These main themes govern the conception of social networking according to Rigby, in his text Mobilizing Generation 2.0.  Combined, these themes suggest that a politician’s engagement with social networking needs to be, as if this couldn’t be guessed, interactive, content rich, and allow for unfettered communication among the participants of the network.

It’s damned important to elaborate these concepts in handbooks, but really only to the folks who don’t already grok social networking, blogs, virtual worlds, etc.  Rigby’s conclusion sums it up well: in his book, he helps you see

how many organizations and campaigns are attempting to navigate the intricacies of Web 2.0 technologies and the associated shifts in our cultural landscape.

If he’d waited a sec before publishing, perhaps he’d have gone bananas over my.barackobama.com.  Yup, there it is.  A brilliant tool for allowing people to get involved, track activity, organize each other, be organized, and so forth.  Somebody in Obama’s campaign understands the whole deal and implemented it well.  Sometimes they even give ringtones out for free!  And yet…

And yet it’s only part of the story.  He rejects the “If you build it, they will come” mentality.  The “Issue a press release!  Where?  On the blog!” mentality.  The “I’m the only one who can talk on this multi-nodal, multi-media, multi-lateral, multi-oriented communication medium!” mentality.  Goody, good, good.

But, what’s next?

Unfortunately, I can’t exactly elucidate an answer to that question quite just yet, but I do have a few ideas about where this whole discussion went wrong:

• Oh, those kids.  They say the darndest things.
• Campaigning is inherently conservative.
• The voters need an incentive…or so they say.

Ribgy first errs by being a bit too old.  Yes, he’s only, like, thirtysomething, but it’s not actually his age that’s at fault — it’s that he thinks he’s too old.  So, the vast majority of folks out there didn’t grow up to the ripe age of thirteen with the ability to T9 type.  Time to get over it.  The kiddies aren’t aliens who live in communication cyberworlds all the time.  They’re just doing what seems natural given the technologies they have access to and the desired results.

As such, the content and communication needs to match the constituency.  If all teens (for example) want to talk about is how cute the candidate’s sons and daughters are, release some photos!  Unfortunately, campaigns and the media that covers them are inherently conservative.  They won’t take risks, their version of jumping ship is changing a few lines in a speech.

And, lastly, enough with the ringtones and listen to your own advice: people are on the internet to do stuff they’re already doing.  Hobbies, sex, and wasting time.  If you can facilitate these things, you’ll be doing yourself and everybody else a favor.

Even more lastly, there will be a Web 3.0, and it will be driven by social forces, and it might not even be as huge a paradigm shift as we may, or may not, have already experienced.  The kiddies will think it’s a natural evolution and the campaigns will still be barely ankle deep.  It’s going to be fun.

Blog postings as “infection vectors.”  Since he chooses to use an analogy of epidemics so liberally, we might as well start there: blogs, if seen as discrete bodies, share quite a lot of bodily fluids.  It’s common enough, at this point, to see entire postings that are nothing but the citation of another blog, article or source.  And, with things like trackbacks, hit and traffic analysis, and comments, the paths that posts and stories use to inseminate, er, insinuate, rather, their way through the population is all the more obvious.  Blogs often even have a roll call of their most frequent partners.  It certainly suggests that Connectors might use their promiscuous exchanges to propagate a full-bore memetic infection.

The idea of Mavens as important to the transmission of ideas is apparent: even if small time blogger picks up an interesting story (who shared the Kilkenny letter first?), the “a-list” blogs will catch the bug real fast and spread the little guy around in a big way.

But all this is fairly rote.  The idea that internet politics are somehow different because they are a “one to many” communication medium, because they reduce the cost of entry for an individual to participate in the forum, because they provide fairly easy modes of information retrieval, etc., is old news.  Allow me to take a skeptic’s approach for just one moment.

This is politics we’re talking about.  Dirty, slime wielding, partisan hackery that, despite anybody’s best efforts, will spread like the plague.  The blogs can stir up a ruckus, yes, but in what way do these ruckii actually reflect meaningful information exchange?  How do we measure it?  If McCain addresses a blog comment in a national address, have we hit the big time, woah, hold-onto-your-hats tipping point?  If O’Reilly lashes out at the Huffington Post, thereby propagating the infection further, are we past the brink and in free-fall?

I’d suggest that much of the bloviation coming from the blogs is meaningful in that it can create the buzz that Gladwell prizes so highly, and the organs of propagation — a-list blogs, mainstream media articles, and so on — offer an intriguing path for exploration.  Yet, what I’d really like to follow, however, is a mixture of Levitt-Gladwell-Miller to round out the internet part of internet politics.  What actually makes a story happen, and how does it get used, and why do people willfully share it?  It’d never happen, especially since Spooky is way to spacey to get too involved, but one can always dream.

A few notes, first regarding collage:

Visual, sound, and text collage–which for many centuries were relatively fugitive traditions (a cento here, a folk pastiche there)–became explosively central to a series of movements in the twentieth century: futurism, cubism, Dada, musique concrete, situationism, pop art, and appropriationism. In fact, collage, the common denominator in that list, might be called the art form of the twentieth century, never mind the twenty-first. …it becomes apparent that the appropriation, mimicry, quotation, allusion, and sublimated collaboration consist of a kind of sin qua non of the creative act, cutting across all forms and genres in the realm of cultural production. (28-29)

Later, regarding allusion:

What happens when allusion goes unrecognized? A closer look at The Waste Land may help make this point. The body of Eliot’s poem is a vertiginous melange of quotation, allusion, and “original” writing. When Eliot alludes to Edmund Spenser’s “Prothalamion:” with the line “Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song,” what of readers to whom the poem, never one of Spenser’s most popular, is unfamiliar? … Taken from this angle, what exactly is postmodernism, except modernism without the anxiety? (29-30)

Yet later, regarding second uses:

Active reading is an impertinent raid on the literary preserve. Readers are like nomads, poaching their way across fields they do not own–artists are no more able to control the imaginations of their audiences than the culture industry is able to control second uses of its artifacts. [Recounting of The Velveteen Rabbit] … Seen from the perspective of the toymaker, the Velveteen Rabbit’s loose joints and missing eyes represent vandalism, signs of misuse and rough treatment; for others, these are marks of its loving use.

The essay then jumps into copyright mode with a look at art as engaging withing a “gift economy” and the commons as some public thing, mostly derivatively drawing from a number of previous thinkers, like Lessig and LItman. But, here’s the kicker: he actually is drawing from these previous thinkers–the essay, while not entirely, draws on a number of ideas, writings, even personal anecdotes that go un-cited. At the end, however, he outlines where certain passages come from. For example, of the passage about the Velveteen Rabbit, he says, “This is a mashup of Henry Jenkins, from his Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture, and Michel de Certeau, whom Jenkins quotes.”

This might fit in by describing collage as an historically situated practice, drawing connections between appropriation, mixing, sampling, and the creation of the novel. Lethem seems to say that most work is derivative, positively so, but I’m willing to take a few more postmodern leaps toward an understanding of the pastiche’s novelty in its own right.

The gist: Vision Machine’s project took an archival speech with no audio and then asked a deaf person to read the lips of the speaker over the course of numerous playings of the video.

The tool: The readings of the lip reader were layered such that they would overlap.  Sometimes, they would echo each other, sometimes they would revise each other, sometimes they would be isolated.

Palimpsest refers to the reusable papyrus where previous writings were not completely erased before a second use.

The authors try to distinguish digital technologies’ mode of layering from analog’s montage/collage.  Not sure if this has any traction.

Before exploring the video collages as sites of empowerment, however, a review of the objects’ attributes is in order to once again establish them as sites of potential voice. In particular, the videos’ digital, mutable, and fluid characteristics permit their use in a critical idiom, the same idiom which could be potentially be used in opposition to the hegemonic forces at play within political discourse. Since the video collages are created from found material, there needs to exist a library from which an appropriate lexicon might be derived. Such a library can only be made practical with the benefits afforded by digital technology, such as the ability to capture, replicate, transfer, and distribute content as needed, as often as possible. The internet-based media environment takes these attributes to an extreme by providing myriad opportunities to procure existing material for later repurposing in a video collage. For example, as of the 2008 presidential campaigns, it is common practice to release videos of candidates making all manner of speeches and statements online. The videos of these speeches are in a format that is easily captured by a computer, mixed with other digital objects such as music and other videos, and then distributed online once again.

But the simple availability of digital materials does not set them apart from the existing digital mediascape sufficiently to permit the creation of a new political voice. Instead, the digital materials that constitute the video collages must also be mutable. Like the imographs described by Burnett (Fluid Screens, Expanded Cinema, 130), the video and audio that constitute the video collages can be “transformed and networked” within editing applications to greater enhance their plasticity. It is not enough to simply juxtapose the elements of a collage with each other, but the elements must actually combine so that they might reassemble into a pastiche with more potency than the simple sequential combination of elements might have. Apropos of my earlier example, the potency of rx2008′s “Bloody Sunday” piece in which President George W. Bush sings the lyrics to the popular U2 song is inextricably tied to the fact that Bush actually sings the lyrics instead of the song simply being juxtaposed with the unadulterated content of the State of the Union Address from which the original footage originated.

And finally, the movement of the final collage is requisite for the creation of a novel voice because, without a means to distribute the object to other participants within the mediascape, the video can not be seen, heard, and understood, and can certainly not constitute a voice. In fact, the style of distribution, what one might call “sharing” in the parlance of the day, challenges traditional conceptions of speaker and voice in such ways that the voice becomes many, propagated by social websites such as YouTube and blogs, and “recommended” by many individual actors on sites like Digg.com and del.icio.us. In this way, the videos become fluid, spreading virally, being shared transmedially, and being “spoken” in multiple contexts which affect the meaning of the object just as the bedrock of a river ultimately determines the path the water’s flow assumes.

Have established the attributes of video collages that allow them to be sites of a potential voice within contemporary political discourse, our gaze must turn to the ways in which the videos are impregnated with meaning, and the ways in which that meaning might influence the discourse and its participants. Of interest to this analysis is the manner in which the videos are produced and consumed, with special regard to authorship in both of these modes. I previously described the videos as intertextual, interactive, and subversive, but absent from previous analysis is the very creative manner in which the videos come to be. Specifically, since collage, bricolage, and mash-up are at the very essence of the objects, there exists an implied collage artist, bricoleur, and DJ making informed, conscious, and meaningful choices that, once congealed together, establish the collage as a site of agency and empowerment. In other words, there exists in these objects an author and, as I propose, this author exists in multiple capacities that increase the influence of the voice afforded by the objects.

The snippets of audio and video that comprise the video collages resemble a cacophony of individual voices from multiple sources: music, political debates and speeches, television and movie clips, and many more. If just jumbled together in a video editing application, these pieces would be simply a hodgepodge of elements removed from their context and juxtaposed with each other. Yet, it is through the deliberate assembly, layering, and ordering by the collage artist that places these individual voices in dialog with each other and, eventually, amalgamates the conversation into an intertextual whole that transcends the individual voices from which it the object is constituted. Landow addresses in his analysis of authorship in a number of ways. Firstly, he describes the process of choosing pieces of a hypermediated environment particularly agentic. In a sense, the layering of different media objects, such as the replacement of audio from one video with that of another, is a authorial move in such that the collage artist is becomes responsible for the new meaning that results from the combination.

Landow goes on to describe the “collaborative” ways in which the collage artist works in opposition to the individual voices that will constitute his eventual product. “Collaboration,” he writes, “also includes a deep suspicion of working with others…which exalts the idea of individual effort to such a degree that it, like copyright law, often fails to recognize, or even suppresses, the fact that artists and writers work collaboratively with texts created by others (Landow, 137-138).” Through the collaborative assembly of other video and audio objects, then, the collage artist is enabled to create not simply a dissident, but even oppositional voice that contravenes the voice, intent, or meaning of an existing media object. Landow later writes that this oppositional collaboration underpins much of our intellectual endeavors, yet it is never fully recognized because the mediums of traditional forms of authorship obscure the intertextual dialog. (Landow, 138) Video collages as described here, however, are extremely forthright about this relationship—the very words and meanings of the original texts are reappropriated to form the new meanings of the collage.

The video collages, as products of a creative process, can therefore be interpreted as sites of subjective meaning produced by the collage artist and imbued with his or her intents and purposes. This suggests to me that the collages certainly represent a novel voice within the mediascape, but, while one voice in the darkness might only be a beacon that suggests a thin, rocky shore, the democratizing empowerment suggested by my earlier explorations is looking for evidence of a mountain silhouetted against the starry night sky. It is through the reversal of the traditional author-reader dialectic where we find the basis for this more momentous shift.

It is through the lenses of postcolonialism and the fluidity of the digital medium that the true empowerment of the video collages becomes evident. As described above, the fluidity of the digital medium allows the video collages to be shared among many viewers. Also discussed in a previous analysis was the manner in which these videos become interactive when experienced online and in varying contexts. “The video becomes a dynamic object,” I wrote, “imparted with interaction and change by the mediascape that surrounds it… [This] creates the potential for the video to be participatory, and reinterpreted depending on the context it is shared in, the manner in which it is viewed, and the changing circumstances which surround the lifecycle of the object.” (Dillon, 2-3, Paper #2) The participatory nature referred to here specifically addresses how the viewer of video collages creates his or her own meanings through the creative interpretation of the combination of media objects. Just in hypertext, where users establish their own paths through networked texts, the viewers of video collages, while being addressed by the creator’s own intents and meanings, also draw upon their own understandings and interpretations of the audio and video to create their own meanings. In a sense, the images and sounds are encoded pieces of meaning that must be decoded to understand their meaning: the viewing of a satirical piece like “I’m F*cking Obama,” by video collage artist Hugh Atkin1, draws on a plethora of sources, from the Sarah Silverman song about Matt Damon, to the media obsession with Hillary Clinton’s crying at the a campaign event. The viewer-cum-author assembles these pieces into a whole for their own, independent of the meanings intended by Atkin.

Further, Landow describes hypermedia, like video collage, as a rich site of postcolonial criticism. By allowing alternative voices to spread on a mass scale and by allowing these voices to be interpreted on a subjective basis by a multiplicity of authors, he might say, the hegemonic forces of the contemporary political discourse are allowing “the empire to write back” to the emperors. (Landow, 345) This speaks to the ability of digital media to expand vastly beyond the confines established for its engagement with the discourse. Again, the fluidness of the media and the subjective authorship permitted by the assembly of voices has allowed the novel voice created by video collage to splash all over and around the hegemonic dialogs endemic to political discourse.

Video collages are, then, voices that reflect a new empowerment that affords a new kind and class of participation within political discourse. This certainty allows further analysis to question the quality and actual effect that this participation has within and on the discourse as a whole.

My understanding of satire puts it as an umbrella term around all of the rhetorical modes used to point out the folly of something by advocating the opposite.  But the actual advocating is done by more specific devices, like irony, parody, and appropriation.  The actual devices lend themselves to postmodern interpretation a lot better than general satire, so I went after that pretty quickly.  Linda Hutcheon’s been pretty solid.  She focuses mostly on parody as the mode/device used by postmodernism, but I think irony is really the place to go.

But, that’s getting ahead of myself: most of the books I found about satire focused on it as a historically based rhetorical form that got its modern flavor from Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope, aka totally 18th century, modernist stuff.  Which isn’t to say that we don’t use satire today, or that its use is outdated (I think fake news a la The Onion and The Daily Show/Colbert Report are modern examples), but that the modernist dialectic is unavoidable when you talk about satire.  If Critical Reintroduction says differently, I might have to reconsider that position, though.

I just grabbed a few of the (overdue) library books scattered on my floor and flipped through them to see if anything supports my position.  Rosenblum, in “The Satirist’s Art” (1972):

“If satire’s reflexiveness, its concern with its own form, makes it seem like a genre congenial to modern taste, the rhetorical view of satire makes it seem old-fashioned in that it runs counter to a view of the relation of poetry to the real world that has become orthodox in many influential poetics. …….. The satirist is interested in his work primarily for its power to move his audience; no matter how inventive the personae or ingenious the metaphors, these literary devices exist only the persuade the audience.”  (p. 31)

This didn’t really serve my purpose super well because I don’t see my videos as in direct opposition to the dominant paradigm.

Suggesting that digital technologies and online environments are “democratizing” political discourse within the United States, or that the participants in these new dialogs upend the power structure so far as to redefine the political process might be overstating the state of affairs. But, that the new levels of discourse that are taking place in these spaces are fundamentally questioning a number of established aspects of the political process and the way it reaches the population at large. In particular, certain types of video collages exist as intertextual discursive objects, substantively questioning power structures, imparting and appropriating meaning, and establishing a novel kind of political voice within the discourse as a whole. The three primary modes of this action are: the technology and techniques used to create the collages, in essence, their form; the potency of appropriation, especially as it pertains to voice, identity, and meaning; and the the subsequent question of authorship. Combined, these three modes of action act subversively within the discourse and serve to challenge the dominant power structures.

The media collages discussed here, while rife with variety, follow a number of conventions that classify each as participating within a specific dialog. The form, the mode of transmission, and the construction are all similar and establish the objects as part of a larger conversation within the discourse. My earlier exploration of these objects as sites of dissent briefly described the creation process—how existing video material, most often from dominant voices within the discourse, is cut into small pieces and reordered and mashed up with other material to create a new meaning. While this is the single most important characteristic of these collages, there are other identifying characteristics, such as the use of a musical track, very often like a music video in which the people in the frame “sing” to the lyrics; the use of quick cuts between political content and content from popular culture, and the extremely rapid cuts of talking heads to sync the visual image to the spoken or sung lyrics. Most often, much of the political content comes from speeches made by prominent political figures originally broadcast on television or as online video, and many instances will life this kind of content from numerous sources.

Once these collages are created, they are shared on popular video sharing sites, such as YouTube, MySpace, Facebook, and others. This mode of transmission affords the creater and viewers of the video to make the medium interactive—the video sharing sites allow for comments to be written about the video, other videos to be posted in response to the original posting, sharing of the video through email or instant messages, reposting of the video to blogs, aggregating sites like digg.com, and the opportunity for adaptation and appropriation of the video by future collage artists. In a sense, the video becomes a dynamic object imparted with interaction and change by the mediascape that surrounds it. This fundamentally important aspect creates the potential for the video to be participatory, and to be reinterpreted depending on the context it is shared in, the manner in which it is viewed, and the changing circumstances which surround the lifecycle of the object.

The construction and sharing process, however, fundamentally challenges modernist conceptions of ownership and authorship. The process of creating these objects involves no original content creation, no original audio, video, or images. The collage artists that created these videos are, in the quintessentially postmodern understanding of the term, bricoleurs, masters of appropriation, adaptation, and the assembly of existing material for reinterpretation. The lack of original content subjects the creators to a number of questions about their role as artists, and as voices within the political discourse: is the created object original, authentic, or novel, or is it simply derivative? As a collage, does the object challenge the meanings of the constituent parts, and are these meanings those intended by the bricoleur? Does the finished object constitute a novel voice within the discourse, or do its constituent parts reinforce the work as an assembly of unique and cohesive voices? Furthermore, the wholesale inclusion of musical works in many of these collages raises questions about the relationship between the collages and copyright law and fair use.

I submit that the single most subversive element to these videos directly involves some of the elements touched on previously within this exploration: the cutting up of existing material such that the new assembled video states, in words or images, a new concept, idea, or meaning; and the question regarding the originality of the collage’s political voice. These two aspects both touch on the concept of appropriation as the primary rhetorical device through which these collages subvert and construct meaning. In particular, the use of other voices from the existing, hegemonic corners of political discourse to articulate dissident sentiments represents a central aspect of the new critical idiom that is challenging contemporary political discourse.

“Sunday Bloody Sunday,” by rx2008 and found on YouTube,¹ demonstrates how the process of bricolage, sharing, and appropriation subverts established political voices and meanings. What follows is a brief description of how this collage demonstrates the above concepts and ideas. The video is an set of minuscule clips primarily taken from from President George W. Bush’s State of the Union addresses, reassembled to repeat, almost verbatim, the lyrics of U2′s song, “Blood Sunday.” Accompanying the visual images and spoken words of the song is an instrumental music track that resembles the music of the original U2 song. In additional to President Bush’s speech, the clip shows many notable political figures applauding, stuttering, and blinking in response to the dialog.

The original speeches that constitute President Bush’s singing of the song come from a State of the Union address, traditionally an opportunity for the President to laud the accomplishments of his or her administration of the course of the previous year, establish the challenges of the upcoming year, and the propose certain goals for the administration to meet in the future. While not entirely, the speech is a celebration of the administration’s work. In contrast, the original U2 song is a first hand account of The Troubles, a period of conflict in Irish history, and in particular the January, 1972 slaughter of civil rights protesters in Derry, Northern Ireland, and event that became known as Bloody Sunday. In the collage, President Bush is made to sing about the tragedy of war and the devastation felt by ordinary, innocent people. “Broken bottles under children’s feet / Bodies strewn across the dead end street / But I wont heed the battle call / It puts my back up / Puts my back up against the wall,” sings President Bush. This is a statement in marked contrast to the actions of the Bush administration which, rather than refusing the “heed the battle call,” responded to the September, 2001 terrorist attacks at the World Trade Center in New York with escalated violence in Afghanistan and again later in Iraq. In a sense, then, President Bush is forced by the bricolaging process to articulate sentiments than are distinctly out of character for him, and for the political voice he represents—the White House, and subsequently the foremost political figure in the country.

President Bush’s voice, then, is subverted and appropriated to articulate a new, anti-war sentiment. The irony of this statement is thick, and the creator of the collage is representing it with a very serious intent to criticize the actions of the American government. The manner in which this criticism occurs takes advantage of the constructive process typical of these video collages, the audience that will view, share, and interact with the object on-line, and and the appropriation of not only President Bush’s words, but also the symbolism of the President of the United States, the State of the Union address, and the identities of all the applauding political figures who appear in the video.

“Political discourse,” viewed as a system of political voices in dialog with each other, is characterized by a variety of types of communications, communicators, and modes of communication. In part, using the term avoids differentiation between the types of voices in play within the discourse, but that differentiation is vital to an analysis that emphasizes the use of power and authority that characterizes the interactions of different political voices within the discourse en bloc. Specifically, the systems of power in play within the discourse privilege certain voices over others.² This aspect of political discourse is placed in jeopardy when faced with the participatory attributes of the internet.

While the systems of power and control within political discourse are often representative of other aspects of our societal systems of control, the participatory technologies on the internet are consistently providing novel modes of engagement for those not favored by the system. Blogs, for example, are modes of communication through which almost anybody might participate. Their sphere of influence is determined by their ability to attract readers and people who propagate their ideas through the “blogosphere.” While the impact of the average blog is often overstated, the influence blogs have over the entire political discourse, both on- and off-line, is very real; blogs are an example of how an average political voice, not privileged by authority or other import (such as a well coiffed face on broadcast television), might gain the ear of opinion leaders with more powerful positions within the political discourse.³ In this instance, however, the blog’s influence is felt within the systems of control and power. The participatory technologies on the internet also have a potential to contravene the norm.

One way in which participatory technologies might afford unprivileged voices opportunities to influence the political discourse is through the appropriation of other aspects of culture into the political discourse. On the internet, where many various modes of discourse are proverbially and literally only a click away from each other, the melding and blending of distinct discourses is certain. Popular cultures, in particular, are consistently invoked within the discourse in order to change the dynamic of political discourse away from those voices imbued with influence and authority, toward the voices disenfranchised by the traditional vocabularies. In a sense, in political discourse, sanctioned voices might use modes of communication that privilege their messages with certain accouterments unavailable to an average voice, such as a press conference, widely distributed newspaper article, or a certain amount of discussion on weekend political talk shows. The use of popular culture references, then, privilege other voices, audiences, or communities—those that understand a Soulja Boy reference or a visual style particular to Indian bhangra music videos. The appropriation of popular culture encodes the messages with meanings that are opaque to a large part of the players within the discourse as a whole.

The incorporation of a distinct cultural discourse into the political discourse suggests that, to participate as a dissenter, one must use a vocabulary with different symbolic meanings and intimations, speak a different language as it were, in order to oppose the system of dominance within the discourse. While it is true that language influences the power relationships between groups of individuals, the effect of these vocabularies extends beyond a simple question of comprehensibility.⁴ By appropriating popular culture into the political discourse, the dissident voice extends itself to a vastly different audience than the existing discourse might reach without the inclusion. As such, groups within the discourse not previously enfranchised by the language (barred by a lack of familiarity with the dominant vocabulary, as it were), are empowered to create a new subtext within the discourse that empowers them.

As James C. Scott writes, the creation of a subversive hidden transcript allows for a space in which various types and degrees of “negation” occur.⁵ Negation offers those excluded by the dominant group within the discourse, such as political pundits, politicians, or journalists within political discourse, a mode of expression that nullifies the systems of rhetorical control in the employ of the dominate group. In this alternative rhetorical space, a fart joke might negate a historically based analysis; or a home-grown music video might express a personal connection to members of the Armed Forces better than a ceremony. The term used by Scott, however, implies that that tools of subversion used by those seeking alternative empowerment is antithetical to those used by the dominant group. Instead, these tools—the appropriation of popular culture, internet-based participatory technologies, and the use of subversive, negatory rhetorical devices—need to be explored as creative, constructive elements within the political discourse as a whole.

Of particular interest to this analysis is a very small set of videos distributed on the internet that engage with the popular culture in order to empower different voices within the political discourse. These videos are inherently participatory in nature because they afford previously mute voices with the ability to express sophisticated meanings through cyberspace, are exchanged between participants virally, and inspire discussion through some of the other participatory technologies that are found on the internet, such as blogs, comment spaces, and forums. They also utilize technologies that allow for the internet to create new meanings from existing material through the use of bricolage and “mixing;” in particular, the use of non-linear video editing applications that facilitate the parsing and arrangement of digital video.

These video collages are embodiments of the kind of alternative voice expressed earlier in this primer, yet they expand the subversive channel of the hegemonic voices within political discourse in a fundamentally important way—by appropriating the very voices of the dominant players within the discourse for use in the subversive voice. The videos work like this: a speech is made by a member of the dominant group within the political discourse, the speech is recorded on video and posted on the internet. An individual downloads the video and slices it up into many clips in their video editing application for subsequent reordering. Each clip comes with its own snippet of audio, too, such that an individual snippet might be a phrase, word, morpheme, or even a phoneme. When reordered, the new author has the ability to piece together these clips in such a way that the face of the dominant actor and the audio appear to be stating something entirely new in a kind of digital puppetry.

This process, when coupled with music, other video clips, and arranged in playful or ironic ways, has the potential to express subtexts that exist beneath the overt meanings created by the rearrangement of the video clips. The process is one of mixing, mashing, and juxtaposing different meanings, symbols, and references together into a pastiche that, viewed intertextually, commands a greater scope and meaning than the constituent parts. It is this aspect of these video collages that has the potential to reframe an aspect of the political discourse in terms more favorable and more potent to the subjugated members of society. Video collages such as these are changing the way in which dissent is expressed online, particularly in its ability to include groups previously excluded from the discourse.