political dissent, project proposal

This study scrutinizes how certain online videos are, through the use of new media techniques and technologies, challenging the manners in which political discourse is experienced, negotiated, and practiced online. Viewed as sites of dissent, these videos represent a new cultural idiom that fuses popular culture, internet culture, music and politics into a digital pastiche that, on various levels of inquiry, manages to question sources of political authority. Of particular interest to this study is how the various technological, cultural and critical techniques employed within these videos serve to embody a novel form of dissent in political discourse to such an extent that the instantiation of the initial political “voice” becomes manipulated, used, and impregnated with new intention by the author of the video. Adaptation, appropriation, irony, and “mixing” are the primary modes for this subversion, but the cultural and media environments in which the videos exist, engage with, and are experienced from color and reflect the intertextual nature of this new political discourse.

the initial idea

This project addresses the subversive political voice as expressed through new media forms found on the internet. It explores how various technologies enable the subversion, appropriation, bricolage and intertextual readings of both traditional and new political voices. In particular, it questions whether new media as a technological solution affords new potential for the delocalization of political commentary and subversion, if the commentary and subversion expressed through these technologically-based new media outlets challenge traditional political voices in a fundamentally new way, and if the interplay between the subversive voice and the technological placement of the voice creates a new space for political discourse.

the two sides

Digital media formats and digital media authoring tools introduced a number of dynamic elements to our understanding of the political voice as a function of communication technologies, “the media” as a heteroglossic medium, and the nature of ownership over a particular utterance within the public sphere. Specifically, the manner in which public voices—such as those expressed by our institutions, organizations and prominent individuals—are created, disseminated and consumed is currently undergoing a renegotiation. On one side of the divide lay the monolithic voices, those that are purveyors of truth-as-defined, established voices and voices seeking establishment within ranks of authority. The content of their messages attempts to declare, specify and inform the eventual consumer. We find these voices and their digital manifestations on television, in stump speeches, reported on in newspapers, quoted in emails. They bear watermarks, press releases, non-disclosure agreements, and the other proverbial kowtows to the authenticity of the voice en bloc. The other side, however, understands the concepts of truth, originality, and authorship entirely differently.

In contrast to the established voices, an alternative kind of voice is being expressed in non-traditional venues and in non-traditional ways. Characterized more by appropriation, bricolage and mixing, the messages are playful, subversive, and ironic. The raw content of the messages is rarely original, but re-used or manipulated for a new aim. This recycling of content in these messages is not, however, blind to context or to the providence of the original message; rather, the providence of the content, the references, the messages, are usually part of the main thrust of the statement. No authority sanctions these statements, they are posted semi-anonymously online for a wide, untargeted audience. These are videos, heteroglossic within their own timelines, that visualize a political expression in which politician and constituent are blended with pop culture, internet culture, music and politics.