Journal articleIssue 12025
Harris vs. Trump: A cross-platform analysis on the 2024 US presidential election through the lens of affordance and self-presentation theory
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authors
Anıl Atay*, Chloé Heyart, Jinzhuo Li, Xi Zeng, Xiao Han*contact author
abstract
This paper presents a cross-platform analysis of the 2024 U.S. presidential election, investigating how the platform affordances of Twitter/X and TikTok influence the self-presentation strategies of candidates Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. Guided by affordance theory, self-presentation theory, and a critical analytics framework, the study comparatively examines the candidates' communication and branding. Using a combination of manual and automated content analysis of official account data collected after the September 10, 2024 debate, the research identifies platform-specific patterns in content, tone, and visual strategy. The findings indicate that candidates adapt their self-presentation to each platform's affordances. On the text-centric Twitter/X, both candidates employ a more formal, professional, and policy-driven approach, using features like threads and retweets to build narratives and critique opponents. Conversely, on the video-based, memetic TikTok, they adopt informal, personality-driven personas, leveraging trends, humor, and influencer collaborations to engage younger audiences. Despite these platform-specific adaptations, the candidates maintain consistent core brands: Trump as a combative, dominant leader and Harris as a collaborative, solution-oriented changemaker. The study concludes that while platform affordances shape the form and style of political communication, a candidate's fundamental self-branding remains consistent, confirming and extending existing theories on digital political strategy.
Journal articleIssue 12025
Debate videos, polarizing content and warlike metaphors in conflictual online discourses
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author
Marios Moros
abstract
Debate videos have been taking social media platforms by storm in recent years, with the YouTube channel “Jubilee” as one of the most prominent audiovisual avenues for conflictual content. This study investigates what combative, warlike metaphors are at play in Jubilee's YouTube channel, metaphors that might be more polarizing than unifying. Through analysis of video titles, thumbnails, content categorization, and debate prompts, this paper examines how war metaphors are present throughout Jubilee's online presence and their role in debate content. The findings reveal that metaphors of war and combat commonly add polarizing elements to the rhetoric that may change the affective perception users have of debate content, transforming the platform into a participatory battlefield where everyone is invited to debate or fight.
Journal articleIssue 12025
Good morning Vietnam! Memetic Formulas, Vernaculars, and a Cross-Platform Analysis of TikTok and Douyin
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author
Zeyu Yang
abstract
This research treats Douyin and TikTok as distinct platforms and conducts a cross-platform analysis between them. It found that the same event, #GoodMorningVietnam, could be portrayed and interpreted differently across platforms. To analyze content creation techniques, the research repurposed “video collages” in 4CAT to identify visual formulas. It discovered that users on both platforms employ the same visual formulas within #GoodMorningVietnam. However, one Douyin template remixes new elements into these visual formulas, transforming the original meaning of the meme. Guided by the “situation and suspense” theory, the research analyzed how meaning changes through repetition-with-variation. Beyond content, the research also examined the comment sections. Using matrix plots to identify textual formulas, it found that while the content and visual formulas are similar, the textual formulas differ, evoking distinct types of affective resonance across platforms. The research hypothesizes that these differences are tied to platform-specific vernaculars. The comments on the remixed Douyin template illustrate how textual formulas simultaneously create affective dissonance and affective affirmation, revealing the complexity of affective responses to memes. Finally, the research identified special affordances and vernaculars unique to Douyin. First, Douyin offers an exclusive emoji system, which may evoke expressions and resonances distinct from TikTok. Second, Douyin allows users to upload pictures and GIFs in the comment sections, offering greater “space” for users affectively reverb with posts compared to TikTok. Lastly, the content and comments on Douyin reflect a unique vernacular where Douyin users spontaneously promote nationalism and patriotism through video memes, manifesting the concept of “playful patriotism.”
Journal articleIssue 12025
Is Luigi Mangione a hero? Analyzing YouTube Video Formats and Audience Comments on Luigi Mangione
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authors
Shuyi Chen*, Minsoo Lee, Xiangnan Yu, Zhiying Li, Hanqiong Ding, Jinzhuo Li*contact author
abstract
The focus of the research was on YouTube video trends and comments on the issue space of Luigi Mangione. News videos with their purpose of new information dissemination rose during the key dates of the event, while Non-News videos underwent relatively steady trends. Initially, anti-Luigi continents dominated the issue space but over time balanced stances were apparent among uploaded videos that represent the change in public sentiment. Overall comments were dominantly supportive towards Luigi regardless of video formats. There were diverse narratives discussed in the comment section from supporting of healthcare reform to framing of Luigi as an extremist.
Journal articleIssue 12025
Kung Fu films as method: Viewing the dilemma of Chinese Wuxia culture in the Western context
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author
Peizhe Li
abstract
This essay critically examines the phenomenon of cultural appropriation in Kung Fu films within the Western context, analyzing how the cultural and philosophical core of Chinese Wuxia traditions has been transformed and commodified for global audiences. Beginning with Bruce Lee's international breakthrough in the 1970s, Kung Fu films have served as a bridge between Chinese and Western cultures, yet this cross-cultural translation has often resulted in the reduction of Kung Fu from a complex cultural tradition to a visual spectacle divorced from its spiritual foundations. The study explores three key dimensions: what has been appropriated (the transformation of Wuxia culture into 'oriental spectacle'), why this appropriation occurs (commercial imperatives and cultural-economic mediation), and how it manifests (through identity passing and cultural hybridization). Drawing on examples from Kung Fu Panda to Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, the analysis reveals how Western cinema has both exploited and potentially preserved Chinese cultural elements. The essay concludes by advocating for a non-Western-centric perspective that recognizes the agency of Chinese cultural producers and the possibility for more equitable cross-cultural dialogue in global cinema.
Journal articleIssue 12025
“Queer Visibility”: The Predominance of Visual Exposure in Queer Politics
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author
Lotte Manders
abstract
This paper examines how the narrative of activist progress, specifically related to the contemporary use of “queer visibility”, relates to Guy Debord's concept of the “situation”. Through a critical theory lens focusing on how identity is mediated through media, this study explores the relationship between queer identity and visibility, illuminating how being visible is also being partial. The paper argues that contemporary “queer visibility” may imply that being visible already means contesting the norm, however, the visible can make passive in certain instances while making active in others. By bringing Debord's situationist theory into conversation with Judith Butler's notion of queer identity formation and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's definition of paranoia, this paper concludes that effective queer politics requires remaining critical and taking an active position in shaping dialogues between generalities and exclusions.
Journal articleIssue 12025
Navigating the precarious career of Chinese content creators: in the case of “Thurman 猫一杯”
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author
Nuo Chen
abstract
Content-creating platforms have been a part of netizens' lives for quite some time, starting with the introduction of YouTube and evolving into the rise of short video platforms. Being a content creator has become a viable profession, offering opportunities for those skilled at capturing audience attention to achieve both visibility and financial success. However, navigating the digital environment is far from straightforward. Cancel culture persists, adding a complex layer of precarity to the careers of content creators. Beyond the unstable working conditions shaped by platform practices like content moderation and recommendation algorithms, government policies significantly influence content-creating platforms in China (Li and Ng, 2024), such as Red and Douyin (the Chinese version of TikTok). By examining the rise and fall of “Thurman 猫一杯”, a former cross-platform content creator on Chinese social media, this essay explores the interplay between creativity, platform dependency, and economic instability, while situating creators as both entrepreneurs and platform laborers in an increasingly precarious digital ecosystem.
Journal articleIssue 12025
Who is the Artist in the Age of AI? A Discussion on Creative Labor, Automation, and Knowledge Extractivism
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author
Jana Reske
abstract
This paper explores the developing relationship between artificial intelligence (AI) and creativity, focusing on how generative tools such as Midjourney, ChatGPT, and Stable Diffusion challenge traditional understandings of artistic production, authorship, and labor. Drawing on the relational-materialist framework developed by Celis Bueno, Chow, and Popowicz (2024) and grounded in Lievrouw's (2014) diagram of mediation, this paper examines the dynamic interactions between technological artifacts, creative practices, and social arrangements. Central to this analysis are the concepts of creative labor, automation, and distributed agency, which help to demonstrate how AI tools function not only as instruments but also as active agents in the creative process. While AI is often celebrated for democratizing creativity and enabling new forms of artistic expression, the paper highlights the ethical and economic concerns surrounding the commodification and automation of creative labor. The concept of “knowledge extractivism” (Pasquinelli and Joler 2021) is used to describe how AI systems are trained on vast datasets of human-generated content, often without consent or compensation, raising critical questions about ownership, distribution of value, and exploitation. In addition, the notion of “mean images” (Steyerl 2023) highlights how AI-generated outputs often reflect statistical averages rather than true innovation. By situating AI creativity within broader systems of data capitalism and epistemic colonialism, the paper challenges narratives of co-creation and calls for a more critical understanding of agency, authorship, and power in AI-driven cultural production. Ultimately, it argues that while AI can augment human creativity, it is not inherently creative. Instead, it functions by remixing and repurposing human labor, necessitating new regulatory frameworks and ethical considerations to ensure a fairer creative future.
Journal articleIssue 12025
The Mediality of Affect in Encounters of Frustration, Fear, and Trauma
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author
Praya Prayono
abstract
Affect has been widely discussed in terms of how it is defined, applied, and studied in media studies. In their accounts of affective politics in online spaces, Boler and Davis contest the most prominent understanding of affect in media studies, where affect generally referred to as “the force and potential of the various intensities of embodiment” leaves much to be desired as a means of navigating affective relations in social media platforms. The interaction between humans and technology, as well as between other humans through technology, is an essential component to the affective turn in new media studies. In this essay, I articulate the resonant intensities of affect in relation to media and technology as it modulates into reverb within existing discourses on affect theory. I identify affective publics and their movements within social media platforms as politically charged, and draw comparisons between the popular understanding of affect as visceral sensations against a critical perspective of affect as mechanisms of networked publics. Lastly, I ruminate deeper into the operationalization of affect within bodies of technology and its potential feedback loop for manifest spaces of dissonance such as fear, frustration, and trauma.
Journal articleIssue 12025
Reading the Shapeshifting Monster in Carpenter's The Thing (1982) Through Layers of Divulged Distrust
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author
Eden Tweedie
abstract
This article presents a critical reading of John Carpenter's film The Thing (1982), arguing that its narrative of distrust offers an extension to conventional monster theory. The author proposes a “beyond the body” approach, positing that monstrosity is located not in the alien's physical form, but in the atmosphere of suspicion its presence engenders. Drawing on theorists including Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Sarah Juliet Lauro, the analysis examines how the shapeshifting antagonist acts as a catalyst, exposing dormant layers of distrust at personal, social, and societal levels. The article investigates how Carpenter's formal techniques, including characterization and mise-en-scene, depict the characters' descent into paranoia, leading to violence that blurs the line between human and monster. At a societal level, the film is interpreted as a microcosm of its contemporary context---a post-Watergate era marked by skepticism towards institutions such as science and government. The author concludes that by decoupling monstrosity from a visible, physical body, The Thing suggests that true monstrosity is a latent and fundamental aspect of human interaction, revealed only under pressure.