Internet Culture Research Articles

Internet addiction among psychology students: the role of resilience and perceived economic hardship

The present study aimed to investigate internet addiction among psychology students, as well as the role of resilience and perceived economic hardship in the manifestation of the phenomenon. The study involved 252 students (233 women, 19 men) of Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. They completed a self-report questionnaire, which included a short version of a scale on resilience (The Connor-Davidson Resilience Scale - CD-RISC), a scale on perceived economic hardship (Economic Hardship Questionnaire), and a scale on Internet Addiction (Internet Addiction Test). The results showed that students of Psychology, regardless of their academic year, make above-average/normal and excessive/addictive internet use displaying indicative behaviors (e.g., uncontrollable internet use, neglect of social life). Furthermore, based on the path analysis models, it seemed that students’ resilience is a negative predictor of above-average/normal and excessive/addictive internet use (and their indicative behaviors). An indirect positive predictive relationship was also found between students’ perceived economic hardship and their above-average/normal and excessive/addictive internet use (and their indicative behaviors) through their sense of resilience. The findings emphasize the need to implement preventive counselling actions within university campuses to engender a safe internet culture among students and strengthen their sense of resilience, especially in a period of recovery from economic crisis.

Hide to Show: ‘Memefying’ Live Music

Michael Beil’s scenic composition Hide to Show (2021) thematizes a basic principle of social media, namely hiding mistakes, failures, or any vulnerable matters with the purpose of simulating an ever-perfect, active, and successful image and profile. Beil’s piece, with memes and memefication as a guiding principle and compositional format, plays along the hyperreal boundary between live performance and digital re-representation. The audience is continuously misled and often left guessing between real and digital, confusing a real body with its projected simulation and live performed music with a (pre)recording. Perhaps more misleading, the live music and vocals are frequently processed in real time, too. Mistakes, but also individual interpretations and authentic appropriations of the piece are smoothed out or erased. Beil’s composition may realize with this ‘fixing’ technique one ideal of today’s live performer: guaranteed perfectionism on stage. In this article, a performer-researcher from Hide to Show and a sociologist of culture and politics analyze the possibilities and limitations of digital art and Internet culture found in Beil’s work. What (new) requirements are demanded of the live performers and technicians? And how does digital simulation affect the artistic experience and aesthetics of contemporary art music and of social life itself?

Think before you share: building a civic media literacy framework for everyday contexts

PurposeIn response to concerns about fake news (Allcott et al., 2019) and polarization (Wollebaek et al., 2019), youth media literacy interventions have emerged to teach strategies for assessing credibility of online news (McGrew et al., 2018) and producing media to mobilize others for civic goals (Kahne et al., 2016). However, in light of evidence that practices learned in classroom contexts do not reliably translate to the context of sharing social media (Middaugh, 2018), this study aims to provide a better understanding of youth social media practices needed to design meaningful and relevant educational experiences.Design/methodology/approachSemistructured interviews with a think-aloud component were conducted with a diverse sample of 18 California youth (15–24) to learn about factors that guide behavior as they access, endorse, share, comment and produce civic media.FindingsFindings suggest a shift toward reliance on incidental exposure and noninstitutional sources when accessing information and a tendency toward endorsement and circulation of posts (vs producing original posts) when engaging with civic issues on social media. As participants engaged in these practices, they not only applied judgments of credibility and civic impact but also concerned for personal relevance, relational considerations and fit with internet culture.Originality/valueThe authors recommend moving beyond models that reflect linear processes of effortful search, credibility analysis and production. Instead, the authors propose a new dynamic model of civic media literacy in which youth apply judgments of credibility, relational considerations, relevance to lived experience, civic impact and fit with internet culture as they receive, endorse, share, comment on and produce media in a nonlinear fashion.

Postalgorithms; or, The Perverse Logic of Flisfeder’s Desire

Algorithmic Desire: Toward a New Structuralist Theory of Social Media offers an account of internet culture that draws as much on the Marxist theories of Fredric Jameson, Mark Fisher, and Maurizio Lazzarato as it does on the psychoanalytic theories of Jacques Lacan, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, and Slavoj Žižek (the last of whom falls into both camps). This essay emphasizes that through line for readers of Rethinking Marxism who may be skeptical of the book’s psychoanalytic insights. In this reading, the perverse subject of social media, who cynically “knows very well” that they are wasting time on their phone, is also a potential activist, as shown not only by the role that social media has played in Iran, in the Arab Spring, and in Black Lives Matter but also in how we are “subjected” by the algorithms of our desire.

传播语言学视域下的中国网络用语分析

Internet slang is a way of expressing oneself that originated in the Internet. Since China entered the Internet 3.0 epoch in 2008, unprecedented progress has been witnessed in the Internet coverage, the number of netizens, and the internet culture. Accordingly, more Internet slang has been surging with incrementing forms of expressions. Adopting the Top 10 Annual Internet Slang published by China’s National Language Resources Monitoring and Research Center from 2016 to 2019 as the quantitative corpus, this study categorizes them, from the linguistic perspective, into four groups: entertainment, society and people’s livelihood, politics, and culture. Later, based on the communication studies, the article analyzes the participants, contents and effects in the communication using the aforementioned slang through the medium of Internet. To conclude, the research also discusses the reason why the political and cultural Internet slang has transitioned from 2016 to 2019.

„Вторая” жизнь советских комедий в интернет-мемах периода пандемии

Nowadays, it is hard to imagine internet culture without memes. To achieve a humorous effect, meme creators use various means, displaying unprecedented creativity. They often draw inspiration from cult Soviet comedies by Leonid Gaidai, Georgiy Daneliya, Vladimir Menshov, Eldar Ryazanov, Aleksandr Sery and other famous directors. This article is devoted to the analysis of iintertextual connections in Russian internet memes related to the current COVID-19 pandemic. The intertextual references can be in the form of a frame from a Soviet comedy, a movie catchphrase, or both at the same time. Catchphrases can be used in the analysed internet memes in their original version, or they can undergo various modifications, such as the replacement of some components and/or the extension of phrase composition. The fact of making use of a specific movie scene or catchphrase by meme creators proves that Soviet comedy is still deeply rooted in Russian culture. Soviet comedies begin to “live a new life” in internet memes.

Digital Dispossession and Gendered Discrimination in Use of Smartphone by Women in Marginal Settings in India

Women are becoming avid user of mobile phones and are increasingly turning to technology to up-skill themselves which offers scope to reduce gender inequalities even in marginal settings. Technology has ushered in a development offering which holds tangible promise to reduce social barriers by providing training that boosts proficiency. Digital media offers scope and opportunities of reshaping systemic gendered imbalances of social structure. Women, in marginalized settings, hemmed in by deeply rooted patriarchal structures may find emancipation by use of the digital technologies in their everyday routine which may accelerate restructuring of their social and cultural realities. The role of digital media in struggle for women’s inclusion in the civil society and gender equality has been considered as emancipatory. This is particularly so because technology provides an avenue for women’s engagement where their physical mobility is restricted and voices deliberately muted. However, patterns of social attitudes may underpin internet cultures if viewed through a gendered prism. There is a persistent gender gap in mobile phone ownership and usage in the low income setting areas and women tend to experience certain barriers more acutely than men. This deprivation in terms of being unconnected widens the gap of marginalization. The present study is an attempt to explore entry of digital technologies in a given culture of slum area in urban settings and subsequent negotiations for the concomitant changes in the discriminatory roles and responses. Two research objectives that have been explored are- factors that engender marginalisation of women and their gendered aspects constraining their digital literacy and competency; the second objective is to describe disruptive impact of digital devices on traditional gender roles and responsibilities that determine the relationships and status in the family. A sizeable percentage of the slum dwellings have electricity, television and smartphones even though lacking toilets. The paper uses qualitative method and tools of observation, focus group discussions and interviews to study mobile and smartphone usage of women living in slums to capture their everyday mobile experience and internet adoption in the context of existing gender inequalities. The study finds that power dynamics within the household play roles that mark digital in/exclusion and (dis) empowerment. It is obvious that digital divide exists even among marginalised as do categorical differences because women are conditioned to accept and continue male dominance in subtle ways. Augmenting the efforts to provide digital literacy and competency to marginalised women may turn out to be real game changer in bringing about social change.

The Politics of Naming: The Online Carnival in China

This article focuses on the carnival aspects of Chinese Internet culture, but it goes further by suggesting that the productiveness of the online carnival leads to the politics of naming in China’s specific context. This article illustrates the questions of how Chinese Internet users name themselves diaosi (“losers”) to separate and distance themselves from the governing power, how they identify the Zhao (“elites”) to form an internal antagonistic frontier in the “us vs. them” context, and how the diaosi are “floating” and appropriated as xiaofenhong (“little pinkos”) to identify the external enemy rather than the rulers inside. This kind of online carnival is not merely a cultural issue, but is also a political and governing theme that has its roots and routes in contemporary China’s governing rationality.

Zooming in on Ben Passmore

This article is about Ben Passmore's DAYGLOAYHOLE (2018–present), the collection of webcomics published as Your Black Friend (2018), and various essays and interviews. Analyzing these texts has led me to develop a new interpretive framework to explain a pattern of zooming in and out as Passmore's dominant aesthetic strategy. I argue Passmore's comics force the reader's focus—a kind of requisite zooming in—on the humorous and the bizarre, drawing attention to the small, seemingly inconsequential, and trashy. Passmore's particular brand of activism is motivated by his wariness of what he terms "political edifice" propped up by a mindless internet culture and is situated around an anarchist vision of dismantling corrupt institutions and oppressive ideologies. This is expressed predominantly through the "zoom," which is a kind of aesthetics of scale. The zoom as an aesthetic mode generates friction that encourages a slowed-down reading of Passmore's comics, which may expose the possible shortcomings of Scott McCloud's vision for the "infinite canvas." I also consider three of Passmore's activist interests as represented in his work—multiracial identity and Blackness, gender and sexuality, and New Orleans and gentrification—which I argue constitute a more conceptual zooming in on social problems.

Getting Psyched About Memes in the Psychology Classroom

Introduction Internet memes are a ubiquitous part of internet culture and a common communication tool among students. Because they are a good medium for expressing ideas and concepts in a concise and fun manner, memes are a potentially valuable tool for teaching and engaging students. Statement of the Problem Instructors may not know how to use memes in classroom assignments or activities to support learning objectives. Literature Review Students finding or creating their own class-related content is an empirically supported way to enhance learning. Instructors can enhance learning by using multimedia approaches (pictures/videos in addition to words), which is a good fit for the use of memes. We include examples of ways that memes have already been used in psychology classrooms. Teaching Implications Incorporating meme assignments or activities in the classroom could be beneficial. Conclusion We describe how students can explain or generate memes that illustrate concepts related to course material. Instructions and supporting information and resources, as well as calls for research into the effectiveness of the use of memes in the classroom, are included.

Student Public Opinion Management in Campus Commentary Based on Deep Learning

Aiming at the needs of network public opinion analysis and crisis public opinion early warning in colleges and universities, the semantic sentiment analysis method is studied in this paper. Most of the public opinion information comes from short text comment information, and its text is separated from the written language, the structure becomes simpler, and it lacks normativity, which brings certain difficulties to the extraction of text features. Traditional sentiment analysis methods often rely on emotional dictionaries and feature extraction, and with the continuous change of Internet culture, a technical help is needed to make even the dictionary updated. Based on the analysis and study of attention mechanism and deep learning related technologies, an LSTM model is proposed to mine the deep semantic characteristics of text, which can accurately determine its emotional tendency. The main tasks are as follows: according to the CNN and LSTM text processing, CNN can better extract the local features of the text, and LSTM can retain the text history information and effectively extract the global features of the sequence. The CBOW model is optimized to pay more attention to the feature vectors that affect the classification results during the calculation process. Finally, the improved model in this paper compares the accuracy, recall rate, loss rate, and F1 value of the traditional model to indicate the performance evaluation index of the model.

Considering Meme-Based Non-Fungible Tokens’ Racial Implications

Considering Meme-Based Non-Fungible Tokens’ Racial Implications

Encoded Subjectivities: Interpreting Blackness and Representations of Black Women on inDmix.com

The study of Black digital and Internet cultures is a burgeoning site of inquiry. While prior research on identity and the Internet does well to address racialized experiences online, further exploration into so-called niche or under-the-radar Black digital spaces is necessary for a more comprehensive documentation of early Internet applications, practices, and digitally mediated sociality during the early 20th century. This article centers Black southern Internet culture by examining the website, InDmix.com, a photo-based asynchronous web media platform, and one of the first Internet visual catalogs of southern Black college nightlife of the aughts. Combining scholarly inquiry with first-person storytelling, this article provides historical references to contextualize an aspect of early Black Internet culture while arguing that Black women, in particular, mediate the process of visibility and valuation since they carry conceptions of beauty and Blackness across the platform. Engaging with concepts of architectural Blackness and informational Blackness, this article demonstrates the ways in which southern Black youth culture combined with early Web 2.0 technology practices provides a digital snapshot of college and urban nightlife experiences along the backdrop of socioeconomic and cultural shifts in the Gulf Coast region of the United States. In the spirit of documenting Black digital cultures, this article concludes with a conversation with founder Ikem Onyekwena, the Phi Beta Sigma photographer and tech entrepreneur who founded InDmix.com in 2004.

Function of “Memes” in Adolescent Communication: A Theoretical Review

Twenty years ago, distracted boyfriend, grumpy cat, and Kermit the Frog would have been three terms that had nothing in common. Today, they are instantly recognized by many as characters of some of the most popular memes. As technology rapidly progressed at the turn of the century, memes evolved to become a crucial aspect of internet culture. What remains to be seen, however, is how this influences communication, and whether or not there is a generational gap in understanding of this new way of communicating. This paper reviews the definition and a brief history of internet memes before discussing the common characteristics of memes. Research related to possible reasons for the popularity of memes, such as human preference for analogy and the inherent desire to belong to an ingroup, are also examined. Possible explanations for the generational divide in understanding and use of memes are considered. It is hypothesized that future experiments would reveal a discrepancy in fundamental understanding of memes across age groups.

Digital Diversity

Digital teaching and learning and diversity-sensitive teaching are often researched independently. This can quickly lead to overlooking the common origin of digitization (or early Internet culture) and an emancipatory diversity-sensitive stance. Uncovering the common origin in the emancipation movements at (US) universities in the 1960s to the early 1980s allows for practical consequences for a diversity-sensitive use of digital media in educational contexts. To accomplish this, the presentation is divided into three steps. In the first step, the development of a diversity-sensitive attitude will be reconstructed, and in the second step, the development of early Internet culture. Based on this genealogical reconstruction work, a competence model for a diversity-sensitive use of digital media in educational contexts will be presented.

Поколение тридцатилетних в современном российском искусстве: особенности кураторской практики и арт-критики

The research was initiated by the preparation of the exhibition “Generation of Thirty-Year-Olds in Contemporary Russian Art” in the Russian Museum (St. Petersburg, 2021). The purpose was to identify those features that characterize exhibition projects and art critics, related to the representation and analysis of the oeuvre of Russian artists of the millennial generation. The study was based on the examination of the curatorial projects and critical texts of the period from 2010 to 2020. Deep changes in culture, caused by a significant increase of the Internet influence on the society, were considered as the most important factor in the development of the art process of the period. The following features of curatorial practice were revealed: Internet culture was viewed from a critical standpoint in most projects of the decade; the most relevant forms of the exhibition were site-specific events and projects with the qualities of immersiveness; the most important component of exhibition was performance. The key trends of art criticism include: the transition from a vertical model to a horizontal one due to the growing influence of Internet publications (self-organized platforms, social networks); crucial changes in the format of the critical text (mixing genres, including multimedia objects in the text as a result of the medial turn in linguistics); the key role of the author and the emphasis on personality as the basis of a critical text.

Retracted] Recursive Neural Network‐Based Market Demand Forecasting Algorithm for Calligraphy Practice Products

In today’s society, calligraphy, which reflects one’s basic writing skills, is becoming more and more important to people. People are influenced by calligraphy in their studies, work, etc. Improving calligraphy writing skills has become one of the key directions for developing one’s abilities at this stage. As an important means of improving writing skills, calligraphy practice products are attracting more and more attention and purchases. In particular, in recent years, as the market economy has developed in a deeper direction, people’s demand for calligraphy practice products has diversified and calligraphy practice product companies have launched a variety of products to meet the public’s calligraphy practice needs in order to adapt to the reality of consumer demand. However, with the development of the Internet culture industry and influenced by objective factors such as school holidays and seasons, the current market demand for calligraphy practice products is rapidly and dynamically changing, making market changes difficult to grasp and leading to poor sales, which directly affects the profits of calligraphy practice product‐related companies. The artificial intelligence neural network method realizes the nonlinear relationship between the input and output of sample data through the self‐learning ability of each neuron and has a certain nonlinear mapping ability in prediction, which plays a great role in the market demand prediction of many commercial products. Based on this, this paper proposes a recursive neural network‐based algorithm to predict the future demand and development trend of calligraphy practice products through extensive and in‐depth research, so as to provide positive and beneficial guidance for enterprises’ future production and sales.

ВЕЛИКАЯ ХАРТИЯ ВОЛЬНОСТЕЙ КАК ПРАВОВОЙ АКТ, КУЛЬТУРНО-ИСТОРИЧЕСКИЙ АРТЕФАКТ И ОБЪЕКТ ИЗОБРАЗИТЕЛЬНОГО ИСКУССТВА

The article gives a comprehensive description of the Magna Carta of 1215 in the totality of three aspects as a legal act, a cultural and historical artifact and an object of fine art. The author proceeds from the fact that the originality of each of the aspects reinforces and strengthens the rest, giving special uniqueness to the Magna Carta of 1215 and turning it into an important element of modern culture. To analyze each of the aspects, the corresponding scientific method is used: comparativistic, formal-logical, source-research, retrospective, semiotic, etc. The characterization of the Magna Carta of 1215 as a legal act reflects its place in the legal system of Great Britain as part of the country's constitution. At the same time, special attention is paid to the ambiguous situation of its adoption. The article shows that this is a legal instrument that has had a huge impact on the formation of modern ideas about the constitutional system around the world, especially with regard to human rights. Considered as a cultural and historical artifact, the Great Charter of Liberties has a whole set of features that give it special value and make the preserved specimens unique. The circumstances associated with its adoption, the materials and ink used at that time to produce official documents, the methods of authenticating the document and other historical and cultural features of the four surviving copies of the Magna Carta of 1215 make it an interesting object of historical and cultural research. As an object of fine art, the Great Charter of Liberties was embodied both in serious monumental works and in caricatures; both in the works of artists and sculptors creating works of elitist art, and in works related to mass culture. The latter is illustrated by examples of images on clothing and vector Internet culture.

Мягкая сила ТикТока: соцсеть, которая покорила мир

This article discusses the rise of TikTok, a relatively young but extremely popular Chinese social network for sharing short-form original videos (mostly entertaining). By the end of 2021, TikTok had surpassed the American search engine Google as the most visited website on the Internet. With its billion unique visitors each month, it is the only top 10 website whose parent company (ByteDance) is located outside the U.S. In the article, I analyze the specifics of TikTok’s presence in the Russian segment of the Internet, its gradual politicization, and the problems the platform has faced over the last two years. In 2021, TikTok surpassed VKontakte, the most popular social network in Russia, in terms of time spent using the app. And, although the service had some friction with the Russian authorities, there is still no full-fledged replacement for it. So far, Yappy—the Russian analog for TikTok—does not look like its serious competitor at all. The article covers what concerns the authorities of other countries have about this social network, and how TikTok in general affects Internet culture. I look into the values propagated by TikTok among young people. In the conclusion, I put forward a hypothesis, which requires further study, that TikTok is now a super effective world-scale soft power tool of the People’s Republic of China.

Influence of jazz and musical forms on pop and song culture

The purpose of the article is to identify the main trends in the influence of jazz and music forms on pop culture. The research methodology involves recourse to an interdisciplinary approach, as well as the use of comparative, historical, and logical methods of analysis and culturological approach in the study of these issues. The scientific novelty of the work is to generalize the problems of interaction and influence of jazz features of vocals on the development of pop vocals, expanding knowledge about the development of pop and song culture in general. Conclusions. The formation of pop singing is inextricably linked with the widespread of music halls, variety shows, cabaret, pop theaters, and more. By the end of the twentieth century, the media, the Internet, and screen culture led to the spread of pop vocals on a new level and pop singing became an integral part of everyday life. All these aspects and features of the jazz genre-style system had an indirect impact on the work of composers who turned to songwriting in the pop sphere, considered jazz as a mediator between "serious" and light musical forms while giving jazz techniques creative and methodological potential. Understanding the music culture of specific pop-jazz types (genres) of modern music influences the understanding of pop, pop vocals, and pop-jazz music as a phenomenon of art.
 Keywords: jazz musical forms, pop vocals, pop-song culture.