On the Vernacular Language Games of an Antagonistic Online Subculture.

Stijn Peeters,Tom Willaert,Daniël De Zeeuw,Marc Tuters

doi:10.3389/fdata.2021.718368

Stijn Peeters, Tom Willaert + Show 2 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3389/fdata.2021.718368

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Abstract

In this paper we develop an empirical, big data approach to analyze how alt-right vernacular concepts (such as kek and beta) were used on the notorious anonymous and ephemeral imageboard 4chan/pol/and the fan wiki Encyclopedia Dramatica. While 4chan/pol/is broadly regarded as an influential source of many of the web’s most successful memes such as Pepe the Frog, Encyclopedia Dramatica functions as a kind of satirical Wikipedia for this meme subculture, written in high concept and highly offensive vernacular style. While the site’s affordances make them distinct, they are connected by a subcultural style and politics that has recently become increasingly connected with violent right-wing activism, forming a loose subcultural language community. Contrary to “memetic” theories of cultural evolution in media studies, our analysis draws on theoretical frameworks from poststructuralist and pragmatist philosophies of language and deploys empirical techniques from corpus linguistics to consider the role of online platforms in shaping these vernacular modes of expression. This approach helps us to identify instances of vernacular innovation within these corpora from 2012-2020—a period during which the white supremacist “alt-right” movement arose online. Through these analyses we contribute both to ongoing interdisciplinary attempts to bridge the gap between cultural-theoretical and computational-linguistic approaches to studying online subcultures, and to the empirical study of the vernacular roots of the “toxic memes” that appear to be an increasingly common feature on social media.

Highlights

Alongside the growth of misinformation, in recent years social media platforms have faced a problem of “ironic Nazis” or “non-ironic Nazis masquerading as ironic Nazis” who use “comical-meme language” to hide their violent intent behind a veil of “inside jokes and plausible deniability” (Goldenberg and Finkelstein, 2020, p.3)
Alt-right actors have created a vernacular that spread at an unprecedented speed and scale (Squirrell and Sonnad, 2017). In approaching this antagonistic online subculture from a big data perspective, we suggest that it might be conceptualized as “cultural language community” Steels (2012) engaged in what we refer to as robust vernacular innovation: recurring and widespread play with semantics that can be seen to constantly change and give new meaning to words, and often has some measure of staying power in that phrases become a significant lasting part of the community’s vernacular
This paper set out to study the meaning-making processes of the language community of which 4chan and ED are a part, which were examined through the lens of language games

Summary

Introduction

Alongside the growth of misinformation, in recent years social media platforms have faced a problem of “ironic Nazis” or “non-ironic Nazis masquerading as ironic Nazis” who use “comical-meme language” to hide their violent intent behind a veil of “inside jokes and plausible deniability” (Goldenberg and Finkelstein, 2020, p.3). This is not an entirely new phenomenon. Jean-Paul Sartre once remarked Nazis would often “amus(e)” themselves with disparaging jokes confident in the knowledge that their adversaries were “obliged to use words responsibly” [Sartre, 1995 (1949) p.20], thereby weaponizing language games to their advantage.

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