groups that have
different beliefs
so that’s step one a breach
in step two there is now an escalation
of this crisis
this usually happens when people take
notice of this breach
and respond to it usually through finger
pointing
through conversations on social media so
much so that with this going
viral or getting a lot of visibility on
social media
there is a reordering on of social
relations
what this means is that maybe a once
popular influencer
may now be very much the number one
hated person on the internet
or it could be that a topic that’s
usually taboo to talk about
is now the one trending meme that is
circulated far
and wide so we see here that there is a
shift
and an escalation of crisis where the
norm has been disturbed and
things are escalating on the rise and
that is step two
in step three after all of this
happening
that usually takes some time for the
person in question
the meme and question or maybe even the
company
who has been faulted to take part in
some sort of regressive
action if you’re a fan of influenza
cultures
this usually takes the form of a sorry
video on youtube
or a very extensive heartfelt post on
this may also come in the form of public
apologies by companies
or by meme factories and different
accounts taking down their contents
deleting contents and making apologies
now redress affection is really
important here because it’s usually
initiated by what we think of as a
disturbed social system
these are people who are responding to a
wrongdoing
or a disturbance in the norms only
because there was an escalation to begin
with
so steps two and three are very
important for us to be thinking about
all the unconscious bias that we have
all of the subtle casual racism and
sexism we usually think
that can pass under the radar as well as
all the casual jokes and humor that we
tend to make about different groups in
society
and pass off as being okay normalized
conversation
steps two and three come together in
tension and allow us to see
and improve as a society to think about
how we can be more sensitive and
inclusive
to each other and then comes the final
step four
known as reintegration this is usually
after some time has passed
maybe the public has accepted the
apology maybe they’ve forgotten this
incident altogether maybe the party in
question has just
faded into oblivion from deleting their
social media presence
we see reintegration when there is a
recognition
or legitimation that there may have been
an irreparable
damage or that this situation has just
passed its time
or past its peak reintegration can take
many forms as mentioned
many a times we see influencers trying
to launch themselves again
but a lot of these social dramas and
scandals have also entirely broken
careers
of influences caused meme factories to
shut down
cause block pages to shut down and be
issued defamation suits
or cause public figures to be asked to
step down from their jobs altogether so
clearly here the circuit of social
dramas
has a function and this is very
important for us to think about whenever
we want to assign
value to controversies petty squabbles
and scandals
on social media that has been me
dr crystal levitan i’m an anthropologist
of influencer cultures
and social media pop cultures and i hope
this talk has been useful for you to
think a little bit more meaningfully
about influences and meme cultures in
singapore
society thanks for having me and feel
free to get in touch if you’d like to
continue our chat
see you