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Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 322

Part of Session 185: Superdiversity and digital literacy practices (Other abstracts in this session)

YouTube mashup videos as satire and interventional political critique

Authors: Häkkinen, Ari Juhani; Leppänen, Sirpa
Submitted by: Leppanen, Sirpa (University of Jyväskylä, Finland)

Social media is widely used for commenting and critiquing the contemporary political developments as well as for taking part in societal debate.

In this presentation we shall look at how YouTube mashup videos (collages of various audio, visual, and audio-visual extracts) have been used to deconstruct (Derrida, 1976) politicians’ messages and rhetoric. Such videos engage in global YouTube/social media cultures while at the same time they can also be seen as interventional political critique. In that sense the videos are also examples of the super-diversity of social media with its re-configuring, multiple-origin, ethnically, linguistically, and culturally differentiated social landscapes (Leppänen & Häkkinen, forthcoming).

In more detail, we shall analyze two video clips and discuss how they comment on and critique the rhetoric of the former and now deceased Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi and a well known Finnish populist politician Timo Soini. Coming from very different cultural contexts, both videos employ similar means of translocal digital literacy practices, critical digital intertextuality (Edwards & Tryon, 2009), and DIY mashup aesthetics.

The producers of our example videos have, through bricolage, mashupped hit songs, viral videos, speech extracts, and other music and video snippets to produce humorous videos, which also disarm the politicians of their claims. The videos employ multisemiotic and multimodal means in combining various linguistic and cultural resources resulting in both funny YouTube clips as well as serious political commentary.

References:

Derrida, Jacques (1976) Of Grammatology. Translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press.

Edwards, Richard L. and Chuck Tryon (2009) Political Video Mashups as Allegories of Citizen Empowerment. First Monday, 14(10), 5 October 2009. [Online.] Available at , date accessed 10 January 2012.

Leppänen, Sirpa and Ari Häkkinen (Forthcoming) Buffalaxed Super-diversity: Representations of the “Other” on YouTube. Diversities, a special issue ed. by Jan Blommaert, Ben Rampton and Massimiliano Spotti. Göttingen: Max Planck Institute for the Study of Ethnic and Religious Diversity.