Conference organised by the Communication and Media Research Institute (CAMRI)
Keynote Panel: Virality, Social Media and Popular Culture
Chair: Dave Morley, Goldsmiths College, University of London
Nancy Baym, Microsoft Research
Emily Keightley, Loughborough University
Winston Mano, University of Westminster
Tony D Sampson, East London University
Paddy Scannell, Media, Culture and Society
This interdisciplinary conference aims to examine how and why everyday popular culture is produced and consumed on digital platforms. There is increasing interest in studying and discussing the linkages between popular cultural and social media, yet there exist important gaps when comparing such cultural phenomena and modes of consumption in a global, non-west-centric context. The conference addresses a significant gap in theoretical and empirical work on social media by focusing on the politics of digital cultures from below and in the context of everyday life. To use Raymond Williams’s phrase, we seek to rethink digital viral cultures as ‘a whole way of life’; how ‘ordinary’, everyday digital acts can amount to forms of ‘politicity’ that can redefine experience and what is possible.
The conference will examine how social media users engage with cultural products in digital platforms. We will also be assessing how the relationship between social media and popular cultural phenomena generate different meanings and experiences.
The conference engages with the following key questions:
- How do online users in different global contexts engage with viral/popular cultures?
- How can the comparative analysis of different global contexts help us contribute to theorising emergent viral cultures in the age of social media?
- How do viral digital cultures redefine our experience of self and the world?
Conference papers will address the following themes:
- Analysing viral media texts: method and theory
- Theorising virality: new/old concepts
- Rethinking popular culture in the age of social media
- Social media, politicity and the viral
- The political economy of viral cultures
- Memes, appropriation, collage, virality and trash aesthetics
- Hybrid strategies of anti-politics in digital media
- Viral news/Fake news
- Non-mainstream music, protest, and political discussion
- Capitalism and viral marketing
PROGRAMME AND REGISTRATION
This one-day conference will consist of a keynote panel and panel sessions. The fee for registration for all participants, including presenters, is £40, with a concessionary rate of £15 for students, to cover all conference documentation, refreshments and administration costs.