Currently, the hashtag #WhyYouNeedTherapyInOneWord is trending on Twitter. From forums where people congregate to share strategies for combatting mental illness to essays that give a glimpse into the experience of those who have mental illness, I believe there is a strong capacity for internet communication to reduce stigma and help those in need. There is also a capacity to increase stigma, or trivialize these experiences. And sometimes a single online event can do both.

Therapy isn’t just for folks with a diagnosed mental illness. I’m a firm believer in therapy for everyone (who wants it), and I think it is invaluable to have a person in your life to whom you can tell anything without fear that they’ll spill the beans. Whether it’s your most deep-seated fears and regrets or trivial complaints about the rude co-worker in the cubicle next door, having a judgment-free zone—if you’re lucky enough to build that much trust with a therapist—can make the day-to-day burdens we carry feel infinitely lighter. Of course, not everyone has a positive experience with therapy, and getting a bad therapist can be traumatizing. But when you click—when it really works—it can change everything.

So yes, we should talk more about why we need therapy. Even when it seems relatively trivial. I have a stressful job, or my dog needs to be put down, or I’m going through a rough breakup—it’s not just severe mental illness that can be addressed through therapy, but a whole host of human experiences that make it a bit harder to get through the day.

So what happens when the Twitter zeitgeist tries to sum up their need for therapy in one word? Here are some of the answers:

Marriage

Life

Clintons

Jaws (with an image of a scene from Jaws)

Kids

Work

Squirrels

Abuse

Clowns

Traffic

Overthinking

Furbies

Rule Breaking

Depression

People

Deployment

Twitter

Life

Answers ranged from electoral politics to childhood traumas to diagnosed illnesses to goofy non sequiturs.  Many of them are everyday experiences that are relatable, and can certainly contribute to poor mental health, but are quite obviously not reason enough in and of themselves to constitute a trip to the therapist. It would be difficult to fill a 45 minute session expressing your feelings about traffic or Twitter.

But even this statement should be treated with skepticism. What if you have experienced trauma from a serious car accident in which you lost a loved one? Or you’re experiencing severe and unending harassment on Twitter?

You might see where I’m going with this. Our need for mental health care can’t be summed up in one word, and even one-word responses that seem trivial reveal the truth about how stressful, unpredictable, and often unfulfilling modern life can be. For those suffering from illness or trauma that inhibits basic functioning, it may be either comforting or disturbing to see the range of responses that people contribute to this hashtag. For others, it may open their minds to the benefits of therapy for everyday struggles. Or, it may perpetuate stigma around mental illness as something people should just “get over,” something no more serious than a Friday morning traffic jam or an aggressive office squirrel.

What you take away from #WhyYouNeedTherapyInOneWord likely has more to do with your already-existing feelings about therapy and mental illness than the specific content of the hashtag. I can imagine myself reading through it a few years ago, when I was suffering greatly from my then untreated mental illness, and feeling deeply hurt that people seemed to be trivializing the issue. I can also imagine myself at other times finding solidarity with and admiration for people speaking openly about their struggle.

Today, I found it heartening to simply see people talking about therapy at all, and the light-heartedness of much of the tag reminds me that sometimes we can laugh at ourselves and the mundanity of daily life, with its myriad effects on wellness. I have certainly spent a couple of sessions with my therapist talking about the stress that Twitter introduces into my life. I recall a time when I finished a rant about an experience with a store clerk and said “Wow, that’s pretty silly, right?” Her response: “It’s your life. It’s not silly. When it comes down to it, most of our lives are a collection of small things. It’s still big.”

So the reasons we may need therapy cannot be summed up in one word. Or, maybe they can. It’s a word that shows up over and over on #WhyYouNeedTherapyInOneWord: Life. It’s the one thing that we all have in common, the one word general enough to sum up the millions of reasons that a person may have to reckon with their own mental wellness. For those lucky enough to have access to affordable mental health care, it can be life-changing. For those suffering alone, it can be an unattainable dream. Maybe our next hashtag can directly advocate for better, more affordable health care that we can all access. After all, life doesn’t seem to be going anywhere any time soon.

Britney is on Twitter.

Budweiser recently announced that it would rename its beer “America” for the duration of the US election season. The rebranding was described as a testament to the “shared values” of Budweiser and America, and their marketing firm Fast Co stated: “We thought nothing was more iconic than Budweiser and nothing was more iconic than America.” Who can disagree with that? No one, because it doesn’t make sense. But that’s beside the point.

Negative responses to the re-branding have generally taken two forms. First, folks on social media are gleefully pointing out that Budweiser is owned by a Belgian corporation. While there is some obvious cognitive dissonance happening when a Belgian corporation brands itself as America’s beer, they’re certainly not unique among products manufactured overseas that use American patriotism as a marketing tool. At least Bud is brewed in the US. But a second response to the announcement is the evergreen accusation that Bud both tastes like nothing and tastes like piss.

I’ve never been able to sort those two claims out. To be fair, I’ve never tasted piss. But I have drank my share of Bud and, while its no flowery and bitter double IPA, it does in fact taste like beer. It’s light, and the “drinkability” of Bud Light was a long-time marketing slogan. Whatever your opinions of cheap, light beers they are undeniably the object of scorn by beer enthusiasts everywhere.

I’m a bartender. In my book, rule number 1 of bartending is that you don’t judge people for what they drink. A few months ago, a man came in with his friends and ordered a Diet Coke with vanilla vodka. His friend immediately started shaming him for ordering a “bitch drink.” There’s always a calculation for me about whether or not to make the personal political when I’m behind the bar. As in all hospitality, my pay depends on not pissing people off. I asked myself, should I call this guy out for shaming his buddy? At that point he had a $50 tab running, so it was a risky decision. But yes, I decided. I should.

“Don’t be mean to people for what they drink. I didn’t make fun of you for ordering Grey Goose even though most people can’t tell the difference between that and well vodka.” Yes, I am aware of the irony in my snarky I’m-totally-not-shaming-you jab. Still, it made me mad. People of any gender should be able to drink whatever the hell they want. You just paid $11 for a drink that you probably couldn’t differentiate from a $6 drink. Grey Goose drinkers, please send your hate tweets to @bsummitgil.

When I hear someone scorn cheap domestic beers, I cringe. I admit, I used to be the worst about this. But now, they’re my go-to when I’m pacing myself for a late night or when my wallet is light. I even cut my beer-drinking teeth on Bud Light. Still, for years I cracked jokes about cheap domestic beers tasting like piss and/or water. And I have come to believe that most of this sneering is not really about the supposed quality of the beer; it’s about the supposed quality of its drinkers.

Cultural theorist and working-class intellectual Raymond Williams wrote of his experiences at Cambridge:

“I was not oppressed by the university, but the teashop, acting as if it were one of the older and more respectable departments, was a different matter. Here was culture, not in any sense I knew [as a working-class person], but in a special sense: the outward and emphatically visible sign of a special kind of people, cultivated people. They were not, the great majority of them, particularly learned; they practiced few arts; but they had it, and they showed you they had it.”

Resources of Hope: Culture, Democracy, Socialism.

Williams was asking a simple question: why were these supposedly revolutionary Marxists at Cambridge sneering at the very people they purported to liberate? When they spoke of the “badness” of so-called “low culture,” that of the British working class, Williams wondered “where on earth they have lived. A dying culture, and ignorant masses, are not what I have known and see.” Culture, Williams argued, was ordinary. It was not confined to the museums and music halls and Cambridge courtyards. It was in the tavern songs and labor newspapers and beach trips just as much as it was anywhere else.

Growing up in a working class neighborhood, raised in a working class family, I have distinct memories of bottles of Bud in the fridge, the cooler, and the built-in cup holder of our second-hand La-Z-Boy. I remember being sent to the kitchen for another round of beers, passing them out to a room of grizzled welders and mechanics. They were a permanent fixture at mud bogging and fishing trips. They were a ritual for the men in my life when, after a long day of physically taxing labor, the first beer was opened, the cap flicked somewhere near but rarely into the trash can across the room. They’re not all fond memories. But I have a deep psychic connection to that label. It was a part of my culture. It was extremely significant, and entirely ordinary.

A recent essay excoriated the “smug style in American liberalism.” I won’t delve into the knitty gritty of the essay and the subsequent criticisms. But look no further than any Facebook page with “liberty” or “freedom” in the title to see just what many working-class Americans think of liberals. Entitled. Elitist. Snobbish. Out of touch. Smug.

Even Budweiser knows it. Their 2015 Super Bowl commercial turns the table on beer snobs, deriding “pumpkin peach lagers” sipped by men with waxed mustaches, juxtaposed with pickup beds brimming with cases of Bud. Their 2016 Super Bowl commercial features sports teams and physical laborers; it’s not “soft” and it’s not a “fruit cup.” It’s for “people who like to drink beer.”

It’s impossible to separate the beer snobbery that characterizes so much of the social media response to Bud’s announcement from the broader classism and disdain for “ordinary” people who like beer that is cheap and easy to drink. And with Donald Trump’s recent joke that his candidacy inspired the rebranding, plenty of people are taking the opportunity to ridicule Bud drinkers and Trump supporters in the same breath. Countless tweets and Facebook comments on how unsophisticated “redneck” Americans like shitty beer and shitty politicians demonstrate just how alluring this narrative is.

Budweiser is not a good company. Its move to Belgium was in no small part an effort to pay a ridiculously low tax rate. Its numerous OSHA violations put manual laborers—the same demographic that it so often markets to—in serious danger. It has a history of union disputes and unfair labor practices. But the most widespread criticism Bud faces is its taste and, by extension, the “taste” of its consumers. Sneering at the tasteless masses is a time-honored tradition in this country. It’s as Merican as apple pie and, well, Budweiser.

Britney is on Twitter.

Years ago, when I was a sales associate (fancy word for telemarketer, please don’t hate me), my company sent us to a conference designed to improve sales and increase our quality of life. They put us up at a very fancy hotel—probably the fanciest I have ever stayed at—and promised that the trip would not only increase our success rate and commission, but also make us happier. For three days we sat through seminars and presentations that started at 7 am and ended at 6 pm. Corporate big wigs, motivational speakers, and customers all attested to the important work our sales associates did, how we were changing lives with our product, and how a positive mental attitude could help us change even more lives while making us rich. There was also a gala where we got gussied up. They gave us a few free drinks. Most people were pretty hammered.

When we got back to work, we were “encouraged” to take part in the computer-mediated seminar that the company had paid for; it consisted of weekly presentations from the headline speaker of the conference in conjunction with reading his book (which we were “encouraged” to buy) and doing activities like journaling, affirmation recording, and visualization exercises. The weirdest part? It totally worked. For about a month. Eventually our positivity soured and we were back where we started. We were, after all, telemarketers. I have wondered in the years since whether the company saw a return on their investment.

It’s an old advertising adage that sex sells. But I think a deeper truth is that happiness sells. The promise that products will improve your quality of life is fundamental to affective capitalism, and as advertising moves increasingly from billboards and magazines into our homes and pockets, we’re surrounded by promises of future happiness.

I love Grub Hub, but sometimes it weirds me out. When I first started using the food ordering service I was amused by the cutesy familiarity they use to update you on order statuses. It’s endearing, and it’s different from a lot of other similar services in so far as it’s really over the top. For a while, their text messages consisted of a joke about deep-frying a crystal ball. But recently, I got this:

I can’t say why, but I was immediately annoyed. There’s too many exclamation points. There’s a typo, which is not really a big deal I suppose. But it’s the “pretty soon” that got to me. What kind of timeline is that? Grub Hub time estimates are almost always wrong, so what’s stopping you from making up some ETA this time? Then, I got this:

Really? Dreams coming true? Formatted as a book title? Look, this is too much.

But I shouldn’t beat up on Grub Hub too much. After all, my Birchbox subscription ships to “The Magnificent/Majestic/Glamorous Britney,” ModCloth tells me how great my taste is when I buy… anything, and Taco Bell absolutely adores me.

In 2014 when Facebook released research on how it had altered users’ moods, everyone was outraged. But how different is algorithmic mood manipulation from the cutesy familiarity or ego stroking and flattery that so many other companies engage in? Is it different because Facebook was deceptive? Or because it actively induced negative emotions? At the end of the day, whether it’s Facebook selling more advertising or Grub Hub getting more orders, the fundamentals of this affective marketing are the same. Build positive associations with a brand in an attempt to increase profit.

In The Happiness Industry, William Davies outlines just how pervasive affective monitoring and communication is. For Enlightenment philosophers like Hobbes, Rousseau, and Bentham the primary goal of social institutions should be to improve upon the human experience as it exists in the “state of nature;” that is, there should be a net gain of happiness and fulfillment that results from policy and market forces. Specifically in the case of Bentham’s utilitarianism and the cost-benefit analysis of policy decisions, the role of governments and markets in regulating the pleasure-pain continuum remains prominent. According to Davies, the moral and political imperative to be happy “originates with the Enlightenment. But those who have exploited it best are those with an interest in social control, very often for private profit.”

As such, the inducing, measuring, and regulating of happiness is quite a weapon to wield. As Davies writes, “those with the technologies to produce the facts of happiness are in positions of considerable influence, and… the powerful are being seduced further by the promises of those technologies.” Davies asks a somewhat provocative question: should we be against happiness?

Recently my partner David ordered food from Grub Hub and, after about 20 minutes, received this unfortunate message:

Aside from the gentle let down and the weird “thank you bye” follow up, it’s a dramatically different message than the typical happy-go-lucky Grub Hub tone. Perhaps that’s because this is such a grave matter that it would be inappropriate to make light of. For the record, they gave him $5 towards another purchase. Because if you can’t generate customer happiness with cutesy familiarity then you can always resort to cold hard cash.

How skeptical should we be with regards to services and technologies that try to induce happiness and familiarity in their customers? What meaning can we take away when Facebook, a behemoth corporation concerned primarily with advertising sales, tells us that it thought we might enjoy this memory from four years ago? Some examples are surely more insidious than others. While Grub Hub may be fairly benign, other services more heavily focused on surveillance demand greater scrutiny. For Davies, “any critique of ubiquitous surveillance must now include a critique of the maximization of well-being, even at the risk of being less healthy, happy and wealthy.”

When I worked in sales, we had all kinds of tricks to put people at ease, to get them to have positive associations with us. If someone objected to the sales pitch, we’d say “I can appreciate that, but let me ask you…” and then forge ahead. We’d ask about their kids, their jobs, their favorite TV shows—whatever we could think of to keep them talking about themselves. People love to talk about themselves. We’d make up stories whole cloth. I once told a woman my husband and I were building a house. At the time I had no husband, and definitely no house. I just wanted her to relate to me, to feel happy talking with me, and ultimately I wanted to make the sale. Maybe that’s why Grub Hub’s overly casual and friendly texts piss me off. They’re transparent, and I know they’re part of a larger game. So just bring me my sandwich. You don’t have to be my friend.

Britney is on Twitter

While those of us in the states were mired in election drama, across the Atlantic Brits came together to celebrate a sacred and time-honored holiday: #EdBallsDay.

On April 28^th, 2011, British Member of Parliament Edward Balls mistook the field for writing tweets for the search bar. Instead of searching for his name, he tweeted his name. And, because his name is Ed Balls, people lost their damn minds. At the time of this writing, the original tweet has over 70k retweets and 40k likes.

It is entirely unremarkable that a British MP whose last name is Balls got so much attention for tweeting his own name. What is remarkable is that people still remember every year. Many a think piece has been written on the ways the internet is destroying our brains, specifically our memories. Plato, the original think piece writer, recounted a story about some king who I can’t remember to make the point that writing would induce forgetfulness in those who learned it. Thousands of years later, people are still buttering their bread on the same idea. The internet ruins our memory. But what about the internet’s memory?

Ed Balls even made a cake to celebrate. 

For Marshal McLuhan, what is “new” about a new medium is its capacity to extend the human sensorium to new scales. Speech allows us to transfer thought from our brains to the air and to other brains. Writing transfers these thoughts to a durable surface. Television broadcasts material sensations across the world. And with the internet, it often seems like everything is happening everywhere all of the time. This new scale requires new modes of cognition, such as Katherine Hayles’ “hyper attention” in which we pull information from multiple sources in quick succession, scan documents for key words, and frequently switch between tasks.

One of the results of this new scale of human cognition is the role of networked information technology in determining what we remember and how we remember it. The internet allows us to extend our memory outside of our individual minds, with important consequences for what gets remembered and how we are reminded of things. Something that has struck me throughout this election season is the work that Bernie Sanders supporters have done digging up old video clips and transcripts to write narratives that are lacking in major news outlets. The fact that no millennial remembers a speech Sanders made before the Senate in 1992 does not preclude their ability to find it, watch it, and use it to make a political argument. This becomes all the more important when these narratives are lacking from other vehicles of mediated memory. In other words, if mainstream news sources are failing to remember important historical moments and contexts, the affordances of digital media offer an alternative.

If every single individual who was party to Ed Balls’ tweet had to remember to celebrate April 28^th each year, it’s unlikely that this fabulous holiday would have survived. But it only takes a few individuals, or perhaps one individual with a large enough audience, to remember given the affordances of Twitter. Over time, the effect snow balls—more and more people remember each year, and as #EdBallsDay gains greater traction it enters the consciousness of more people. Who knows; by April 28^th 2021 it might be a national holiday.

So to my British friends, a happy belated Ed Balls Day. I’m sorry I didn’t send a card. I’m sure I’ll remember to next year though. Or, more likely, the internet will remember for me.

Britney is on Twitter.

Theorizing the Web 2016. Photo Credit: Aaron Thompson

Live tweeting is an art. Anyone can do it, but doing it well requires a serious skillset. Keeping up with the ongoing conversation, making valuable contributions, engaging with other people, keeping all your hashtags and usernames organized, all while somehow paying attention to the meatspace event that prompted the live tweeting in the first place… it’s a lot. On the heels of two conferences (Society for Cinema and Media Studies and Theorizing the Web) and a long (oh so long) presidential debate season, I’ve been thinking a lot about live tweeting as a particular form of rhetorical address. Here, I offer a rhetorical model for understanding live tweeting as a social phenomenon.

Rhetoric is one of the oldest academic fields of study. In the 4^th Century BC, Aristotle wrote and taught extensively on rhetoric as the ability to see the “available means of persuasion” in a given address. That definition has remained remarkably stable over the millennia, and today rhetoric offers a variety of heuristics for constructing and critiquing rhetorical addresses and their ability to move people to action. Speaker, audience, social context, and the goals of an address are all factors in determining rhetorical tactics and effects; appeals to emotion, logic, patriotism, authority, and other factors can be analyzed using a rhetorical framework.

So how does understanding live tweeting as a rhetorical address shape the way we might both analyze and enact this new (relative to Aristotle anyway) mode of discourse? I think that, rather than an Aristotelian approach to rhetoric, the work of Kenneth Burke is helpful.

Kenneth Burke, a prolific writer and literary critic of the 20^th century who significantly influenced the rhetorical tradition, reframed rhetoric in terms of identification rather than persuasion. Rhetors use the means of persuasion to make the audience identify with the speaker. This process is most obvious in addresses such as political advertisements and stump speeches in which politicians appeal to “ordinary people”: the single mom, the minimum wage worker, and the college graduate drowning in debt.

Live tweeters attempt to foster identification in a variety of ways. The hashtag itself is a tool of identification. It alerts the audience that you are part of the same conversation, that you are observing—or, in many cases, not observing but interested in—the same topic or event. We use the hashtag to organize and place ourselves in a particular conversation. Hashtags might be seen as a tool for stabilizing what Burke called the “unending conversation.” He writes:

Imagine that you enter a parlor. You come late. When you arrive, others have long preceded you, and they are engaged in a heated discussion, a discussion too heated for them to pause and tell you exactly what it is about. In fact, the discussion had already begun long before any of them got there, so that no one present is qualified to retrace for you all the steps that had gone before. You listen for a while, until you decide that you have caught the tenor of the argument; then you put in your oar. Someone answers; you answer him; another comes to your defense; another aligns himself against you, to either the embarrassment or gratification of your opponent, depending upon the quality of your ally’s assistance. However, the discussion is interminable. The hour grows late, you must depart. And you do depart, with the discussion still vigorously in progress.

(The Philosophy of Literary Form, 110-111)

Conference live tweeting is, in some ways, a different animal from other live tweeted events such as presidential debates. Each contribution to the conversation takes a particular audience into account, and serves a certain purpose. After going to both Society for Cinema and Media Studies and Theorizing the Web, I’ve noticed four major types of conference live tweets: 1) summary of a point for the immediate conference audience, 2) summary for an audience that extends beyond the conference, 3) commentary or response to something intended for the immediate audience, and 4) commentary that extends beyond the immediate audience.

For example, some live tweets reiterate or quote something from a specific presentation in such a way that only people immediately present for that presentation will understand. For example: “And that’s when I realized I wasn’t in Kansas anymore.” -@generic_username. If you aren’t in that room, watching that presentation, you have no idea what this refers to. And that’s because it isn’t for you. It’s for the other people in that room. It’s like highlighting a passage in a book.

The other types of tweets are pretty straightforward; maybe you’re summarizing a presenter for the folks at home who are following the hashtag, maybe you’re cracking a joke that only fellow audience members will get, or maybe you’re adding to someone’s point in a way that will make sense to people regardless of whether or not they are there with you. But the address that interests me the most is that first variety. After all, what purpose does it serve to summarize a point for an audience that heard the same thing? And, even more interesting, why are those tweets so popular? What are you doing when you like or retweet something that simply reiterates a point for a narrow audience?

You’re identifying. You’re demonstrating your understanding of this moment in the unending conversation, and you’re asking the rest of the audience to recognize that this point is important or interesting. You’re taking the reigns as rhetor, and addressing an audience in such a way that recognizes your common experience. And when you like or retweet that address, you’re confirming the identification. “Yes, I too heard that. I also think it is important.” The like or retweet quantifies the success of the address.

Live tweeting is one part self-promotion, one part community service. Each tweet promotes yourself to a particular audience, and performs a service for a particular audience. It either insulates the conversation, keeping it inside the realm of the meatspace experience, or it extends the conversation and invites others in. Tweeters make decisions about who they’re talking to, not only during an event like a conference but also in our day-to-day lives.

Theorizing the Web is right around the corner! This post is a short overview of my paper, “Textual Community: Finding Belonging in the Manosphere.” It’s part of the “Politics of Platforms” panel, C5 on Saturday, April 16^th from 1:30-2:45 PM.

Our social worlds are increasingly augmented, dependent on both online and offline interaction. While community building offline depends heavily on face-to-face interaction and relatively stable, anchored identities, online communities have some unique characteristics. “Knowing” another member of your online community may come more from usernames or avatars than given names used in our offline interactions. Solidifying community beliefs and ideals doesn’t rely on church sermons or PTA meetings, but from popular blog posts and digitally-afforded hierarchies. One way to theorize these differences is a focus on texts, the ways they circulate, and ways they shape shared community worldviews.

I propose the concept textual community to describe the dynamics of digital belonging. A few definitions can help flesh out the concept. First, text itself merits some attention. Texts are fragments of what rhetoric scholar Michael McGee (1990) calls “apparently finished discourse.” An apparently finished discourse is a fluid, semi-stable collection of text fragments that allows people to make meaning out of otherwise disparate or incomplete signs.

These fragments are composed of a signifier—the entirety of the discourse that is represented—and a signified—the meaning we take away from the text relative to the discourse. Text fragments are situated within three structural relationships: fragment and apparently finished discourse, fragment and culture, and fragment and influence. For McGee, this model is a means of keeping a text anchored in its context—of reading the text within a universe of meaning and understanding the dialectical relationship among texts and discourses.

For my purposes, texts online consist of blogs, videos, memes, social media and forum posts, comments, and similar scraps of discourse that circulate in online spaces. Anyone who has ever stumbled upon an obscure or insular online community full of unintelligible jargon and nonsensical memes knows just how important McGee’s definition is. On the other hand, anyone who has found a community that resonates with you, that you want to be a part of, has had the experience of combing through the texts that circulate there.

This dynamic is key to the form textual communities take online, and platforms play an enormous role in determining the ways texts circulate. To define community, I rely on Ferdinand Tönnies’ concepts gemeinschaft and gesselschaft. Tönnies’ concepts translate roughly to community and society, in which community refers to voluntary associations based on shared values and beliefs and society refers to indirect, impersonal interactions based in necessity. Tönnies’ dichotomy is not so much a straightforward binary, but a dialectical tension or spectrum on which human associations can be evaluated.

Textual communities are characterized by voluntary, personal interactions based on shared values in beliefs, which are stabilized, perpetuated, and changed via the circulation of texts. Some texts circulate widely and often, becoming key signifiers for the community. Others may come and go quickly with varying degrees of influence on the community. In highly structured communities, texts may be centralized and canonized via a specific platform’s affordances. In others, texts may be more dispersed and difficult to find or understand, raising the barriers to entry for outsiders.

These types of communities are widespread online, from fandoms sharing their favorite fics to political and activist groups sharing articles. The community of A Song of Ice and Fire fans has always fascinated me; in their subreddit they reference past posts or prominent users, they build massive and remarkably comprehensive wikis, and they read and re-read the books looking for morsels of insight into characters and plot. And, of course, they share it with each other, have text-based discussions, make memes, and on and on.

Not every online community is textual; raiding parties on WoW or forums for cat owners may build a strong sense of community without circulating texts that shore up ideologies and values. Similarly, not every textual space online is a community. I think few people would argue that Reddit’s r/funny is communal in Tönnies’ sense, despite the text-based premise of the subreddit.

Textual communities may have varying levels of hierarchy, structure, and intelligibility to outsiders. One example of a highly structured textual community is Reddit’s The Red Pill (TRP) and its related subreddits. Briefly, TRP is a neo-masculist community—part of the Manosphere—that trains men in self improvement and dating strategies predicated on natural male dominance. In less than four years, The Red Pill has accumulated just under 150,000 subscribers, thanks in part to its low barriers to entry.

Using Reddit’s side bar feature, TRP makes basic community and pedagogical texts easily available to new comers. It is also a hierarchical community that utilizes the affordances of the Reddit platform to demarcate not only moderators, but also the TRP vanguard and “elders” or experts in the community. Furthermore, karma accumulation indicates how valued a member’s contributions are.

Another textual community from my own research is 4chan, specifically r9k, with very little structure and high barriers to entry. There is no helpful sidebar of introductory texts, and conversations on 4chan can be quite alien to outsiders. This is no accident. Creating an insular community requires jargon and concepts that are not easily available to outsiders. In fact, users lament the advent of websites like Know Your Meme or Encyclopedia Dramatica that allow non-users to familiarize themselves with the memes that circulate in these communities. Additionally, the fast-changing memetic discourse on many 4chan boards also makes it difficult to keep up unless you are always on, always watching and shitposting.

My goal with a concept like textual communities is two fold. First, it offers a theoretical center for understanding community dynamics as they relate to platforms. Anonymity, voting, and archiving are just some of the various platform affordances that can dramatically shape the form communities take. But it also offers a methodological inroad for studying these communities.

At last year’s TtW I presented on Nick Couldry’s (2000) concept “textual environments” and “reading formations” as a method for analyzing texts not as individual scraps of culture, but as moments in a larger flow that moves across space and time. With this approach, and for textual communities broadly, a blog post is not merely its content, but how and where it was shared (post vs. sidebar), how users were able to interact with it (comments, voting), and how it was received by community members as a valuable contribution to shared beliefs and values. This work builds on my earlier TtW presentation, and on my dissertation research broadly.

Britney tweets!

Photo credit: Karri Huhtanen on Flickr

I sit too much. You probably do too. The rise of office jobs and screen-based work and leisure has taken its toll. Incredible advances in chair-comfort technology have made sitting irresistible. And if a cat crawls into your lap… forget it. That chair is your new home. Sitting is the new smoking. It’s killing you. Quick, run for the hills. Or better yet, buy an activity tracker. I guess.

Unfortunately, sitting and smoking are two of my favorite things

I bought an activity tracker. For all of my distaste of the quantified self, I did it anyway. This isn’t a product review—I’m not interested in the strengths of weaknesses of various activity trackers paired against each other—but if you’re interested, I bought a Fitbit Alta because it is small and not ugly and it tells me when I get a text message, which is fun and exciting. What follows is a personal reflection on why I bought it, how it’s changed my day-to-day activity, and why I think these observations are significant.

I bought an activity tracker for three major reasons. First, I wanted to track my sleep. I’ve always had problems with sleep—too much, too little, not restful, so restful that I could be mistaken for a corpse, and so on. Some times I can get nine hours of sleep and still need an afternoon nap, and other times I can run on three or four hours of sleep without even noticing. This is actually a symptom of bipolar disorder, and part of managing my health is paying attention to my sleep and understanding how it can trigger mania and depression.

That leads me to my second reason: the silent alarm. I’m an early riser and (sometimes) a heavy sleeper. My husband is a late riser and a light sleeper. A silent alarm seemed like a good solution—I can get out of bed relatively quietly without pangs of guilt. Now we just need to replace all of the flooring in the entire apartment so it doesn’t sound like an ogre is walking through the kitchen.

Finally, I was enticed by the “get up and move” feature, which reminds you to walk around for 2-3 minutes every hour. At ten to the hour it sends me a polite and encouraging message like “Get up and move!” or “Want to take a walk?” When I reach my hourly step goal it celebrates my achievement. It fact, it celebrates everything I do. 7,000 steps? Here, have some excessive vibrations and fireworks! Sleep well last night? “Sweet, you met your goal!” It’s like a little digital cheerleader, patting me on the back for slightly decreasing my sedentary lifestyle.

Fitbit never shames me, which is more than I can say for myself. If you don’t meet your goal, no worries. No frowny faces or bright red alerts. It is only celebratory. This works for me, as self-flagellation is a bad habit of mine. Of course, there’s a practical element of this for Fitbit as a company; who wants to wear a wrist band that chastises you for watching a movie in the afternoon?

I’m surprised how much I like counting my movements. I bought this device with the expectation that I would send it back. I thought it might be annoying, or that I would feel guilty for how sedentary I am. Or, I thought it would just be a piece of crap that didn’t work. But I’ve had it for almost two weeks now and I still like it. I also forgot how nice it is to have a clock on my wrist. Whoever thought that up was really on to something.

But here’s what troubles me about how much I like this tracker—I bought it because I felt so out of touch with my own body. I find it comforting to know, as a quantifiable fact, that I am tired because I didn’t sleep well. I’m surprised by how often I need to be reminded to move. It’s not exactly shocking, but seeing the direct correlation between how much work I get done and how little I move is disturbing. It’s almost as if my mind is waging a war against my body, and the activity tracker is a UN diplomat trying to broker a peace.

It’s a deeply human experience to look for a techno fix for our problems; from the first weapons and tools made by pre-homo sapiens to the index card I taped over my annoying coffee maker light, there is a long human tradition of seeing a problem and inventing a technology to fix it. Sometimes a techno fix has a reasonable amount of success addressing particular problems, and sometimes it offers a misguided alternative that fails to address the root causes of inequality and social ills.

So many problems can be solved with index cards and duct tape

Works on Microwaves as well!

The activity tracker does a bit of both; it helps mediate the gap that I feel between my perception of my body and the material conditions of that body, but fails to address the structural conditions of a society that requires so many of us to sit at a desk for eight to nine hours a day, five (or six!) days a week. Until we shorten the work day, demand more breaks that allow us to be active in whatever way we are able, or diversify the types of work that require long periods of sitting, activity trackers are a bandaid on the bullet wound of sedentary lifestyles that are killing us.

OK, gotta go—I need 56 steps to meet my goal for the hour.

Britney is on Twitter.

From the beginning of his entrance into the race, we’ve been clamoring to categorize Trump, to understand where he fits into the political and cultural landscape. First, he was a flash in the pan, an inevitable “also ran” with whom voters would quickly lose interest. He’s an “outsider,” despite his bragging about pulling the strings of politics through political donations for decades. He’s a fascist, hell-bent on whipping up national fervor to undermine democratic institutions and further bolster white supremacist power. And, of course, he’s a troll just trying to get voters riled up.

It’s a bit comforting to call Trump a troll. Last summer, Nathan Jurgenson made the compelling argument that we call Trump a troll to convince ourselves that the rest of the presidential horserace is good-faith politics. He concluded that we are being trolled, but not by Trump; we’re being trolled by a corporate news media that is desperate to convince us that the spectacle is real, that Trump is different from other presidential candidates. Jurgenson argues that, in fact, Trump is playing the same game as the rest of the presidential field—he’s just better at it.

Jurgenson’s essay is delightfully cynical. The first time I read it, I couldn’t help but think of Jean Baudrillard’s description of hyperreality, a symbolic representation with no basis in reality. Baudrillard proffers Disneyland as an example of the hyperreal, a sign without a referent. Disneyland presents us with an imaginary world, an idealized version of our own, with a small-town America Main Street and animatronic crocodiles. For Baudrillard, Disneyland tries to sell you the idea that you are escaping reality when, in fact, Disneyland is more real than the LA urban landscape that surrounds it. In the same way that Disney is there to convince you that the rest of the world is real, Trump’s role is to convince voters that the rest of the horserace is in good faith. He’s not a troll, he’s a sign without a referent. He’s a convenient lie, persuading us that when we leave the amusement park, the real candidates will be waiting for us.

But a lot has changed since last summer. Trump isn’t a sideshow anymore. He is the main event. And yet, the troll title has stuck. Part of the reason for the persistence of this misnomer is, as Jurgenson points out, the haphazard application of the term “troll” to anyone who is bigoted or mean spirited. But it’s worth trying to understand what a troll actually is, assuming we want to treat it as a meaningful cultural trope with clear boundaries and sociological utility.

Fortunately, scholars have written a great deal about trolls. I rely on Whitney Phillips’ excellent book This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things to try to get us back on track in our use of the term, and to understand why it’s so important that we don’t think of Trump as a troll. Phillips lays out some basic characteristics of trolling. First, trolls are devoted to disrupting what they consider worthless conversations. They attempt to upset as many people as possible. They want to elicit feelings that are disproportionate or unreasonable. They are incredibly media savvy, and know exactly how to manipulate the news cycle and the affordances of social media to achieve their goals. They target easily-exploited populations, such as people already fiercely invested in a specific topic, or those already prone to sensationalism and outrage.

At this point you’re thinking “check, check, check…” and you’re absolutely right. Trump shares many of the characteristics of trolls, and that’s why the label sticks to well. But the linchpin of why Trump is not a troll is the most important troll characteristic of all: lulz. Trolls, according to Phillips’ research, troll for one reason—to elicit emotional reactions for their own enjoyment. Trolls take glee in embarrassing others, in making them reveal their own hypocrisies and “irrational” emotional attachments. It’s schadenfreude on steroids. Trolls, by any definition that takes into account the rich history of the term and the way self-identified trolls employ it, do not typically troll because they want to make meaningful change or convince anyone of their beliefs (though this may, on occasion, happen). They troll for lulz. They troll because it’s fun.

By this definition—and I think it’s the only definition that can make troll a useful analytic term—we have to ask ourselves about the difference between Trump’s tactics and his intentions. Trump riles people up. He knows which populations to exploit and how to do so. He is as media savvy as they come. But is he in it for the lulz? After a rally, does he walk off stage thinking, “wow, I really revealed the hypocrisy of my supporters. I really riled them up over nothing, which was terrific by the way. Tremendous.” I don’t think so. In fact, I think he’s absolutely sincere.

This might be the point where I lose some of you. And that’s fair. Sincerity is a sticky wicket. There is no way to definitively know that someone is being sincere, and that’s doubly true for politicians, and triply quadruply true for Trump. I don’t know how I could possibly present any empirical evidence to support my belief that Trump is sincere when he says he wants to build a wall and make Mexico pay for it, or when he threatens to put all American Muslims in a database, or when he says the only foreign policy advisor he needs is his big, beautiful brain. Call it a gut instinct.

And obviously, I’m not the only one who thinks Trump is sincere. That’s a huge part of his political appeal—supporters love his off-the-cuff speaking style, and his willingness to say things that, by every measure of political strategy, should tank his political campaign. It’s also why so many are terrified of him. But regardless of whether or not you believe he is sincere, it is incredibly dangerous to assume he isn’t. History proves that. In 1922, many believed that Hitler’s anti-Semitism was mere blunder and propaganda—that when he came into power he would tone down the violent rhetoric. This underestimation of Hitler’s sincerity had consequences the likes of which the world had never seen.

And that is the danger of calling him a troll. Lulz, while often achieved with violent, hurtful rhetoric, is a key element of troll intentionality. They don’t seek fame or fortune, they don’t seek political power. They want to piss you off. But Trump wants to be the commander in chief. He wants to have his finger on the most powerful nuclear arsenal in the world. He wants to mock foreign leaders and allies from the presidential pulpit, he wants to viciously beat protestors and round up Muslims, and he wants to tear apart millions of families through deportation. Calling Trump a troll undermines his potential to profoundly alter the international political landscape. It’s no lulzing matter.

Britney is on Twitter.

CW: Cissexism, genital mutilation, penis shaming

“You know what they say about men with small hands?”

—Marco Rubio

Shame and genitals go together like peanut butter and jelly. The story of Adam and Eve tells us just how enduring this shame is. With knowledge came shame, and their nakedness and the differences of their genitals started a downward spiral of fear—fear of our own genitals, and fear of others. From mutilation of the labia and clitoris, to castration, to the disturbing obsession with the state of transgender and nonbinary people’s genitals, we have been conditioned to judge, manipulate, and even destroy these most sensitive body parts. And I really, really wish we would stop doing that.

A few weeks ago I saw an image circulating online of Donald Trump, elegantly illustrated and sporting a small penis. I have yet to find myself defending Trump for literally anything, but I was disturbed to see so many lefties sharing an image that contributes to a culture in which masculinity is defined by body parts and individuals can be denigrated based on what’s in their pants. None of this is to equate transphobia or genital mutilation with a meme about Trump’s penis—rather, it’s important to recognize that all of these phenomena are wrapped up in the same cultural fear of genitals, and specifically the ways they can transgress the binary gender regime.

Queer theorists like Judith Butler and J. Halberstam have frequently noted how complex the relationship between genitals and gender is, and how those distinctions are used to reify systems of oppression and disenfranchisement. Butler notes in Gender Trouble that we often make the mistake of believing that gender is the cultural manifestation of sexual difference when, in fact, sexual distinction relies on the binary gender regime and compulsory heterosexual matrix. Sex doesn’t make gender. Gender makes sex. This is a dramatic oversimplification of the argument—the two reify each other constantly, and ultimately Butler’s goal is to dismantle the nature/culture distinction that the binary gender regime relies on, but the point stands.

The need to reinforce these binaries manifests in our compulsion to mutilate the genitals of intersex infants, to determine the “realness” of an individual’s gender based on whether or not they have a vagina, and to gauge the masculinity of a cis man based on his penis size. Penis size is often used to explain why a cis man is “compensating” for some weakness by purchasing expensive sports cars or being a bombastic braggadocio. The accusation of having a small penis is a mechanism for policing masculinity. What disturbs me about this trope is that it persists at a time when notions of sex and gender binaries are finally being chipped away at. The failure to see why it is toxic to critique Trump based on a presumption about his penis is a failure to see the root problems that allow for the perpetuation of genital shaming, and its often horrific consequences. If we can’t see why penis-shaming Trump is bad, how can we tackle systemic sex- and gender-based oppression?

I could go on to cite psychoanalytic approaches to genital shame, statistics on the relationship between penis size and self-perception, or the history of the penis as a tool of patriarchal domination against people of all genders, but I’m not going to. I’m simply going to plead with you to stop attacking someone’s character based on your assumptions about what’s in their pants. There are so, so many reasons to hate Donald Trump. His penis really shouldn’t be one of them.

Britney is on Twitter.

Edit: It’s worth noting what the artist of “Make America Great Again,” mentioned in this essay, says about the piece, which runs counter to my argument here. The artist writes: “One should not feel emasculated by their penis size or vagina, as it does not define who you are. Your genitals do not define your gender, your power, or your status.” As always, art is open to many interpretations. In my observations, the image was shared by people intending to emasculate Trump, an interesting dynamic given the artist’s stated intentions and the agency of discourse.

“So, is anyone going to bring up the masturbator thing in the bathroom?”

“Whoa, wait. What?” Did I leave a dildo in the bathroom? No, no way. Then it hit her.

“Oh, you mean the bidet? I was wondering if anyone would mention it. Masturbator? What makes you say that?”

“I dunno, it’s just weird I guess” Cheryl replied. “When did you get it?”

“A couple of days ago. The pipes are old and the toilet kept clogging. I read online that getting a bidet can help. It cuts down on paper use.”

“Wait, so you don’t use paper anymore?” Neil asked.

“No, I still use paper. But just… less. Because… ya know… it’s like, cleaner before…” This was a lot harder to explain that she’d anticipated. Poop. Spray. Wipe. For some reason saying that out loud seemed much more embarrassing in the moment than when she’d practiced to herself before the party.

“You don’t use as much paper because you’re already clean. You just have to dry off.”

“So, how does it work?” someone chimed in.

“It just hooks up to the water supply and attaches to the toilet seat. The knob controls water pressure. So, if you’re gonna use it, start slow.” She laughed a bit, realizing how embarrassing it was to give that warning.

“… it’s cold water?”

“Yeah, it’s cold. But you get used to it really quickly. After a couple times it doesn’t even bother you.”

“You’re trying to tell me you shoot cold water at your asshole, and it doesn’t bother you? What the fuck?”

“So what’s it like?” Folks were starting to get curious. This was kind of exciting. Like having some exotic pet.

“I really like it. It’s… refreshing? I definitely use less toilet paper. And it’s a real time saver. And obviously I feel a lot cleaner.”

The thought of feeling clean—not just getting rid of dirt or shit but all the different ways a person can feel clean— brought up unexpected memories. She remembered a vingette in a book she’d read long ago, The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf, a novel about a family of Muslim Americans facing Islamaphobia and culture clash in the Midwest. The passage she remembered was a discussion about dirty American buttholes, and how water was the only way to become truly clean. The father in the story, if she remembered correctly, had pointed out the irony of Americans’ belief that they were the more civilized society, while they walked around with shit in their ass cracks all day.

“How much was it? I heard they’re expensive.”

“Some are I guess, but mines a pretty basic setup. No heated seats or butt dryers or anything. It was like $25 on Amazon. That’s the only reason I bought it. I figured if I didn’t like it, it wasn’t a huge investment.”

“I use those wet wipe things. They’re pretty good, and you can just flush ‘em.”

Wow, we’re doing it, she thought. We’re talking about how we clean our asses.

“Maybe if you have decent pipes, but mostly they don’t disintegrate and they clog up the plumbing really bad. And I’m not keeping poop napkins in my trash.”

“I dunno, it seems like a good way to get yeast infections or something,” Chris retorted, their nose wrinkling.

This was starting to get intense. She felt on the defense, like she was personally invested in this piece of plastic that cleans your butt, like she needed to shield it from the naysayers.

“Actually, a lot of doctors think it can lessen lots of infections. Because… ya know, it’s cleaner.”

“I dunno. I think it might be kind of nice. I wonder why they’re not more popular in the states. When I went to France last summer they were everywhere.”

“Did you use any when you were in France?”

“Nah, too intimidating. The ones I saw were separate from the toilet, and I wasn’t really sure how to do it. I sorta thought I might end up drenched in poop water. Pretty silly now that I’m saying it out loud.”

“They’re pretty common in most parts of the world—Europe, South America, Japan… I think Americans don’t like them because we’re all so puritanical.”

“Also homophobia. Because, of course, anything that touches your butt is gonna turn you gay.”

Everyone chuckled a little. Some of the obvious discomfort eased a little.

“So, does it… feel good?”

“Yeah. I mean, it doesn’t reach the level of arousal or anything, or not for me at least. But it feels good. Sorta like when someone scratches your head, or when you take your watch off and the skin is all soft and touching it feels cool.”

An uncomfortable silence settled, and someone stood up and announced they were going to get a beer. Two others followed. The hostess wondered if she’d committed some faux pas by explicitly saying that the bidet felt good. Yes, obviously I did. People do not typically express pleasure over spraying their buttholes with cold water in decent company. 

Time passed, and the conversation on anus-cleansing practices gave way to more respectable topics like Supreme Court decisions and new additions to Netflix. The party was starting to wane, empty beer bottles on every surface, the pile of coats getting smaller and smaller. She walked toward the kitchen to start sorting bottles and then she heard it—the unmistakable sound of the bidet. Someone had given it a go. She smirked, and averted her gaze when the user left the bathroom. She was strangely embarrassed that she knew someone had just used it, even though she wasn’t terribly embarrassed to own it.

When the party was over, the guests gone home, she laid in bed thinking over the conversation about the curious device that performed a basic, everyday, yet unspeakable function. A device that, to her mind, was far preferable to the toilet paper tyranny that so often goes unchallenged. But she was absolutely convinced that the whole thing had made at least a few guests bidet curious. The gospel was spreading. It was only a matter of time. The bidet revolution had begun.

Britney is on Twitter