Content Warning: Racism (anti-black racism, xenophobia)

Authors note: This is an analysis of images;  I debated to what extent the images themselves should be included and how much description I should provide. In this sort of research, there is always a risk of re-circulating the violent discourse that the you intend to critique. Ultimately, and for a variety of reasons, I decided to include the images. I’m interested in readers’ thoughts on this question, so please post in the comments if you feel inclined to do so.

As with any ethnic or racial identity, whiteness is a multitude. White supremacy takes many forms. And, as Jenny Davis showed us earlier this week, it’s been a hell of a year for white supremacy.

Unless you are actively involved in white supremacist discourse communities, or find yourself a target of racist speech and violence, it can be difficult to envision these more hateful variations of whiteness. This invisibility makes it far too easy for some (and here I mean myself and many other white people) to underestimate just how much virulent racism exists all around us. This invisibility is two-fold: it tends to remain somewhat contained on forums like Stormfront or various “quarantined” subreddits, and we tend not to go looking for it.

There is great danger in this invisibility. First, the most disturbing variations of white supremacy can only remain invisible for so long before they start to spill out, as we saw last week when #blacklivesmatter protestors were attacked in two venues: one who was beaten at a Donald Trump event, and several others who were shot at a protest. Additionally, the invisibility and containment of extremist white supremacists makes it more difficult to draw straight lines between “subtle” forms of racism like wanting to close national borders to refugees and the more explicit forms that circulate in dark corners of the internet.

In what follows, I want to confront white supremacy head on. Visual rhetoric, the study of the persuasiveness of images, provides a useful tool for analyzing a wide variety of ideological formations. It is perhaps uniquely suited to analyses of digital cultures, which are replete with images. Below I conduct a rhetorical analysis of images circulated in two spaces; the first is the Twitter hashtag #whitegenocide and the second is 4chan’s “politically incorrect” (/pol/) board. I’m particularly interested in how the affordances of the two platforms, Twitter and 4chan, encourage different varieties of white supremacist images.

The primary difference between the two spaces is that one is primarily pro-white (#whitegenocide) while the other is primarily anti-black (/pol/). It’s key to understand that this is not necessarily an ideological difference—both sites are simultaneously pro-white and anti-minority. Rather than an ideological distinction, it’s more useful to analyze their differences as one of emphasis or articulation. In other words, the worldviews expressed in these spaces have only slight differences. It is really the modes of expression that differ, and these modes are in part informed by the differences between the platforms themselves. While tweets are associated with stable, often public accounts with personally identifying information, 4chan is anonymous and posts cannot be tied to individuals’ offline selves. The result is that #whitegenocide engages in a greater degree of “acceptable” white supremacy, while 4chan users can be more “obviously” racist.

The image above provides a good starting point for understanding #whitegenocide. Crying white babies are included to emotionally prime viewers for the seriousness of the purported problem, the disappearance of the white race. The blame for this extinction of the white race is “multiracialism,” a term that is effectively persuasive in its ambiguity. It has an air of legitimacy without needing to define itself. The phrase “Africa for the Africans…” etc. refers to the presumed double standard that non-white countries are excused for being racially homogenous while white nations are expected to become increasingly heterogeneous—an argument that conveniently elides centuries of colonialism in which the entire world became a white playground and site of resource extraction. Finally, the image dismisses all anti-racist activism as anti-white “reverse racism.” The short phrase does a surprising amount of work: it asserts that 1) reverse racism exists, 2) the only racism now is anti-white racism, 3) all of this is somewhat conspiratorial and encoded.

This image makes a similar argument, appealing to the protection of children. It dismisses “left-wing” logic as internally inconsistent without needing to acknowledge that, while Tibet is actually facing the possibility of being wiped off the face of the earth, Europe… well, isn’t. It’s not happening. The last panel launches a three-pronged assault against leftists, undermining their overly-emotional and unreasonable anger, their use of labels like fascist and Nazi, and (I’m pretty sure?) their use of internet abbreviations.

Here we see what looks like Keith Olbermann (who hasn’t worked at MSNBC since 2011, but I digress) calling the GOP racist, while another white guy, possibly Bret Baier but who could potentially be any white guy from Fox News, calls for legal immigration. This is another triple threat—a critique of mainstream news media, the assertion that both the left and the right are calling for white genocide by supporting immigration, and of course two scared white kids. Scared white kids is a pretty common theme.

Moving on to /pol/ we see greater emphasis on Black Lives Matter, particularly in the wake of the recent shooting in which two 4chan users from /k/, a weapons board, provoked protestors and, upon being crowded away from the protest and allegedly punched, shot at least 5 people. The image from the Bernie Sanders campaign event, in which BLM activists interrupted Sanders, was widely criticized by his supporters. The claim that a movement built on raising awareness about and countering disproportionate police violence against black Americans plays into many of the same fears present in #whitegenocide, namely the decline of white power. It’s a bit more crude than those shared on Twitter, perhaps because 4chan is “speaking to the choir” where persuasion is more internal than outreach-oriented, and so the messages do not need to be as finely crafted.

This image features a news report and mug shots of two black men who murdered Amanda Blackburn, a white mother pregnant with her second child. The connection between the murder and the BLM movement, though completely unrelated, suggests that black-on-white crime delegitimizes a movement that primarily addresses police brutality. The fact that Blackburn was a pregnant white woman makes her a particularly sympathetic subject. Like the last image, this is more crude than most of the images featured in #whitegenocide.

This one was new to me. Pepe the frog is a popular meme, especially on 4chan. This particular Pepe is Smug Pepe. Only now he’s Smug Trump Pepe. This image was posted in a thread defending the BLM protest shooters, accompanied by text using a derogatory term for black protestors. The poster expresses their hope that protestors will become violent, thereby delegitimizing the movement as a whole, and that the shooters, “brave Pollacks,” will be acquitted on grounds of self-defense. The connection between the text and Donald Trump goes unstated, but is a good fit given Trump’s racist campaigning. It’s an inside joke, a rhetorical device that fosters in-group solidarity rather than attempting to persuade outsiders.

There are several images from 4chan that I decided not to include because they are just too vile, but they’re worth mentioning. One featured Michael Brown, whose shooting sparked the Ferguson protests that began in August of 2014 and was a major contributing event to the ascendance of the BLM movement. Brown’s image was accompanied by various dehumanizing stereotypes. Also featured were images of Hitler and Nazi regalia, offensive caricatures of Jewish people, an historical photo of a lynching, and unflattering images of black Americans designed to make them look dangerous or frame them as objects of ridicule. The thread also contained many slurs and calls for black genocide and the rollback of civil rights.

The #whitegenocide images differ rhetorically from the /pol/ images in at least two important ways. First, as mentioned above, they are connected to stable accounts that often contain identifying information. As such, they tend to be less explicitly racist and more about advocacy. Using statistical data about the trend towards a white minority and fear for the future of white children, they combine supposedly rational argument with emotional appeal. These are two of Aristotle’s three means of persuasion: logos, the appeal to logic; pathos, the appeal to emotion; and ethos, the appeal to the authority of the speaker. Aristotle defined rhetoric as the ability to see the means of persuasion, and argued that rhetors should assess their arguments and the employment of these means depending on their audience and their goals. These are tactics that many of us use almost subconsciously when trying to craft an effective argument, and more sophisticated rhetors use them quite purposely to ensure their arguments have the intended impact.

Secondly, the #whitegenocide images are employed in ways that attempt to convince outsiders of their arguments, while /pol/ is much more oriented toward reinforcing group solidarity among those who already agree with their positions. By using statistics and emotion in ways that are on the surface less explicitly racist—by emphasizing advocacy rather than virulent dehumanization—the nature of persuasion changes dramatically. And these facts reflect the variations of white supremacy more broadly. While the Ku Klux Klan has historically operated in secret—though that fact is changing a bit—the Tea Party movement and the GOP rely on dog-whistle racism to present ideas that, while existing in the same ideological universe, are made more palatable to the public at large. As the cultural climate changes toward or away from xenophobia and other forms of racism, the extent to which white supremacy can reveal itself also shifts. We present ourselves differently to co-workers, family, friends, and strangers depending on how much we value their opinion of us, how likely they are to agree with our views, and how easily we can be held accountable for our opinions. In addition to all of these factors, the cultural acceptability of certain opinions changes over time (and not always in a progressive direction), adding another factor to the variety of rhetorical performances.

These are the faces of white supremacy. We can’t let them hide, and by ignoring them we give them the chance to flourish.

Britney is on Twitter.

TW: xenophobia, anti-Muslim racism, violence

One of my favorite uses of the internet and social media is spreading stories. Not just fiction stories, though those are great, but real stories about real people living interesting and complex lives. They can humanize the dehumanized, spread a bit of positivity in a time when things often seem hopeless, and bring attention to important social issues. Time and again we’ve been appalled at stories of police violence against black Americans, and personal stories can humanize the victims and draw increasing public attention to the systematic violence perpetrated against vulnerable and oppressed populations across the board. The popular “Humans of New York” project brings us stories about people from retirees visiting Rockefeller Plaza, to homeless veterans, to immigrants in a strange city dealing with countless hardships. HNY has recently started including stories from Syrian refugees as well. These stories make the lives of strangers intelligible to us. They help to close the gap between us. And they, at least some of the time for some of the people, help us to empathize.

In the wake of the November 13^th Paris bombings, the political conversation in both Europe and the US has turned more forcefully to questions of immigrants, refugees, and borders. This rhetoric is magnified in the US thanks to election season, and candidates are racing each other to see who is the toughest on terrorism (read: who hates Muslim people the most). The House of Representatives has passed legislation that would make it even more outrageously difficult for Syrian refugees to enter the US. Noted turdface Donald Trump is making up ridiculous bullshit to stir up as much anti-Muslim racism as possible. Hate crimes are dropping for every category except Muslims. The Paris attacks are being used to support policy agendas like barring refugees and banning encryption, despite the fact that neither played a role in the attack. Racist memes are being shared by uncles everywhere. Dark times.

A lot of criticism surfaced in the wake of massive news coverage of the Paris bombing, particularly writers noting the stark difference between coverage of attacks in the western world and those in the Middle East and North Africa. David Graham attributes the discrepancy to “the empathy gap” resulting from the lack of familiarity Europeans and Americans have with non-Western peoples relative to their connection with a place like Paris. Maybe we’ve visited France, or have seen it in movies, or consider it a place of high culture in ways that we (incorrectly) don’t associate with places like Lebanon or Mali. As Zeynep Tufecki asks in her recent essay on the politics of technology and empathy:

“These questions go to the heart of the many divides in the world, between rich and poor; haves and have nots; those who count and those who do not. Who is included in the hierarchy of empathy? Who is not?”

Either way, the bottom line is that we don’t care as much. It raises a chicken-and-egg question—do we care less due to insufficient media coverage, or does the media cover it less because we don’t care?

Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky theorized this phenomenon in Manufacturing Consent (1988), arguing that news coverage of wars and natural disasters varies depending on alliances among nation states—US allies are painted as “good guys,” non-allies or combatants as “bad guys,” and third world nations as “naturally violent,” regardless of the details of the events. You’ve probably heard similar arguments—the Middle East has always been violent, “those people” in “that area” have fought each other for centuries. This despite the fact that much of the current instability in the Middle East is a result of western intervention dating back to the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the subsequent carving up of the region into arbitrary nation states, not to mention decades of US intervention in state governments.

So, stories. We need them. If Westerners don’t care about the stability of the Middle East or the refugee crisis, we need to close the empathy gap and make the peoples of other regions of the world more familiar, more relatable. John Knefel and Adi Cohen have documented how Instagram photos “offer a personal window into the refugee crisis that is often difficult to comprehend in its enormity.” In their November 20^th episode of Radio Dispatch, John and Molly Knefel note how refugees face problems we may not even think of, like the need for baby carriers as families trek across an entire continent. These problems are compounded by the fact that refugees must travel through regions where they don’t speak the language and are often greeted with hostility.

What if we all replied to Uncle Jerry’s racist meme with the story of Muhammed, who was forced to leave his family behind, finally getting a job in a hotel where he worked 12 hours a day for $400 a month? Or Fatima, whose daughter Sozdar died on the journey after being denied hospital treatment in Turkey? Or Mouaz and Shadi who perished trying to swim the English Channel to escape from the refugee slums of Calais?

Much of what we see about the Syrian refugee crisis are cold, indescript reports that don’t do much to humanize victims of war. And who knows if your uncle will change his mind in the face of these more personal stories—such calls for empathy are often met with the response that sure, it’s sad, but we have to protect Americans first. And you might counter with the fact that our chances of dying in a terrorist attack are astronomically small and that we’ll spend ourselves into oblivion trying to reduce those odds by the smallest fraction. You’re more likely to die being struck by lightning than in a terrorist attack, and more likely to be murdered by a white supremacist than a jihadist (tw: autoplay). But, as someone who has seen racists come around—at least a little bit—after successful conversations on social media, I think it’s worth a shot.

There a million and a half reasons to flex our empathy muscle when it comes to the refugee crisis. Refugees are fleeing the very forces we’re fighting against. Closing our borders bolsters the Daesh claim that the West doesn’t care about Muslims, that we are openly hostile to them, and that they are fighting a holy war. Our lack of empathy allows politicians to get away with perpetuating Nazi-like rhetoric. We risk creating a whole new generation of people who hate the West. In the face of these hurdles and their dire consequences, sharing a personal story of a refugee may seem grossly insufficient. But keep in mind, it wasn’t until the extent of mass murder during the Holocaust was widely known that the US changed its policy on Jewish refugees. If the news won’t cover these stories—if they continue to be utterly incapable of putting a human face on such a massive human crisis—the least we can do is try.

Britney is on Twitter.

The other day I went to Taco Bell for the first time in a long time. As we pulled away from the drive thru window I noticed that something was off, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. Then I looked down at my lap. The bag. This was not a Taco Bell bag, this was more like a fancy Bloomingdale’s bag; it was a thick, heavy brown paper that was dramatically different from the thin, flimsy plastic that Taco Bell has used for as long as I can remember. My first thought was “my cats are gonna love this.” My second was “why does this bag say Live the VIP life?”

Emma living the VIP life.

Intrigued, I did what the bag told me to do. I downloaded the app. The bag promised me that the app would give me access to many features wonderful to behold. So, I did what so many of us do all the time; I traded my personal information for the promise of free stuff and customer perks, though I did so as a curious media studies researcher more so than a frequent Taco Bell consumer. I am particularly interested in class analysis and this bag/app combo had it all: promises of exclusivity, VIP status, and of course, “Living Más.” Who doesn’t want to live más?

What greeted me in the app was more than I could have hoped. The app is a combination of colloquial, friendly greeting and “lifestyle” imagery. Hip young white people enjoying their life and hanging out with their friends while not-so-subtly consuming Taco Bell products. They are sitting under palm trees, wearing shabby chic jeans, holding iPhones, and eating Dorito tacos while hanging from some sort of bungee cord/harness thing.

In case you thought I was joking.

There is also a game that you can play. It’s called #playyourlife. It “rewards you when you Live Más.” You can (obviously) connect the app with your social media networks and “live your life and post about it” with the hashtag. Taco Bell will reward you with puzzle pieces that can earn you “free food, swag or cool experiences.” The FAQ asks and answers the question “Why did you create this crazy new game?” by saying “… we think you’re pretty rad and we want to reward our fans who inspire us everyday.” No mention of the free advertising and user data Taco Bell receives from social media posts, but seeing as we’re all friends here I’m sure that’s just a fortunate perk and secondary to the totally awesome fun you and Taco Bell will have sharing experiences and sweet, sweet swag.

They also have a tricky way of getting around the question of tracking you by saying “we have a Live Más algorithm, and you never know what you might do to trigger it. We would tell you the super secret formula, but then this wouldn’t be a game.” To the question “How can I earn puzzle pieces by connecting my social networks?” T-Bell says (this is worth quoting in full):

“First, connect with us so we can recognize you for being awesome. Then do what you’re already doing. Live your life and share it. You probably already post about your adventures in everyday life, right? Then you’re already halfway there. Update that status, like a few pages and don’t forget your check-ins. Oh yeah, Instagram posts, tweets, and retweets can all earn you pieces too. You’ll never know exactly what actions you take on your social networks might trigger a piece, but that’s part of the fun!”

This not only has the advantage of concealing what T-Bell does with your information but also encourages you to post as often as humanly possible to increase your odds of being picked up by the algorithm and getting puzzle pieces that will eventually get you rewards.

I could go on all day, but lets get to some analysis. In short, if you want to be a VIP you should download the Taco Bell app. Doing so means you have great taste, and you’re a savvy consumer who knows a good deal when you see one. All you have to do to “earn” the rewards that you “deserve” is what you’re already doing: being your rad, adventurous self while sharing your exciting experiences on your social media platforms. You just have to add an extra hashtag and Taco Bell will track you down and bestow upon you the rewards of living más. Also, Taco Bell does all of this because they love you (to an extent that borders on creepy) and just wants to give you free stuff for being so cool.

Taco Bell is tapping in to a zeitgeist that is popular for corporate entities looking to appeal to a young, hip customer base. The “lifestyle” aesthetic of neoliberal late capitalism commodifies individualism, and identity maintenance through products and social media presence is a valuable tool for commercial entities. Taco Bell is more than willing to trade a few burritos for something that is difficult to buy—a seemingly authentic integration into the everyday lives of their consumer base. And that’s the key; social media interaction is embedded in everyday life for the consumers Taco Bell is targeting here. If they can get you to think about and share Taco Bell in your everyday life, then hopefully Taco Bell 1) becomes a part of your everyday life as well and 2) becomes a part of everyday life for your social media network. The images of young white people holding tacos and having adventures capitalizes on an aesthetic that is central to both advertising and identity maintenance—the (sub)urban lifestyle of taste-makers with disposable income.

Probably not the sort of authenticity TB was hoping for. Used with permission from Tweeter.

What’s more interesting is Taco Bell’s reputation for cheap, edible food that is best consumed when you are stoned out of your mind or have been drinking all night. It is also accused of having deleterious effects on the digestive system. It is both beloved and feared for whatever it is that they do to their ground beef. But never, in my experience, has it been characterized as the fast food of adventurous VIPs. More typically it is the go-to late night snack for intoxicated college kids on a budget.

Taco Bell didn’t choose this reputation as an advertising strategy, for reasons that don’t need to be explained here. But whether or not it’s been successful is a question to ponder. I checked Twitter and Instagram for #playyourlife. It isn’t exactly a flourishing tag. And the few posts that I did see usually had nothing to do with Taco Bell, though whether the users were connected to the app is impossible tell without further ethnographic analysis and interviews. It’s interesting that the #playyourlife hashtag doesn’t explicitly have anything to do with the brand. There are two possible explanations for this: it’s a marketing oversight that isn’t having the desired effect, or it was deliberately vague to encourage greater use among customers who don’t want to turn their social media accounts into billboards. I suspect the latter is true, in which case Taco Bell isn’t necessarily interested in free advertising as I suggested earlier. Rather, they may just be interested in keeping track of the customers willing to trade a peek into their digital selves for free stuff. For some, it’s a small price to pay for living más.

Britney is on Twitter.

My street in winter.

Pew Research Center recently released a report saying that Americans feel better informed thanks to the internet. Well, it was released in December of 2014 but they just Tweeted the report so what was old is new again. While info glut has been a concern since Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock in the 1970s, the majority of internet users polled in this study find that they know more, not less, about the world thanks to digital technology. But what is most interesting about the study is not how much they know, but what they know more about.

Pew Research Center

When it comes to purchases, most respondents say that the internet allows them to make better informed decisions. As we descend the chart, however, there’s a trend—the closer to home, the less useful the internet becomes. For national and international news, pop culture, and product reviews people find the internet a valuable source of information, but with regards to local activities less than half of the respondents say the internet is a useful tool.

In a sort of chicken-and-egg dilemma, we might ask which came first: the current state of community-level alienation or internet communication and technology? Robert Bellah et. al. wrote about the dwindling of community-based associations at the hand of American individualism back in 1985, and argued that this trend would have disastrous consequences for democratic governance. Similarly, Robert Putnam argued in 2000 that declining membership in social organizations such as labor unions and the Boy Scouts meant a decline in civic discussions and, therefore, fewer interactions with fellow community members and local governance. While Bellah et. al. targeted American “civil religion” and ideological individualism for his critique, Putnam included communication technology, such as television and the internet, and the individuation of leisure time as a significant force for dwindling community involvement.

The very structure of both “one-to-many” mass media and “many-to-many” digital media may help to explain why these media lend themselves to consumerism and cosmopolitanism. Both mass media and digital media rely primarily on advertising revenue, and the political economy of nearly all media runs on corporate consolidation and big business funding. Meanwhile, the proliferation of consumer goods and services has made the buying experience incredibly complex, as anyone who has spent 20 minutes reading Amazon reviews to find the right meat thermometer can tell you. The advertising model relies on sensationalist news items to attract more viewers, and these types of stories are less likely to occur at the local level. Frankly, my local news is pretty boring relative to Trump’s latest fascist tirade.

The defunding of public access television and the withering of local investigative reporting are also key elements of these trends. People are becoming more mobile, mostly thanks to job instability, and it’s harder and harder to get to know your neighbors well—in the 4 years I’ve lived in my apartment the tenants next door have changed 4 times. It’s difficult to follow my local politicians unless I knew them personally or have time to attend city council meetings. Smaller towns are often terrible at publicizing things like public meetings and proposed legislation. Even when they do the audience is often limited, especially online.

I live in a Troy, NY, population: 50,129 as of the 2010 census. If Pew is right that 84% of American adults use the internet then Troy should have about 42,000 Trojans online. The two social media sites I use to keep track of local happenings are the Troy subreddit and the Troy City Council Twitter. r/troy has 615 subscribers, and @TroyCityCouncil has 976 followers. Talk about a drop in the bucket. What’s more, both accounts see limited interaction—very few upvotes, comments, retweets, and favori—oops, sorry, “likes.” Obviously this is all just my experience, but it seems significant that in a town of 50,000 residents only 2% of them follow the city council on Twitter. New York City fares even worse—less than 0.5% of the population of NYC follows their city council’s Twitter.

Maybe the percentage of residents following a government Twitter account is a bad measure of all of this. But the question remains—why do we feel more informed about the price of pants and the Syrian civil war than street sweepings and school board meetings? And, perhaps less obvious, should it be a priority to build localism into the internet? The problem of alienation from our neighbors and communities is certainly not something that any single techno-fix is going to solve. I’m not Facebook friends with my neighbors because I simply don’t know them that well, and I don’t have many venues to get to know them in. I don’t retweet my city council because most of my followers are geographically scattered and I don’t think they really care about tomorrow’s finance meeting. The internet is only useful for learning about our neighbors if we want to know about them and have the resources to build community-based tools. The latter is an issue of public divestment, but what about the former?

I hate to ask a question that I can’t answer, but the fact is I think there are a million reasons why we aren’t as invested in our communities as we could be, and I have no concrete suggestions for changing that. Volunteerism and community associations are a common proposed solution (see again Bellah and Putnam) but this requires time, material resources, and emotional labor that are so often lacking as people work more hours for less pay and live in neighborhoods that they barely have time to invest in before they move to the next apartment. It’s a problem of time, resources, and geography that transcends the online/offline divide. Throw in the facts that city council meetings are often alienating, local news is boring and full of fluff, and all of the momentum is behind corporate ad-based media, and the cards seem stacked against flourishing local media.

Maybe these things are co-constituting. It’s hard to learn about, and therefore care about our communities because so much communication takes place online where the emphasis is global. And there is a limited presence of community life online because we just aren’t as invested as we could be. And there are a thousand other factors hindering local involvement—fear of our neighbors (thanks local news outlets for over-reporting crime), disenchantment with local politics, and a pervasive feeling that our ability to make meaningful change, even at the local level, is minimal.

This is a huge conversation and there are so many things I’ve left out. These include the ways location-based platforms tend toward bigotry (see also David Banks’ work), the work already being proposed to build local social networks, the role of Yelp and Foursquare to encourage patronage of local businesses, and the pros and cons of investing energy into digital tools for local engagement when our communities already face so many enormous obstacles. Let’s talk about all of this. Maybe even with our neighbors.

Britney is on Twitter.

TW: discussion of gun violence. I do not provide any detailed descriptions of violent acts, nor do I use any slurs. Some of the links provided below do reference slurs, misogyny, racism, and homophobia.

The mass shooting that took place at Oregon’s Umpqua Community College on October 1^st was simultaneously horrifying and unsurprising. As mass shootings, particularly at schools, become more and more the norm, the desperate search for answers continues. Gun control, mental health, school security, and more recently “toxic masculinity” are often cited as the underlying factors at work in these acts. Despite pleas from criminologists, psychologists, and even some media outlets to stop publicizing the identity of mass shooters—thought to be a significant motivation for these acts—each new shooting comes to dominate news media coverage for days, if not weeks, after the incident.

Perhaps what is needed is not more coverage, but a different sort of attention altogether. Instead of plastering the faces and names of mass shooters all over the news, I believe it’s time for a different approach—find the sites of incubation for these violent acts and build a better understanding of what motivates these killers in the first place.

In the days after the Umpqua shooting many flocked to the 4chan board /r9k/ to interrogate, harass, or simply try to understand users after it was reported that the shooter posted a warning to the board. He wrote: “Some of you guys are alright. Don’t go to school tomorrow if you are in the northwest. So long space robots.” “Robots” is a term of address among r9k users that refers both to the site’s origins and the self-proclaimed abnormal social behavior of users—for a brief overview see this Know Your Meme entry. As outsiders, or “normies” in r9k terms, began posting to the board, robots argued that the harassment and provocation proved the point that they had been making all along—that bullying and ostracizing of socially a-typical people is creating hordes of resentful and potentially violent individuals who feel they have little recourse but to act out.

Some robots praised the shooter as a hero who, finally, was drawing attention to their plight. Many claimed that the “beta uprising,” a phrase referring to the hoped-for uprising of so-called beta males against the rest of society, was at long last underway. Some proclaimed that robots would continue to seek retribution against normies. Others vehemently scorned the shooter’s actions, arguing that this would stoke even more hatred for social outcasts and possibly lead to r9k being more heavily monitored or even shut down. A great deal of the discussion across posts on r9k, both before and after the shooting, revolved around mental health and the failures of the psychiatric industry to provide any solutions to the problems faced by social outcasts. Debates about the merits and failures of psychiatry are a common thread in r9k.

All of this veers dangerously close to the assumption that mass shooters, especially white males, always suffer from mental health disorders, an argument that often stigmatizes those with psychological conditions and implies that shooters are not culpable for their actions. The fact is that those with mentally illness are significantly more likely to be the victims of violence than the perpetrators. That said, there is certainly something happening mentally and emotionally when an individual decides to vent their rage violently and indiscriminately.

One lens for trying to understand the motivations for mass killings is Sara Ahmed’s work on the cultural politics of emotion and affective economies. Ahmed argues that emotions are cultural practices as much as they are mental states, and that affects work to create boundaries across bodies, defining who is in or out of a certain group. The movement of emotions among signs and bodies creates group identities and has material effects—a truth that is overwhelming evident in instances of emotionally and politically motivated violence. As I’ve argued previously, Ahmed’s work is quite valuable for understanding the phenomenon of togetherness and belonging online. The discourse of robot vs. normie results in the dehumanization of socially “normal” individuals, and anyone outside of the group is, for at least some r9k users, deserving of violent death.

Signs and symbols are a key element in the “affective economies” that surface bodies and create identities, and r9k is replete with signs. Perhaps the most central to the beta uprising and the Oregon shooting is “angry Pepe,” a version of the Pepe the frog meme in which Pepe “sees red” so to speak. It is used to express intense rage, and often includes Pepe holding a gun when referencing mass shootings. However, rage isn’t the only affect that circulates widely on r9k; loneliness, sadness, depression, and fear are also key elements of affective community building and identity. Many of these emotions are conveyed through humor and complex in-group references.

One thread that surfaced the day after the Oregon shooting deserves specific attention. A poster claiming to be a psychiatrist asked users to share their feelings with her in the hopes that she could help prevent further shootings. Robots responded with a variety of posts—some asking for the original poster (OP) to post a picture of her breasts, some doubting her claim that she was a psychiatrist, others stating that they did not want help but simply wanted to see society fall apart. But the most common posts were, in fact, users sharing their problems. Anxiety, depression, sexual frustration, traumatic experiences of bullying, and hopelessness that their lives would ever get better cropped up throughout the thread. Rather than offering any meaningful help, the OP posted twice more in the thread: once telling a poster to seek therapy despite the poster’s stated lack of insurance or money to do so, and another saying that she (OP) felt unwelcome. Many robots were offended that an outsider, a normie, would enter their space with absolutely no understanding of their culture; they advised her to lurk more before attempting to make a meaningful contribution to the board.

If so many users have no interest in or access to mental health resources, what’s the solution? Catherine Chaput’s work on rhetorical circulation in late capitalism [paywall restriction], which builds on Ahmed’s research on affect, concludes with the argument that “the new goal is… to increase communicative exchanges that circulate positive affects… in such a way that we all become more open to the world’s creative potential.” Similarly, Manuel Castells demonstrates how modern social movements rely on the double articulation of outrage and hope—a sense that the current political situation is unacceptable and, more importantly, that change is possible. He argues that both of these affects can be stoked in digital spaces, where movements can share ideas and organize. These arguments are complicated by a site like r9k; attempting to circulate positive affects or cultivate hopefulness is a guaranteed way to put yourself on the receiving end of a host of epithets. The extent to which any such project would be successful seems minimal.

I believe the solution must begin earlier—before potential robots got the point of hopelessness and misery that draws them to a place like r9k in the first place. The only mechanism that I see for accomplishing this is to cultivate an ethos of acceptance and compassion, particularly in younger people during the years where bullying and alienation are most likely to shape someone’s life. There is a whole host of possible tactics for accomplishing this, including educational programs in diversity that include social behavior and mental wellness, as well as training students and teachers in conflict resolution and how to spot, and counter, bullying. Finally, a better understanding of the role of “toxic” masculinity—those conceptions of masculinity that shame men for failing to conform to certain standards such as physical strength and emotional stoicism—in perpetuating misery and violence is absolutely necessary to any conversation about mass shootings committed by young men.

Britney is on Twitter. 

I’d like to offer a friendly rebuttal to Jenny Davis’ recent essay in which she argues against the use of trigger warnings in favor of other signifiers of content that may cause people to relive trauma in unproductive ways. Davis proposes “an orientation towards audience intentionality among content producers, content distributors, and platform designers” as a potential path out of the mire of trigger warning debates, such as ending the use of clever titles that mask potentially disturbing content or doing away with autoplay. I think we can all agree that autoplay needs to go. Seriously, please stop forever.

I agree with Davis that trigger warnings don’t do enough; they often fail to take into account the wide variety of trauma triggers and leave content producers and distributers in the position of mind reading to predict what content will be triggering for whom. But the same argument can be made for nearly every social convention designed to mitigate harm. Laws against hate crimes will be unevenly enforced, warnings on labels will leave out chemicals not yet known to be harmful, and seatbelts will not prevent all automobile accident deaths. Yet the fact that someone will consume more than three alcoholic drinks per day while taking ibuprofen does not spur vigorous debate around the utility of the warning.

We put up with half measures all the time, in nearly every facet of social life. So why are trigger warnings so divisive, as Davis rightly points out? She compares the use of trigger warnings to picking a fight, but who fired the first shot? If using a trigger warning on content is a political decision, and I agree that it is, what are its politics? Davis argues that trigger warnings tell “a contingent of consumers to go screw.” But why are trigger warnings read that way by so many people? To my mind, there is nothing obviously offensive about writing “TW: anti-black violence” at the beginning of an essay or before an item on a syllabus. There is no clear reason why someone might read that phrase and be so turned off to the content itself that they refrain from reading it—unless, of course, they have experienced some trauma that gives them cause to.

Trigger warnings often spur disagreement that descends into a discussion of the warning itself, rather than the content. But what causes this divisiveness in the first place? I believe that trigger warnings are divisive because they suggest that we are responsible to each other to foster an environment of mutual respect, because they demand that we empathize with individuals in ways that, as Davis points out, we cannot predict or imagine. This responsibility and act of empathy is absolutely counter to the dominant neoliberal paradigm of individual responsibility and unmitigated competition that informs so much of our social imaginary. The idea that your pain might be, at least in part, my fault because I failed to do something as basic as type a few extra words in a syllabus is anathema to a culture that expects us all to train ourselves to be savvy consumers with bootstraps made for pulling.

Davis argues that trigger warnings often turn into “a self-congratulatory monologue” and, as with so much of progressive politics, she is absolutely right. She also argues that there is a slippery slope lurking on the horizon in which all content will be tagged with so many trigger warnings that they simply become noise; again, I agree. These are problems to contend with, but they are not so insurmountable that we have to dispose completely with the trigger warning as a tool which is limited, but still useful. Self-congratulatory monologues are unavoidable, but not a problem inherent to trigger warnings. Useful content often proliferates to the point of being mere noise but, frankly, I don’t see that happening any time soon with regard to trigger warnings. They are still very rarely used in mainstream news outlets, classroom syllabi, or literary works.

A frequent argument against the use of trigger warnings is that they are patronizing or, as Davis says, “paternalistic.” Now, patronizing generally means condescending, imposed from above by someone in authority. But it is those who have experienced trauma that demand trigger warnings in the first place. So who is patronizing whom? I argue that it is, in fact, patronizing to assert that individuals who have experienced trauma should prioritize the annoyance, or even hostility, of those who dislike trigger warnings above their own needs regarding mental wellness.

Early in her essay Davis asserts that “we all agree that people who have experienced trauma should not have to endure further emotional hardship in the midst of a class session nor while scrolling through their friends’ status updates.” However, many of the essays arguing against trigger warnings argue exactly the opposite. For example, this much-circulated essay in The Atlantic discusses exposure therapy and argues that students with PTSD should be exposed to their triggers in a classroom setting since “the world beyond college will be far less willing to accommodate requests for trigger warnings and opt-outs.” The author fails to point out, however, that exposure therapy usually takes place under relatively controlled conditions and in increments; in other words, definitely not a classroom environment.

Thus far I’ve tried to speak from my perspective as a scholar, a teacher, and as someone who is careful about how they share content on social media. I’d like to break from that perspective briefly and, if you’ll indulge me, speak as someone who has experienced trauma. I have had entire days robbed from me in the course of reading online because an essay or video failed to prepare me for triggering content. It is not merely a question of being unsettled, sad, or disturbed. For many, whether they are diagnosed with PTSD or not, it is a question of losing bodily autonomy, of descending into a panic attack and hyperventilating until you cannot use your hands or feet. It can result in more than just lost sleep or skipped meals, but self-harming and even suicidal behavior. When I see a trigger warning, I do not feel patronized—I feel respected. I am being given the informed choice to consume or not consume content that may rob me of my piece of mind. Davis ends her essay by saying “perhaps the best way we can care for one another is by helping and trusting each person to care for hirself.” This, I argue, is exactly what trigger warnings do by design. They don’t censor content (it’s still there!), they label it in a way that those most affected by it have found, and continue to argue, is liberatory.

Britney Summit-Gil is a graduate student in Communication and Media at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. She tweets occasionally at @beersandbooks.

For many Reddit users, these are dark times indeed. With the banning of r/fatpeoplehate and other subreddits that did not curtail harassment and vote brigading, followed more recently by the sudden dismissal of Reddit employees including Victoria Taylor, many users are criticizing the increase in top-down administrative decisions made under the leadership of interim CEO Ellen Pao.  Alongside these criticisms are accusations that the “PC” culture of safe spaces and “social justice warriors” has eroded the ideological foundations of Reddit culture–freedom of speech, democracy, and the right to be offensive under any circumstances. Meanwhile, Reddit’s biggest competitor voat.co is having a hard time keeping their servers functioning with the massive influx of traffic.

The abrupt and unexplained dismissal of Victoria Taylor has become a particularly vivid rallying point for disgruntled users. Many moderators set their subreddits to private or restricted submissions, effectively making Reddit unusable and invisible for a vast majority of visitors. “The Blackout” (aka #TheDarkening) lasted from late Thursday (7/2) until Friday afternoon when most subreddits came back online; it is one of several tactics used so far in the “Reddit Revolt.” At this time a change.org petition calling for Ellen Pao to step down is nearing 200,000 supporters.

One of the more confusing elements of the revolt is the target of redditors’ anger. Who is to blame for this perceived assault on liberty and the free exchange of ideas? For now, two seemingly opposed forces are bearing the brunt of accusation. These are Ellen Pao, under the influence of commercial interests, and social justice activists who criticize Reddit for tolerating and perpetuating hateful discourse. No one is speaking up on the cause of Taylor’s dismissal, which has led to speculation that she was fired for refusing to comply with the increasingly commercial motivations of Reddit admins, that she would not relocate from New York to San Francisco, or that she did not sufficiently manage the controversial Jessie Jackson AMA. Without more information, and in the context of other recent changes to Reddit, users alternate between blaming encroaching corporatism or PC freedom police who are finally ruining the internet.

So, how can these two forces both be responsible for the changes taking place on Reddit, and in other media such as television and gaming? Consider that a cornerstone of the Gamer Gate fiasco has been the assertion that market forces, not SJW activism, should determine the content and character of video games. Opposition to greater inclusivity in games, such as more central female, minority, and queer characters, has often been justified through free market rhetoric; the assertion is that men are the primary consumers of games, and that their demographic preferences do–and should–determine content. Any other force driving game design is perceived as ideologically motivated, propagandizing, and an assault on liberty.

If video game production companies are acquiescing to the demands of activists, they have not been forthcoming about it. Instead, they claim to be adapting to a marketplace in which women, people of color, and LGBTQ individuals occupy an ever increasing consumer base. Perhaps the activist/consumer dichotomy is more distracting than useful, given that the voices most critical of capitalism’s ability to turn identity into a commodity are also the ones advocating to see a bit of themselves in their beloved games. Here again, people are caught between wanting to see their values and identities reflected back at them in the media that they love, and coming to terms with what capitalist logics do to those values and identities.

On its face, the simultaneous blame directed at SJWs and commercialization seems at odds. But given the ability of neoliberal late capitalism to commodify identity and the self, and to turn nearly any element of culture into a profitable enterprise, this muddiness is a logical outcome of the contradictions of capitalism that Marx believed would be its downfall. Instead, neoliberalism and identity politics send capitalism into overdrive as the need to colonize ever expanding markets and commodify even the most absurd abstractions turns anti-capitalist ideology into easily packaged products. Rather than disturbing the supposed working-class false consciousness, the contradiction has accounted for it and marketed it back to the very people it exploits. It’s only a matter of time before Walmart starts selling a t-shirt that reads “Social Justice Warrior!” in yellow glitter.

Also central to the Reddit Revolt are discussions of labor and exploitation. Many on Reddit have remarked on the betrayal of moderators by the admins. Mods develop and manage Reddit content on their own time and for no compensation, a service admins rely on for the site to function and be profitable. In exchange, mods have historically been given relative freedom within the subreddits they moderate. Now that this freedom is being restricted or, as in the case with Victoria Taylor, decisions are made at the admin level without consulting or even informing mods, mods and users are taking the opportunity to air more general grievances, like the lack of investment in the site’s infrastructure.

Here is the centerpiece of the Reddit Revolt paradox: what is a redditor relative to the admins, or to the site itself? Redditors perceive themselves as members of a community, or perhaps as customers of the site. In many instances they even see themselves as workers generating content for the site to the benefit of the admins. But redditors are not customers, nor are they simply workers—they are the product. To complicate this further, the Reddit Revolt requires all of us to grapple with digital and affective labor, and its tendency to blur the categories of workers, products, and consumers. Ellen Pao’s job is not to make Reddit a happy community, it is to sell the attention of redditors to advertisers. And even as users begin to understand that Reddit is less like a community and more like a factory, they seem less clear on their position within this factory. Redditors are not so much customers engaged in a boycott or even laborers on strike, they are products. As products, the only effective protest movement redditors could possibly engage in would be to remove themselves from the market. Hence, the blackout.

While the blackout was fairly short lived, another is planned for next Friday (July 10^th) for 24 hours. Users have also been telling each other to install and enable ad blockers and discouraging each other from giving Reddit Gold. But the fact is, Reddit admins can shoulder the brunt of a couple of blackout days or fewer gold subscriptions. Given how quickly the front page returned to normal over the weekend it seems unlikely that any sustained movement will take hold. And while they may make promises to users about changes to come, Reddit admins will continue to do what all successful corporate entities require—turn a profit, often at the expense of those who use, make, or even are the product.

It’s to be expected that redditors feel betrayed by the powers that be for undermining the perceived ethos of Reddit as a community in which ideas—any ideas—can be freely exchanged. But there is perhaps a deeper betrayal that has not been articulated in the dominant narrative of the Reddit Revolt. That is the betrayal of western rationalism itself, and the notion that free markets and free speech are two articulations of a deeper, natural order that ultimately works in favor of the masses. The rhetorical relationship between freedom of expression and freedom of markets performs key ideological work for the perpetuation of an American-flavored narrative that capitalism is the great equalizer. While events like the Citizens United Supreme Court case occasionally highlight the absurdity of this argument, it is pervasive and often unseen. That cornerstone of western rationalism that so many redditors love is playing out in ways that they really really do not love. And the rupture will require more than dank memes and mental gymnastics to reconcile.

Britney Summit-Gil is a graduate student in Communication and Media at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. She tweets occasionally at @beersandbooks.

“Have you been on Yik Yak?”

My graduate student friends can attest to the fact that I ask this question of almost everyone at some point. Sometimes more than once, like when you’re excited about something and can’t help but tell the story over and over again to the same audience. Annoying, I know, and I’m sorry to all my friends.

But it’s just because I find Yik Yak absolutely fascinating. I’m drawn to it because, for at least some users, it serves as a sort of technologically cultivated hive-mind therapy session. For the uninitiated, Yik Yak is an anonymous social media app available on Android or iOS mobile devices. Users can post, vote on, and publicly reply to “yaks.” Users collect “Yakarma” based on how many votes their yaks receive and how often they vote on other yaks. Once a post receives more than five down votes it is removed. Rather than following other users or adding friends, Yik Yak shows posts from others within a ten-mile radius of your location, so when you visit the Yik Yak stream you are seeing the anonymous posts of other users in your area. As such, it is particularly popular among college students—a place to gripe about classes you hate, snoring roommates, bad cafeteria food, and attractive people that won’t give you the time of day. Of course, it’s also a place for inside jokes and celebrating particularly rowdy parties, but to be frank, there’s a lot of complaining.

I mean this relatively—Yik Yak strikes me mostly for its absolute rawness and emotional honesty compared with many other social media sites. True, much of it is pretty innocuous and trivial, but other posts are exactly what you might expect a bunch of anonymous bits of communication to consist of: people’s greatest hopes and fears, anxieties and insecurities, and a loneliness that reads like a turn-of-the-century Russian novel. Some recent examples from my own feed include:

Confessions: I fell in love with the wrong person.

That moment when you desperately need a hug and there is no one around and you end up grabbing a pillow instead.

Dealing with soul crushing loneliness… Any tips?

I just have the one friend, and the hope that they’re upvoting my yaks is literally the only thing that keeps me going. 

Okay, it’s not exactly Dostoevsky but you get my point. In between people celebrating satisfying bowel movements and shouting out the red-headed cutie at the farmer’s market are these poignant confessions from people that are simultaneously very close geographically and impossibly far away conceptually. The person next to me in the coffee shop might be yakking about their devastating depression while I’m yakking about the sub-par muffins and we would never know what is in each other’s hearts and yaks. Replies to these tender posts are often as affecting as the original posts. Users reach out to each other, offer advice and resources, and commiserate. Sometimes replies are mean spirited, but often they are removed after users down vote them.

Positive thinkers will likely disagree with me, but I’ve always held the conviction that complaining is good for the soul. It feels good to get something off your chest, and it feels even better to have people commiserate with you. In a society that often feels alienating and impersonal while stigmatizing mental health concerns, Yik Yak allows people to reveal the most intimate parts of themselves without many of the consequences of doing so to people you know in day-to-day life. Judgment, rejection, and ridicule have lower stakes because they aren’t your friends (as far as you or they know) and you don’t have to feel embarrassed the next time you see the person you drunkenly confessed to last weekend.

In fact, one of the oft-stated fears of Yakkers is that someday, somehow, all of our Yik Yak identities will be revealed and everyone will know what we—the named “we”—have posted. You can protect your Yik Yak information via a password that must be entered when the app is opened, and the rules state a “zero-tolerance policy on posting people’s private information.” Repeat offenders—those reported by users for bullying or posting private information—are suspended according the developers.

What can be said about Yik Yak, the Yakkers, and the content of the yaks themselves? There is a sort of double articulation of the loneliness and alienation many experience, and a sense of solidarity and the possibility of meaningful connection that many Yakkers express. It is akin to Sara Ahmed’s work on affective economies and the cultural politics of emotion in which she argues that emotions are material social bonds that work to bind and divide subjects as affects circulate and accumulate value. For Ahmed, emotions are a form of capital that creates boundaries across social spaces and across bodies. On Yik Yak, emotional capital is quantified as Yakarma—the more a yak circulates, the more value it accrues. This value serves to bind or divide communities, even when they are anonymous.

Yik Yak also complicates notions of private and public. My identity is private, but my innermost thoughts are public. I can complain about the people closest to me without hurting their feelings or experiencing their wrath. I can confess my darkest secrets and feel a bit of relief or find out that I’m not alone in my misery. Unlike what Jenny Davis calls the compulsory happiness of Facebook, Yik Yak allows for negative emotions to circulate widely and to accumulate value. While you might feel uncomfortable “liking” a friend’s miserable Facebook status (since you don’t really “like” it), there is no such feeling about upvoting a sad yak. Furthermore, there is something to say about the fact that when posting anonymously on a social network such as Yik Yak or Whisper, much of what gets expressed is sadness and fear. For a generation with both a tendency toward digital exhibitionism and a fierce opposition to surveillance Yik Yak satisfies the urge to “get it out there” without suffering the consequences of making oneself too vulnerable to one’s social network.

There must be something satisfying about Yik Yak since users keep coming back. Maybe it’s the validation of being upvoted for something funny or relatable, maybe the whimsical nature of the app itself, or maybe the hope of making a personal connection with an apparent stranger. Probably all three. Given its exponential growth in 2014 it seems like a compelling mode of communication that’s unlikely to disappear soon.

And no, you absolutely may not see my yaks. Don’t even ask.

Britney Summit-Gil is a graduate student in Communication and Media at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Her research interests include the relationship between mass and digital media, the intersections of nationalism and capitalism, and media criticism of race, gender, and class representations. She tweets sporadically at @beersandbooks.

This post discusses the HBO show Game of Thrones and George R.R. Martin’s novel series A Song of Ice and Fire. There will be spoilers up until the events of season three’s finale, as well as a discussion of physical, emotional, and sexual violence against women.

I admit it—I am one of those insufferable people who read the books. I’m the worst kind of Game of Thrones viewer—the one who can’t watch an episode without pointing out how “in the books, x happens this way instead.” I love telling fellow GoT viewers that Tyrion Lannister actually led the vanguard in the battle between Stark and Lannister, rather than being knocked unconscious before the fighting began. I get a sick pleasure from describing how Daenerys’ hair is completely burned away when she survives Drogo’s pyre funeral. And yes, it still chaps my ass that the show denies Samwell Tarly the triumph of sending out the ravens after the battle with the White Walkers at the Fist of the First Men.

What I’m talking about here is the unavoidable shift that occurs when content is remediated—that is, borrowed from one medium and reimagined in another. In this case, the content of the book series A Song of Ice and Fire (ASOIAF) is remediated to Game of Thrones, the HBO television series. Some of the differences in this instance of remediation seem pragmatic—remembrances are turned into scenes of their own, dialogue is shortened, characters omitted or altered for the sake of brevity and clarity. I am no purist, and I recognize that with remediation comes necessary alteration for the content to suit the new medium. But other differences speak volumes about our cultural biases and expectations surrounding those with socially-othered bodies—like Tyrion, Sam, and, of course, women. What can we say about these differences? And perhaps more importantly, what do they say about us?

Two examples of these changes from book to TV stick out in my mind, both relating to violence against women. The first is the scene in which Khal Drogo and Daenerys Targaryen consummate their marriage (season 1 episode 1). The HBO series depicts a fairly straightforward rape scene in which a brown-skinned “horse lord” forces himself upon his young white bride while she weeps in pain, comforted only by the sight of her dragon eggs. The book, however, tells a very different story. Here is a (fairly graphic) passage from the book:

“She could sense the fierce strength in his hands, but he never hurt her. He held her hand in his own and brushed her fingers, one by one. He ran a hand gently down her leg. He stroked her face, tracing the curve of her ears, running a finger gently around her mouth. He put both hands in her hair and combed it with his fingers. He turned her around, massaged her shoulders, slid a knuckle down the path of her spine […] He cupped her face in his huge hands and she looked into his eyes. ‘No?’ he said, and she knew it was a question. She took his hand and moved it down to the wetness between her thighs. ‘Yes,’ she whispered as she put his finger inside her.” (A Game of Thrones, 108)

Let’s get one thing straight—in Martin’s series Daenerys Targaryen is a thirteen-year-old child who has been sold into marriage by her brother for political reasons. The scene above is not consensual sex. She is coerced and, at least by our standards, too young to consent to sex. I have no intention of making some over-simplified case for “book GOOD, TV show BAD.” Recognizing this, the fact remains that this passage depicts Drogo as downright tender—and throughout the book series the Dothraki, and Drogo in particular, are much more complex and robust characters than their TV counterparts. Is it so far beyond the realm of imagining that Drogo would be gentle towards his new bride? What does it say about popular culture, and the media content created for it, that a violent sex scene is inherently more interesting than an affectionate one? Why do we prefer to see a brown man forcibly rape a white woman, rather than romance her? This example in particular highlights the racist and sexist assumptions about dark-skinned “savages” and the purity of white women that predominate popular media artifacts.

Another example comes from the dreaded Red Wedding episode [season 3 episode 9] in which the Freys and Boltons plot to murder the Starks during the wedding of Edmure Tully and Roslin Frey. The events depicted in the book and those in the TV series are mostly the same, with one glaring difference—Rob Stark’s pregnant wife Talisa is killed after receiving multiple stab wounds in her stomach. This is one of the differences between the books and TV show that absolutely bowled me over. I couldn’t quite wrap my head around it. For starters, Robb’s wife is a completely different character in ASOIAF and doesn’t even attend the wedding.

Talk about bad luck

Was the cruel betrayal and murder of almost every member of the beloved Stark family not enough gore and violence for the writers? Maybe Robb being filled with arrows, or Catelyn’s sorrowful wail as her throat was slit didn’t have enough shock value to thoroughly horrify viewers. Who can say? But the inclusion of the gratuitous and gruesome murder of Talisa Stark is a prime example of how popular media glorifies acts of violence against women, often for no other purpose than to grab a few more eyeballs.

After all, that’s the purpose of TV, isn’t it? To attract as many viewers as possible and generate advertising revenue. Television producers sell eyeballs. Talisa’s murder does nothing to further the plot and deviates from Martin’s writing in such a way that begs the question: What is it about violence against women that makes for “good” (read: compelling) TV? Why does Drogo need to violently force himself on Daenerys? Why does Talisa need to be stabbed in her pregnant belly? What does it say about our popular culture that these are the changes TV writers choose to make?

 I think the funhouse mirror is a useful metaphor for understanding this process. Media representations reflect back at us an exaggerated, sometimes grotesque image of ourselves—the hips too wide, the nose too long, the feet to large. In other words, media representations often reveal and amplify some of our society’s least appealing characteristics. From this perspective, it seems reasonable that a cultural mainstream that publicly shames victims of rape and financially punishes survivors of domestic violence also produces media artifacts that go out of their way to depict graphic acts of violence against women.

Of course, media products don’t just reflect us. We absorb them; we use them to inform ourselves about ourselves, in a creative and recursive process of making and remaking. In their work on remediation, new media theorists Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin argue [PDF] that “our culture still needs to acknowledge that all media reproduce the real,” and that remediation is a “process of reforming reality” as well as media content (346). These acts of remediation aren’t just funhouse mirrors, revealing our less flattering features for the sake of a laugh—they are cultural practices that make and are made by us. Those of us thinking hard about technology and media should pay close attention to how these remediations “reform reality.”

When asked in an interview how he writes such diverse and dynamic female characters, George R.R. Martin replied by saying “I’ve always considered women to be people.” Even in the HBO series, the characters are mostly complex and richly developed. Game of Thrones is certainly doing a better job than many others at portraying women as powerful, self-determined individuals (I’m looking at you, Big Bang Theory), but that doesn’t mean we don’t have a long way to go. We should hope for and work towards media content that can deliver characters like Brienne of Tarth, Arya Stark, and Ygritte without relying on lazy and unsatisfying tropes like “brown man rapes white woman.” If remediation truly has the power to reform reality, it should at least attempt to do so for the better.

Britney Summit-Gil is a PhD student of Communication and Media at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. You can follow her on Twitter @beersandbooks for strange drink recipes and pictures of her cats.