Multimodal Representations of Prejudice on Vine

Abstract

The widespread access to wireless and mobile connectivity, the increasing popularity of social media, and the pervasiveness of portable devices such as smartphones and tablets are offering unprecedented opportunities for expressing and sharing personal understandings and representations of the world. This technology-mediated and hyper-connected milieu offers a fertile ground for representing, enacting, and counteracting antisocial outlooks and behaviours such as prejudice, discrimination, and bullying. In the introduction, we propose a unified theoretical model to comprehend the idiosyncrasies of prejudice, discrimination, and bullying, in function of the analysis of user-generated Vines related to prejudice, which is presented in the second part of the article. In this study, we posit prejudice as one of the primary seeds of discrimination and bullying, and we then examine its multimodal representations on Vine, a social medium that offers a short-form apparatus for constructing and communicating meaning. This study contributes to the understanding of how prejudice is represented and interpreted on mobile social platforms and opens the field to research on how people depict and perceive sensitive issues through “condensed” forms of computer-mediated communication.