This is part of a series of posts highlighting the Theorizing the Web conference, April 14th, 2012 at the University of Maryland (inside the D.C. beltway). It was originally posted on 4.6.12 and was updated to include video on 6.22.12. See the conference website for additional information.

The issue of self documentation is increasingly fertile ground for theorizing the intersection of the digital and the material, illustrating how our identities are increasingly mediated by new technologies and “digital” forms of sociality. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest (as relatively new forms of sociality) produce requisite changes in our self concepts. In the digital era, identity becomes a project of coordinating, collecting, and curating; self presentation becomes a project of self documentation.

Each of these authors acknowledges the paradigmatic changes new technology (especially social networking sites like Facebook) has introduced into our self concepts. For example, Aimée Morrison looks at how norms are created, encouraged, and enforced in the digital realm of Facebook. The Facebook status update field has gone through several permutations, reflecting changing expectations and norms regarding self presentation and self documentation on this popular social networking site. Somewhat differently, Rob Horning addresses issues of power and control in the promulgation of new forms of sociality. More specifically, Horning discusses Facebook’s role in socializing users into the “digital self,” or the self as curated project. Self documentation is integral to the rise of the digital self and the destruction of the inner/private self. In addition, Jordan Frith reflects on how social media incorporates emerging GPS technology into location based social networks (LBSN) like Foursquare. Drawing from qualitative interviews with over 35 Foursquare users, Frith analyzes the impact of this LBSN on both self-presentation and self-documentation practices.

Finally, social media and the ability to self-document also changes our conception of time. As Nathan has argued, “Social media increasingly force us to view our present as always a potential documented past” (Jurgenson, 2011). In this vein, Sam Ladner addresses the proliferation of digital calendaring (MS Outlook, Google Calendar) and resultant changes such technology engenders to our conceptions and use of time. Digital calendars create new affordances but also new risks in time management.

[Paper titles and abstracts after the jump.]

Rob Horning (@marginalutility) – “Facebook as the ‘Projective City'”

In a short paper, I compare Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s recent letter to investors that accompanied its IPO to Boltanski and Chiapello’s description of “”the projective city”” in The New Spirit of Capitalism to demonstrate how social media companies are helping naturalize the so-called post-Fordist network society. They have broadened the reach of the ideology that privileges flexibility over security and renders social life as a series of entrepreneurial risks rather than a respite from work-related depletion.  Facebook has exported management techniques developed for corporate streamlining and now explicitly seeks to implement them on the whole of its nearly billion users.

Facebook prompts us to reconceive sociality in terms of provisional projects and our place in society as a tactical point on an ever-shifting “social graph,” while reshaping the values that support our perception of what defines and justifies effort in nonprofessional relationships. The social media space becomes an arena for project-making, and involvement with projects come to dictate the status of any given relationship. These projects, as Boltanski and Chiapello argue, form the basis for elaborating the network to ever greater degrees, providing social-media companies with powerful incentives to try to remake friendship in the project mold. Thus in Facebook’s public rhetoric and in the architecture of its service, activity for activity’s sake is seen as a behavioral norm and novelty is held to be intrinsically satisfying; these come at the expense of older ideals of intimacy and privacy.

At the same time, identity becomes an explicit product of one’s position and activity in a network rather than a quality of the self that one seeks to express within the network. This affords companies like Facebook a proprietary interest of sorts in its users’ identities. Their work to continue to affirm their identity and presence in Facebook becomes the company’s data product. Thus Facebook has incentive to give ideological support to a post hoc conception of identity, a “data self” that emerges after one generates a sufficient quantity of recordable and processable information and is recognized as the truth about oneself, as opposed to previous conceptions that emphasized the possibility of uncovering a unique pre-existing self through various acts of self-actualization. By helping society discard the notion of the inner self that can be discovered once the more basic needs of security are met, Facebook is creating social conditions under which a precarious self — burdened with social risk, uncertain prospects and lacking in ontological security — becomes more tenable and tolerable for subjects.

 Sam Ladner (@sladner) – “Digital Time: The Technological Transformation of the Calendar”

We stand at the cusp of a major shift in how we organize and understand time. Technological change profoundly affects time reckoning (Heidegger, 1954) and new ways to reckon time are often harbingers of new ways to order social life (Thompson, 1967). This paper will explore how contemporary web-based technologies affect calendaring and time reckoning in general. Like many other social phenomena, time reckoning is rapidly becoming a “digital” phenomenon. Time is a very fundamental “typification” of social life (Berger & Luckman, 1966, p. 27), yet we have very little theoretical work on the socio-cultural significance of calendaring (Postill, 2002). Millions of people use Microsoft Outlook and Google Calendar (Google Inc, 2010). These very common web-based tools represent time in significantly different ways than traditional analogue calendars in that they make appointments digital. Digital artifacts can be ordered, and re-ordered at will, and easily “mashed up” with other artifacts.  In this paper, I trace three significant trends in calendaring.

First, I will outline how the calendar, like the clock before it, has become increasingly a “personal” artifact. This shift has brought with it significant contestation and a transformed the personal calendar into a symbol of “upward mobility.” Second, I sketch out the three ways in which the digital calendars differ from analogue ones: their apparent “bottomlessness,” their networked nature, and the ease with which they are altered. And finally, I will show how the digitization and personalization of calendaring are intersecting in the rise of personal mobile calendars on smartphones. I will then discuss the implications of these mobile, personal, digital calendars. How might they change temporal experience? What potential changes to social organization could they create?

Aimée Morrison (@digiwonk) – “The Affordance of Facebook: Autobiography and the Changing Status Update Field”

Fundamentally, social network sites invoke, compel, and shape (and are in turn themselves reshaped by) autobiographical discourse from individual users. Employing the theory of “affordance” drawn from visual perception studies (Gibson; Norman; Hutchby; Graves), as well as that of “coaxing,” drawn from auto/biography studies (Smith and Watson Getting a Life; Smith and Watson Reading; Poletti) this paper investigates how users figure out what to do, and how to do it, when confronted with the interface of one particular social network site, Facebook.

Much of the scholarly investigation into “”social network sites”” (boyd and Eliison) has, understandably enough, focused on the social and the network aspects: that is, how do people interact with one another in these spaces, and how is the boundary or membership of the networks and its social norms determined and policed (see Papacharissi, ed. 2011 for a collection of essays on this topic; Baym 2010 for an extended example)? But how do individual users know what to do, how to interact, what to say, when confronted with the site? The shifting affordance of the status update feature, I suggest, coaxes and coaches users in what kinds of actions are expected of them, in what kind of length, and using what kinds of extra, multimedia materials.

Since Facebook’s founding in 2004, the interface between service and users has changed many times: early versions of the site mainly prompted users to comment on other people’s walls (dialogue, public speech), with static profiles displayed; later versions of the status update shaped and invited particular kinds of disclosures. For example, an early interface featured a very small textbox and the prompt: “Aimée Morrison is:” inviting some kind of ontological statements—happy? Hungry? Over time, the visible text box grew longer (inviting longer format statements) and shifted the prompt—What are you doing? What’s on your mind? And now, most simply, “Share.” As the status update interface and its user base matured, the interface became more sophisticated in its options: media buttons inviting web links, audio files, video clips, and even quizzes now sit atop (take priority over?) the blank box that awaits your text.

Where most scholarship deals with Facebook in the aggregate and in the mass, this paper argues for an examination of the more intimate relationship between individual user and software interface. The close reading methodology of the literary study of autobiography meshes well with affordance-studies attention to means by which an individual perceiving subject makes sense of the possibilities of action in a given setting.

Such work is easily generalizable to other online contexts, and suggests, in Hutchby’s words a “”third path”” whereby a preponderance of investigation into macro-level activity online can be balanced against a minute attention to individual sites of interaction between users and interfaces.

Jordan Frith (@jhfrith) – “The Check-In as Marker and Mnemonic Device: Theorizing how Foursquare use Impacts Self-Presentation and Self-Documentation”

Two of the most important development in the communication technoscape over the last decade have been the adoption of Social Networking Sites (SNS) and the adoption of Internet-enabled mobile phones. SNS provide new ways for people to present themselves to others and document their lives, and smartphones enable people to stay constantly connected to the Internet and their social networks through mobile SNS applications. Smartphones also aid in the development of new forms of SNS, notably through the sharing of location information that takes advantage of the GPS and wireless triangulation capabilities built into these devices. These newer forms of SNS are called location-based social networks (LBSNs), and their popularity has increased over the last two years. Foursquare, the most popular LBSN, currently has over 12 million users.

Drawing from data derived from 36 interviews and 9 months of ethnographic research with Foursquare users, this presentation theorizes how Foursquare usage impacts both self-presentation and self-documentation. On Facebook, people shape their presentation of self through the friends in their network, their status updates, their likes and dislikes, and the images they share. On Foursquare, they do so mostly through their mobility. By choosing to check-in to some places and share their location with friends, they are “writing themselves into being” (boyd, 2006) through their physical mobility. Drawing from my data, many Foursquare users, put a great deal of thought into how they present themselves through Foursquare, using a number of different approaches to highlight certain parts of themselves through their decisions about where to check-in. With the increasing growth of location-based services, it is important to understand how physical mobility can play an integral role in how people present themselves to others through mobile applications.

Equally interesting, my data reveals that many of my participants use Foursquare as a sort of “life logging” tool that documents their experiences. They are often selective about the places they check-into, not because of concern over how they present themselves to others, but because of concerns about how they present their present self to their future self. For example, the service “Foursquare and Seven Years Ago” sends people an email each day telling them where they checked-in on that day last year. This service works as a mnemonic device, linking memory to one’s past location, reminding users of the experiences they enjoyed. Because of Foursquare’s role as a mnemonic device, people selectively choose where to check-in based on where they want to remember in order to not “pollute” their data set.

This presentation will examine these areas and use my data to theorize how self-presentation and self-documentation occur through Foursquare use. Considering the growing popularity of Foursquare and similar services, researchers must begin to think through the new affordances of the mobile Internet and this presentation will be a step in that direction.

This is part of a series of posts highlighting the Theorizing the Web conference, April 14th, 2012 at the University of Maryland (inside the D.C. beltway). See the conference website for information as well as event registration.

At this year’s Theorizing the Web, we are pleased to announce a lunch time short-film screening of the techno-queer-romantic-comedy “Over&Out” (2012). The film runs less than 30 minutes. Register here for free lunch & a movie.

We will also have the film’s writer, Kelsey Brannan, available all day for questions, comments, and/or chit-chat after the screening. Brannan, who wrote the film while getting her bachelor’s from UC Santa Barbara, is currently getting her master’s in Culture, Communications, and Technology from Georgetown University. In her own words

Similar to my current research on the relationship between queer community development in DC, Over & Out is about finding new ways to connect with people, when personal intimacy fails in the sight of technological addiction. Communication technologies, such as smart-phones, have made it easier and more convenient to communicate with others, but is has also made relationships less intimate. What happens to old technologies when we move onto the next technology? Do we archive them? Recycle? Or throw them away?

Over & Out is also a lesbian romantic-comedy, but the “queer” romance is not the center of the film. Instead, it is about how all people, no matter what their background or sexuality is, cope with digital media. My goal was to create a different type of lesbian film for the community, one that did not feature the typical “coming-out” story or the “first-encounter” lesbian drama. Over & Out is a post coming out film; a film that explores how being queer in a heteronormative world, is like being digital-less in world dominated my digital technology. In other words, trying to navigate our digital world without digital technology, is like how trying to find queer identifications in a world dominated by heteronormative rules and discourses. Similarly to my presentation on the effects of Grindr on male-male desire, I hope to show, in a comedic and charming way, how technology is changing the way we conceptualize desire, love, and community.

We expect the film to dovetail nicely with issues and topics discussed at this year’s conference, and we highly encourage you to RSVP for this wonderful event. As a special incentive, the first 30 attendees to RSVP for this lunchtime screening/discussion will receive a FREE Jimmy John’s sandwich (vegetarian option available). Register here.

Lunch is scheduled from 1pm-2:30, with the film screening set to begin at 2pm. Don’t miss it!

You may have heard some of the exciting feline technology news coming out of SXSW this year. If not, check this out!

The video above displays three early “cat games” released by Friskies brand cat food at SXSW 2011, which included “Cat Fishing,” “Tasty Treasures Hunt,” and “Party Mix”. However, at this year’s SXSW Interactive they unveiled an all new cat game titled “You vs. Cat.” This game will allow for humans to play their companion animals for the first time. Because the earlier apps were designed simply for cats, people could not play alongside them. The result is a lot videos of confused cats slapping and rubbing on iPad screens.

The “You vs. Cat” application allows you to play a simple game on your iPad with your feline friend by lobbing virtual objects at your cat’s “goal” across the iPad screen. The cat, presumably will then frantically swat, bat, and slap the objects before they reach his/her goal. In this way, the cat is directly reacting to movements and actions initiated by the human companion. This lends itself to a greater level of human-animal interaction. This really is a “video game” designed for both humans and companion animals (in this case felines).  This is unlike the earlier games released last year, which were designed largely for cat-solo play.

It appears that Friskies is trying to make their way into the internet cat video business. According to Julie Voss Catron, a brand representative showcasing the product at SXSW Interactive, the logic is quite simple. “There are more cat videos than just about anything out there on YouTube,” Voss Catron said, “And we know there are quite a few cat lovers here at SXSW Interactive, so it made a lot of sense.”

And later she proclaims,

This is just another step in Friskies fueling the fire for Friskies being the leader in cat gaming. It’s something that has caught fire since we launched our first game last year called Cat Fishing for tablets and iPhone. There was such a good response from it that we decided there was such an opportunity for us to expand and grow in this area.

Human-animal sociality is currently a fledgling topic of study (at least in sociology, where the American Sociological Association recently created the “Animals and Society” section). But with the proliferation of Web 2.0, the preponderance of cat videos in social media,  and the rise of “catvertising” as a new form of niche marketing, we may see this topic expand greatly as our pets and other nonhuman companions become increasingly central to our self-concepts and identities as consumers.

You can download the new game “You vs Cat” yourself from the iTunes store now.

We are currently facing a cultural crisis of authenticity. Since the early 2000s, we have seen the concept “authenticity” slowly move from margins to mainstream (Reynolds, 2011), encapsulated by feverish celebrity gossip surrounding breakout stars like Lana Del Rey, personified through the rise of the urban hipster as folk devil (those self-professed taste arbiters of cool who ride “fixies” through the urban landscape, collect obscure records, and wear vintage clothes), and exemplified in Web 2.0 and the rise of social media (especially curatorial media like LastFM and more recently, Pintrest), where we are all now encouraged to share, like, and make public pronouncements of our personal tastes. In the contemporary zeitgeist, it seems that we are all “grasping for authenticity” in an attempt to make our lives seem more important, substantial, and relevant (Jurgenson, 2011).

In this environment, identity is constructed both on and offline, but our online identities are increasingly coming to define our public identities. As such, the “online commons” (Lih, 2009) becomes an important space of identity construction and conflict.

Given this crisis of authenticity, and the preponderance of social media for contemporary identity construction, it is no surprise that the digital commons, and especially various forms of social media, become spaces of conflict. On Facebook, Twitter, or Tumblr, conflicts of taste become commonplace, as one person’s proud statement becomes another’s laughing joke, fodder for ridicule and sarcasm. For example, a tweet or status professing my appreciation for the new Nickelback album [“Nickelback’s new album roolzs!”] would no doubt invite commentary like, “Nickelback is still a band?” or “Dude. You’re joking right?”.

Celebrity deaths often serve as a focal point for such conflicts of taste, as individuals make identity claims by tweeting, sending a status update, or creating memorial memes to share with their digital social networks, as the most recent case of Whitney Houston illustrates. However, celebrity deaths also invite counterclaims by those who either feel their identities threatened by the publicity their once-beloved-idols receive, or who feel that such public grief is unwarranted. Most internet memes that mock such public pronouncements of grief are latent with such cynicism, seeing consumers as passive and simple-minded, naively concerned with the death of their idols while more newsworthy crises and events occur elsewhere.

Internet memes, as small, packaged signifiers pregnant with shared cultural meaning, become weapons of symbolic violence  in conflicts of taste that occur in social media. By symbolic violence, I amend Pierre Bourdieu’s (1989) concept slightly, in order to account for individual actions aimed at social domination or symbolic/discursive control in the curation of taste. Bourdieu originally defined used the term to refer to the process by which dominant groups secure ideological hegemony by naturalizing their positions and getting minorities to internalize these hierarchies as legitimate, a premiere example of Bourdieu’s other concept of symbolic “world-making” (Bourdieu, 1989). In the case of conflicts of taste in the digital commons, however, symbolic violence most often takes the form of individual assaults on taste cultures, trends, and fads.

Internet memes become weapons for making identity claims online. Individuals lob them at one another through the digital commons, making claims and counterclaims of authenticity, seeking to prove “true” allegiance to an act, band, celebrity, or subculture through mockery, wit, and sarcasm.

In the digital realm, identity is partially constructed by such texts, whether in the form of a meme or more directly as a status or tweet. These public pronouncements act as expressions of taste. As we know from Bourdieu, expressions of taste are latent with underlying class tensions (Bourdieu, 1984). In the contemporary moment, such conflict is epitomized by the Occupy Wall Street protests, whose rallying cry “We are the 99%!” reflects a moment in history when struggles of agency/structure are increasingly perceived as a product of corporate malfeasance.

Susannah Young observes how the current “authenticity crisis” emerges alongside fields of cultural production like advertising and public relations. She illustrates how such logic enters our self-concepts.

Ultimately, the whole authenticity issue taps into our own social anxieties over being called out on our lack of knowledge. We live at a time when almost everyone has access to enough information and cultural trends (whether within their own social networking microcosm or on a larger plane) to make ourselves dilettantes and present ourselves as experts. Close proximity to both information and experts means we should be harder to fool – but also that we’re one withering “@you” away from being “Del Rey”’d ourselves when we do get fooled. It’s a weird, delicate situation, having to prop up our own advertisements for ourselves. Did we listen enough to “I’m Every Woman” to be justifiably, authentically sad? Does it matter?

So the crisis of authenticity becomes an integral part of the self-concept, a contemporary identity tension we must all reconcile. The deployment of internet memes, often witty but sometimes hurtful, is but one way individuals discursively construct their identities online.

Since Sarah posted on Kony yesterday, I though I would throw in my two cents on the matter. I would like to discuss claims that the Kony 2012 is a hipster movement.

Why are people claiming the movement against Kony is a hipster movement? I think it is because of three main reasons. 1) people are using social media to spread it; 2) Invisible children plays into the whole Toms shoes, suburban college student social justice movement; and 3) individuals are claiming allegiances to this social justice movement as a form of social distinction.

First, as Sarah Wanenchek so eloquently argued yesterday, the Kony 2012 movement has been successful largely because it has been spread “virally” via social media like Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr. The fact that the video has reached over 75 million views in a little over a week plays testament to this fact. However, social media is often treated like a hipster’s playground because it is “new” and “hip” and platforms like Facebook lend themselves nicely to self-promotion and vanity, two things hipsters are said to do quite well. The video below, titled “Future Hipsters,” helps encapsulate this sentiment.

The video pokes fun at hipster culture by sarcastically looking at the “good ole days” of social media and hipster self-promotion . The video is “funny” because the viewer can feel smug knowing that all those cool kids will one day be uncool when conditions change (I guess the producers want to the viewers to assume that the golden days of social media are already over and that in the near future people will be unable to self-promote to the extent they do now).

Secondly, Invisible Children (which created the Kony 2012 video) plays into the larger college student social justice movement. For many privileged young people in this country, college is the first time they learn about social inequality, acting as a sort of “consciousness-raising” period of young adulthood (Broido, 2000). For many young, white, suburban adolescents, trading in their Vans for a pair of Tom’s shoes is a very powerful act of self-determination. Unfortunately, these shoes have themselves become more of a status signifier, signalling pseudo-bohemian tastes and center-left political leanings. Hence, Tom shoes become but another signifier of “hipster” status (or Christian hipster status, if you want to get more specific).

I recall how popular Invisible Children was when I was an undergrad just a few years ago; I also recall feeling quite bitter that other pressing social problems like education, poverty, and the prison reform were receiving such scant attention. It seemed to me that more immediate social problems were being relegated to the sidelines in an effort to draw attention to white paternalism and “lets save Africa” rhetoric. For some people, including myself, Invisible Children feels more like glorified backpatting. Jesse Daniels, over at RacismReview, just wrote a wonderful piece highlighting the white racism behind the Kony 2012 movement.

Perhaps most importantly, the Kony 2012 has been charged as a hipster movement because of how its supporters have used it as a form of social distinction. I draw your attention back to this series of tweets posted on BuzzFeed last week. Here we can see how individuals are positioning themselves alongside the Kony 2012 zeitgeist through what I like to call “foundation narratives.”

Foundation narratives are narrative accounts of one’s personal involvement to a particular sub/counter culture. They serve as status claims aimed at protecting an individual’s identity investments from later adopters (Arsel and Thompson, 2010).

So in this case the “field” of Kony 2012 expanded greatly as a result of the bandwagon effect and the viral spread of the Kony 2012 video through social media. Individuals who identified with the Kony 2012 movement felt threatened by the new public awareness; their identities as Invisible Children activists came to be seen as a result of the bandwagon effect. Hence the explosion of Tweets defending individual’s involvements in this movement. “I hate trendy activists” thereby becomes both an identity defense mechanism and a subtle critique of later adopters (ie: “posers”).

In my opinion, these are the real hipsters of the Kony 2012 movement. Why? Because they are mocking public  attention to Kony as a form of social status. If we define hipsters as people who seek social distinction through deliberate anti-conformity, then these individuals are setting the standard.

Today I bring you one example of how medical technology and body modification are converging.

The image above comes from the Georgia Institute of Technology, where they have engineered a new form of wheelchair mobility through the use of a tongue piercing. The Tongue Drive System uses a dental plate that captures the movement of the tongue piercing below, which is fashioned with a tiny magnet on top. The information is then sent to an iPod Touch or iPhone, where

Software installed on the Apple device works out the relative position of the magnet with respect to the array of sensors in real time and interprets the user’s commands. This information is then used to control the movements of a cursor on the computer screen or to substitute for the joystick function in a powered wheelchair.

The team has also created a universal interface for the intraoral Tongue Drive System that attaches to a standard electric wheelchair. It holds the iPod, wirelessly receives the sensor data and delivers it to the iPod touch, charges it and features a container for leaving the retainer overnight for charging.

The system can be trained with multiple commands — unlike the common sip-n-puff device that acts as a switch controlled by sucking or blowing through a straw.

This technology is but a recent example of the (new) cyborg body. I have written before about how body modification and medical technology are changing the way we approach the human body, expanding the possibilities for prosthetics and human augmentation. For instance, I have highlighted some of the early prosthetics of the medieval period, and I have also highlighted ‘The Bionic Girl’ Chloe Holmes, who received a powerful prosthetic hand with independently articulating digits. And in terms of augmentation, I have reviewed the “Eyeborg Documentary” as an exploration of the future of human-technology augmentations.

The Tongue Drive System is but a recent example of medical technology incorporating popular body modifications into new assistive technologies, blurring the boundaries between medicalization and body modification.

Below is a three part essay I presented at the 2012 Southwest Texas Popular Culture Association meetings in Albuquerque, New Mexico on February 9th. It was presented as part of a series of panels titled “The Apocalypse in Popular Culture.” A (much) earlier version of this paper can be found on the Sociological Images sister blog.

THE ZOMBIE IN FILM: FROM HAITIAN FOLKLORE TO APOCALYPTIC ANXIETIES

If you are alive these days, and not already part of the undead masses yourself, you probably have noticed a staggering increase of zombie references in film, television, pop culture, videogames and the internet.For instance, the big screen and small screen have both hosted a plethora of zombie films including the more popular blockbusters 28 Days Later (2002), Shaun of the Dead (2004), and I Am Legend (2007). In television, we have seen the recent success of AMC’s The Walking Dead, based on the comic book series of the same name. In pop culture, we have seen the viral video of penitentiary inmates dancing to Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” and even the popular television sitcom Glee host its own rendition of the dance. And if you are on a college campus like myself, you have probably seen undergraduates playing “Zombies Vs. Humans,” a game of tag in which “human” players must defend against the horde of “zombie” players by “stunning” them with Nerf weapons and tube socks. In videogames, we have seen the success of the Resident Evil franchise, eventually culminating in a series of films staring Mila Jovovich, as well as more recent games like Left 4 Dead and Dead Rising. Finally, the internet is awash with zombie culture. From post-apocalyptic zombie societies to zombie fansites and blogs.

Part 1: The Early Cinematic Zombie

What is the zombie and where does it come from?Bishop’s (2010:20) “taxonomy” of the dead” is a useful for articulating the different conceptualizations of the zombie as it has appeared in film. In my opinion, however, the zombie can be reduced to three main types: the somnambulist (ie: mind control slave-zombie), the cannibalistic corpse (ie: undead eaters), and the infected living (eg: the “rage virus” of 28 Days Later).

What makes the zombie unique from other movie monsters is its unique place of origin. Whereas Frankenstein, Dracula, and the Wolfman all have ties to the Gothic literary tradition, the zombie stands apart in having a relatively recent (and proximal) origin. Theorists of zombie culture (such as Kyle Bishop or Jamie Russell), attribute the origin of the zombie to Haitian folklore and the hybrid religion of voodoo. But the zombie didn’t make its away into American culture until the 1920s and 30s, when sensationalist travel narratives were popular with Western readers. Specifically, W.B. Seabrook’s book The Magic Island, is often credited as the first popular text to describe the Haitian zombie. Additionally, the work of Zora Neale Hurston (specifically her 1937 book Tell My Horse) explores the folklore surrounding the zombie in Haitian mythology.

With the development of the motion picture, the zombie became a staple of horror, and a popular movie monster. The first major zombie film was Halperin and Halperin’s (1932) White Zombie, which depicted a Haitian voodoo priest capturing the female protagonist as a zombie slave. Other early zombie films include: Revolt of the Zombies (1936), King of the Zombies (1941), and I Walked with a Zombie (1943). What is important to note is that the zombie of these films was not the cannibalistic creature we now know it as. These zombies were people put under a spell, the spell of voodoo and mystical tradition. In these films, the true terror is not be being killed by zombies, but of becoming a zombie oneself.

What all these films have in common is their depiction of Voodoo and Haitian culture more generally as dangerous, menacing, and superstitious. Those who study colonial history are keen to note that the messages contained in these films are less than subtle, and present stereotyped versions of Haitian culture aimed largely at satisfying a predominantly white audience. Many of these films also contain an all white cast, with several members in blackface serving as comedic relief for the more “serious” scenes.

In the 1950s, zombie films came to the American shores. At this time of Cold War anxiety, films oriented around mind control and invasion from afar resonated with audiences. Films like Invisible Invaders (1952) presented the dangers lurking nextdoor, as family, friends, and neighbors turned on one another. In this film, a mad scientist uses technology to secure power over men’s brains. In films such as these, fears of loss of individuality and loss of control over the self become predominant. This mirrors the changes of suburban America at this time, as expansion into the suburbs and the development of mass-production led to new forms of consumption and identity creation. Films like The Last Man on Earth (1964) portray the fight for individuality as Vincent Price, as the last man on earth, must fight off the onslaught of night-walking, vampire/zombie hybrids.

Also, after the devastation of the atomic age was realized in Hiroshima ad Nagasaki, new anxieties developed surrounding science and technology, the limitations of human progress, and the dangers posed by new forms of energy we did not yet fully understand. Films like Plan 9 From Outer Space (1959) root the zombie in terms of these fears, portraying the inevitable apocalypse as arising out of humanity’s own hubris. Developments in science and technology, especially the desire to control nature through new forms of energy, lead extraterrestrials to intervene to stop humanity’s inevitable acquisition of these dangerous weapons of mass destruction. The aliens resurrect the dead in order to destroy the living. In these dramatic premonitions of the future, humanity is said to be facing retribution for its sins. In the 1970s, these fears would only be magnified…

As you can see, the zombie as movie monster represents a very fluid metaphor or “artefact” (Bruns 2008) upon which our worst fears and anxieties can be grafted. Throughout time, the meaning of the zombie has changed, but so has our fears.

Part 2: Romero and the Politicized Zombie

Romero’s 1968 classic, Night of the Living Dead, revolutionized the zombie metaphor. His “flesh eaters” have since become a staple of the genre and the social criticism laced within his early films have become a tradition in subsequent zombie films. Prior to Romero’s take on the zombie genre, zombies  largely reflected the spirit of the times in which these films were made. Hence, the fears of racial miscegenation found in White Zombie (1932) and the fears of mind control found in Invisible Invaders (1952). However, Romero changed these trends when he made the zombie into something more than simply an automaton of mind control or voodoo mysticism; Romero introduced the “flesh-eater” into the zombie lexicon, pushing the genre further into the macabre and raising the possibility of a politicized zombie figure.

In fact Night of the Living Dead was created as a critique of the violence and devastation of Vietnam, with the dead returning to life as a result of radiation emitted from a government “Venus probe” sent to space. In addition, Romero made his zombies into a form of contagion: A single bite from a zombie will similarly kill and turn one into a zombie, thereby playing into fears of loved ones and strangers turning on one another. Since Romero’s film, the zombie has usually been associated with cannibal corpses that have risen from the grave to devour the living.

What is interesting to note about Romero’s film is its not-so-subtle use of race relations to depict the tensions of the Civil Rights era. Although Romero himself has stated that his casting of a Black man as the lead role had nothing to do with race, the impact was felt by audiences, who saw the film as ahead of its time. To make this allegory all the more palpable, Romero included still photography at the end of the film, in which militant white police officers drag the corpse of Duane, the lead character, by meathooks, accompanied by canines and armed civilians. These photos, shocking in their graphic violence, are reminiscent of white lynchmobs in the southern United States.

Romero took his social criticism one step further in his second zombie film, Dawn of the Dead (1978). In this film, protagonists bunker down in a shopping mall as zombies invade from outside. The images of zombies mindlessly walking, groping, and drooling over consumer goods provides a stark image of the cult of consumerism and American capitalism.

Similarly, the Italian zombie horror film Let Sleeping Corpses Lie (1974) reflects fears of environmental degradation and pollution. In this film, the zombie epidemic is caused by an experimental pest-control machine, which sends radio waves into the ground. Although it solves the local pest problem for farmers, it also reanimates the dead in a nearby cemetery. Once again we see the fears of scientific progress and environmental degradation leading to the zombie apocalypse.

Finally, The Plague of the Zombies (1966) captures themes of colonialism, tyranny, and proletariat exploitation. Set in the mid 1800s, a mysterious plague caused by voodoo magic leads the rural proletariat into a zombie revolution, eventually overtaking their corrupt patriarch and devouring him.

In short, the films of the 1970s became extremely political, as the zombie became a metaphor for various social anxieties that were most salient at this time, including environmental degradation, science and technology, rising inequality, energy crises, and consumer culture.

With the 1980s, the zombie turned into a comedic figure. The films became more formulaic and less dramatic, mainly as a result of low-budget production houses capitalizing on the success of early zombie films. These exploitation films revolved around ever-increasing levels of gore and nudity in order to attract young audiences with shock value. Films like Return of the Living Dead (1985), Dead Alive (1992), and Redneck Zombies (1989) capture this era of Grindhouse cinema.

Nonetheless, the zombie films of this era still contain social commentary. For instance, themes of drug abuse and teen promiscuity feature prominently in these films, mirroring the social context of the 1980s, particularly Reagan’s “War on Drugs” and the AIDS epidemic. Similarly, Romero’s third zombie installment, Day of the Dead (1985), is credited as a criticism of Cold War international relations and the U.S. military-industrial complex.

As we can see from the examples above, Romero successfully turned the zombie from brainless automaton into a premier source of social and cultural criticism. The cannibalistic nature of his “flesh eaters” and the precedents he set for the genre helped to transform the zombie into powerful figure for social commentary. Next week, I will cover Part 3: The Zombie Renaissance and conclude with some theory signifying the importance of the zombie as metaphor.

Part 3: The Zombie Renaissance

Scholars have called the post-9/11 era the “Zombie Renaissance” due to the torrent of zombie films produced at this time and the paradigmatic changes introduced to the zombie as movie monster (Bishop 2010). The first blockbuster film of this era, Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later (2002) is often credited to raising the stakes in zombie films. This film became a powerful drama oriented around the zombie apocalypse, something that has since been mimicked in recent films and especially in AMC’s recent television series The Walking Dead.

Perhaps most importantly, Boyle’s film is also credited in the creation of a new breed of zombie, the fast-moving, disease-infected living type I outlined at the onset of this presentation. These zombies are no longer depressed automatons, but enraged, feral, and overcome with madness. They sprint rather than shuffle; and more than brains they seek to spread the infection further, spewing blood and bile onto their victims in addition to devouring them.

28 Days Later also set the stage for a dramatic expansion of the zombie narrative, both in terms of special effects and in scope. In the film, the entire world is said to have succumbed to the “rage virus” and the protagonists must struggle to survive without the safety of social institutions. In fact, the very social institutions established to protect humanity become threats to survival, as the protagonists find out when they bunker down with renegade soldiers who attempt to rape and kill them.

The themes of social decay portrayed so eloquently in 28 Days Later have since become a staple of the zombie genre. This is made most salient in films that draw direct parallels to global terrorism and social unrest. Zombie films like Dawn of the Dead (the 2004 remake of the Romero classic) take this to a new level, portraying dystopian anarchy on a grand scale that could not be achieved in early renditions of the zombie apocalypse. With characters left to fend for themselves, these “everyman” tales become gripping stories of individualism and resilience, thereby resonating with Western audiences.

But the social criticism of earlier zombie films was not lost in these recent films. Romero, particularly, has been keen to maintain explicit social commentary in his recent films. His more recent, Land of the Dead (2005) has often been credited as an indictment of the Bush era corporate-political inbreeding, in which the rich close themselves off in the opulent Fiddler’s Green while the masses wallow in filth on the streets below, forever at risk of zombie invasion. In addition, the very structures enacted to protect us actually become our own undoing, as the barricades constructed to keep out the zombie horde ultimately serve to prevent the characters’ escape.

In recent years we have also seen a resurgence of the zombie as a comedic element. Films like Shaun of the Dead (2004) and Dance of the Dead (2008) portray scathing social commentary while using the zombie survival narrative as comedic relief. Similarly, the film Fido (2006) portrays historical revisionism in its portrayal of 1950s America, in which racial tensions are replaced with tensions between domesticated zombie slaves and their human masters.

In my opinion, zombie serves as a fluid and powerful metaphor for articulating our deepest cultural anxieties and social fears. Borrowing Axel Bruns (2007) concept  of the “artefact,” an incomplete product that has neither an absolute beginning nor end, we can articulate the zombie as a collectively-produced cultural artefact. Its life cycle continues to grow and change with each successive film, spawning new creatures, deviations, and forking into new domains. In this sense, the zombie is a resilient metaphor that allows various ideas to be grafted upon it. As Peter Dendle (2008) has so eloquently argued, the zombie thereby serves as a “barometer” of our collective anxieties at different points in history.In addition, the zombie apocalypse and the survival narrative of many of these films provides a magnificent medium from which to make political and social statements, a vantage point from which contemporary (non-zombie) society can be dichotomized. The stories of survival contained in these films always contains implicit a criticism of the prevailing social order and the dystopian future that awaits us.

Finally, the zombie has acquired a powerful cultural currency since 9/11. It has spawned powerful new narratives of society and the individual, and invigorated gun enthusiasts and doomsdayers with models for survival (Dendle 2008). It has led to a distinct subculture of horror fans that identify with the zombie, inspiring “zombie walks” across the country and spurring fan communities across the globe. Given that the collective consciousness continues to identify so strongly with the zombie narrative, we will probably only see more zombie related media and activities emerging in the near future. In fact, we already have college courses and anthologies dedicated to the zombie. In this sense, the zombie will live on as part of our cultural understanding of mass society, offering us an image of the future but also a critique of the present state of the social order.

Selected References:

Bishop, E. 2010. American Zombie Gothic: The Rise and Fall (and Rise) of the Walking Dead in Popular Culture. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.

Dendle, P. 2007. “The Zombie as Barometer of Cultural Anxiety.” In N. Scott (Ed.), Monsters and the Monstrous: Myths and Metaphors of Enduring Evil. New York: Rodopi. Pp. 33-43.

Pagano, D. 2008. “The Space of Apocalypse in Zombie Cinema.” In S. McIntosh and M. Leverette (Ed.), Zombie Culture: Autopsies of the Living Dead. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press. Pp.71-86.

Below is Part 2 of a three part essay (Part 1 is available here) I will be presenting at the 2012 Southwest Texas Popular Culture Association meetings in Albuquerque, New Mexico on February 9th. I will be presenting alongside several other scholars for a series of panels titled “The Apocalypse in Popular Culture.” A (much) earlier version of this paper can be found on the Sociological Images sister blog. Part 2 discusses the role of George Romero’s “flesh eaters” and the use of zombie films for social and political criticism between the late 60s and the mid 90s.

Romero’s 1968 classic, Night of the Living Dead, revolutionized the zombie metaphor. His “flesh eaters” have since become a staple of the genre and the social criticism laced within his early films have become a tradition in subsequent zombie films. Prior to Romero’s take on the zombie genre, zombies  largely reflected the spirit of the times in which these films were made. Hence, the fears of racial miscegenation found in White Zombie (1932) and the fears of mind control found in Invisible Invaders (1952). However, Romero changed these trends when he made the zombie into something more than simply an automaton of mind control or voodoo mysticism; Romero introduced the “flesh-eater” into the zombie lexicon, pushing the genre further into the macabre and raising the possibility of a politicized zombie figure.

In fact Night of the Living Dead was created as a critique of the violence and devastation of Vietnam, with the dead returning to life as a result of radiation emitted from a government “Venus probe” sent to space. In addition, Romero made his zombies into a form of contagion: A single bite from a zombie will similarly kill and turn one into a zombie, thereby playing into fears of loved ones and strangers turning on one another. Since Romero’s film, the zombie has usually been associated with cannibal corpses that have risen from the grave to devour the living.

What is interesting to note about Romero’s film is its not-so-subtle use of race relations to depict the tensions of the Civil Rights era. Although Romero himself has stated that his casting of a Black man as the lead role had nothing to do with race, the impact was felt by audiences, who saw the film as ahead of its time. To make this allegory all the more palpable, Romero included still photography at the end of the film, in which militant white police officers drag the corpse of Duane, the lead character, by meathooks, accompanied by canines and armed civilians. These photos, shocking in their graphic violence, are reminiscent of white lynchmobs in the southern United States.

Romero took his social criticism one step further in his second zombie film, Dawn of the Dead (1978). In this film, protagonists bunker down in a shopping mall as zombies invade from outside. The images of zombies mindlessly walking, groping, and drooling over consumer goods provides a stark image of the cult of consumerism and American capitalism.

Similarly, the Italian zombie horror film Let Sleeping Corpses Lie (1974) reflects fears of environmental degradation and pollution. In this film, the zombie epidemic is caused by an experimental pest-control machine, which sends radio waves into the ground. Although it solves the local pest problem for farmers, it also reanimates the dead in a nearby cemetery. Once again we see the fears of scientific progress and environmental degradation leading to the zombie apocalypse.

Finally, The Plague of the Zombies (1966) captures themes of colonialism, tyranny, and proletariat exploitation. Set in the mid 1800s, a mysterious plague caused by voodoo magic leads the rural proletariat into a zombie revolution, eventually overtaking their corrupt patriarch and devouring him.

In short, the films of the 1970s became extremely political, as the zombie became a metaphor for various social anxieties that were most salient at this time, including environmental degradation, science and technology, rising inequality, energy crises, and consumer culture.

With the 1980s, the zombie turned into a comedic figure. The films became more formulaic and less dramatic, mainly as a result of low-budget production houses capitalizing on the success of early zombie films. These exploitation films revolved around ever-increasing levels of gore and nudity in order to attract young audiences with shock value. Films like Return of the Living Dead (1985), Dead Alive (1992), and Redneck Zombies (1989) capture this era of Grindhouse cinema.

Nonetheless, the zombie films of this era still contain social commentary. For instance, themes of drug abuse and teen promiscuity feature prominently in these films, mirroring the social context of the 1980s, particularly Reagan’s “War on Drugs” and the AIDS epidemic. Similarly, Romero’s third zombie installment, Day of the Dead (1985), is credited as a criticism of Cold War international relations and the U.S. military-industrial complex.

As we can see from the examples above, Romero successfully turned the zombie from brainless automaton into a premier source of social and cultural criticism. The cannibalistic nature of his “flesh eaters” and the precedents he set for the genre helped to transform the zombie into powerful figure for social commentary. Next week, I will cover Part 3: The Zombie Renaissance and conclude with some theory signifying the importance of the zombie as metaphor.

Below is Part 1 of a three part essay I will be presenting at the 2012 Southwest Texas Popular Culture Association meetings in Albuquerque, New Mexico on February 9th. I will be presenting alongside several other scholars for a series of panels titled “The Apocalypse in Popular Culture.” A (much) earlier version of this paper can be found on the Sociological Images sister blog. Part 1 discusses the first wave of zombie cinema 1920-1950s.

The Zombie in Film: From Haitian Folklore to Apocalyptic Anxieties

If you are alive these days, and not already part of the undead masses yourself, you probably have noticed a staggering increase of zombie references in film, television, pop culture, videogames and the internet.

For instance, the big screen and small screen have both hosted a plethora of zombie films including the more popular blockbusters 28 Days Later (2002), Shaun of the Dead (2004), and I Am Legend (2007). In television, we have seen the recent success of AMC’s The Walking Dead, based on the comic book series of the same name. In pop culture, we have seen the viral video of penitentiary inmates dancing to Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” and even the popular television sitcom Glee host its own rendition of the dance. And if you are on a college campus like myself, you have probably seen undergraduates playing “Zombies Vs. Humans,” a game of tag in which “human” players must defend against the horde of “zombie” players by “stunning” them with Nerf weapons and tube socks. In videogames, we have seen the success of the Resident Evil franchise, eventually culminating in a series of films staring Mila Jovovich, as well as more recent games like Left 4 Dead and Dead Rising. Finally, the internet is awash with zombie culture. From post-apocalyptic zombie societies to zombie fansites and blogs.

But what is the zombie and where does it come from?

Bishop’s (2010:20) “taxonomy” of the dead” is a useful for articulating the different conceptualizations of the zombie as it has appeared in film. In my opinion, however, the zombie can be reduced to three main types: the somnambulist (ie: mind control slave-zombie), the cannibalistic corpse (ie: undead eaters), and the infected living (eg: the “rage virus” of 28 Days Later).

What makes the zombie unique from other movie monsters is its unique place of origin. Whereas Frankenstein, Dracula, and the Wolfman all have ties to the Gothic literary tradition, the zombie stands apart in having a relatively recent (and proximal) origin. Theorists of zombie culture (such as Kyle Bishop or Jamie Russell), attribute the origin of the zombie to Haitian folklore and the hybrid religion of voodoo. But the zombie didn’t make its away into American culture until the 1920s and 30s, when sensationalist travel narratives were popular with Western readers. Specifically, W.B. Seabrook’s book The Magic Island, is often credited as the first popular text to describe the Haitian zombie. Additionally, the work of Zora Neale Hurston (specifically her 1937 book Tell My Horse) explores the folklore surrounding the zombie in Haitian mythology.

With the development of the motion picture, the zombie became a staple of horror, and a popular movie monster. The first major zombie film was Halperin and Halperin’s (1932) White Zombie, which depicted a Haitian voodoo priest capturing the female protagonist as a zombie slave. Other early zombie films include: Revolt of the Zombies (1936), King of the Zombies (1941), and I Walked with a Zombie (1943). What is important to note is that the zombie of these films was not the cannibalistic creature we now know it as. These zombies were people put under a spell, the spell of voodoo and mystical tradition. In these films, the true terror is not be being killed by zombies, but of becoming a zombie oneself.

What all these films have in common is their depiction of Voodoo and Haitian culture more generally as dangerous, menacing, and superstitious. Those who study colonial history are keen to note that the messages contained in these films are less than subtle, and present stereotyped versions of Haitian culture aimed largely at satisfying a predominantly white audience. Many of these films also contain an all white cast, with several members in blackface serving as comedic relief for the more “serious” scenes.

In the 1950s, zombie films came to the American shores. At this time of Cold War anxiety, films oriented around mind control and invasion from afar resonated with audiences. Films like Invisible Invaders (1952) presented the dangers lurking nextdoor, as family, friends, and neighbors turned on one another. In this film, a mad scientist uses technology to secure power over men’s brains. In films such as these, fears of loss of individuality and loss of control over the self become predominant. This mirrors the changes of suburban America at this time, as expansion into the suburbs and the development of mass-production led to new forms of consumption and identity creation. Films like The Last Man on Earth (1964) portray the fight for individuality as Vincent Price, as the last man on earth, must fight off the onslaught of night-walking, vampire/zombie hybrids.

Also, after the devastation of the atomic age was realized in Hiroshima ad Nagasaki, new anxieties developed surrounding science and technology, the limitations of human progress, and the dangers posed by new forms of energy we did not yet fully understand. Films like Plan 9 From Outer Space (1959) root the zombie in terms of these fears, portraying the inevitable apocalypse as arising out of humanity’s own hubris. Developments in science and technology, especially the desire to control nature through new forms of energy, lead extraterrestrials to intervene to stop humanity’s inevitable acquisition of these dangerous weapons of mass destruction. The aliens resurrect the dead in order to destroy the living. In these dramatic premonitions of the future, humanity is said to be facing retribution for its sins. In the 1970s, these fears would only be magnified…

As you can see, the zombie as movie monster represents a very fluid metaphor or “artefact” (Bruns 2008) upon which our worst fears and anxieties can be grafted. Throughout time, the meaning of the zombie has changed, but so has our fears. Stay tuned next week for Part 2: Romero and the Politicized Zombie, where I will be discussing the use of the zombie as a vehicle for social criticism.