POSTDIGITAL PROPAGANDA

20 June 2024

I have found a label under which i want to bundle my research interest for now. At last. It was a wild ride with TikTok as a starting point, the whole notion of disinformation and the shortcomings of the term leading to propaganda as a more promising concept thanks to a conversation with Marc Tuters and Boris Noordenbos in a Mezcalita bar in Philadelphia last year and a rediscovery of the term postdigital outside the art world. And then there was a talk by Y7 on a train, a tweet by Jules Terpak and a professor in Sweden who finally turned into a newsletter edition and an additional thread. The soundtrack to the marriage of both terms would be Charli XCX and Sky Ferreira.

It's time to embrace memetic warfare, Giesea 2015
The Trump presidency, therefore, serves as a good case–study of the rise of a new form of mainstream ‘troll-politics’—a political conversation characterized by a reciprocal, ongoing memetic warfare, Merrin 2018
Disguised Propaganda, Farkas & Neumayer 2018 – previous theories of propaganda, namely vertical and horizontal modes, are complicated by the polyphony, ephemerality, and vastness of digital spaces.
Propaganda, Digital Diplomacy, Meme Wars: How Digital Confrontation Is Shaping the New World Orde, Idil Galip 2023 – However, what is becoming more challenging to track in what some thinkers call our “post-digital era”, is how propaganda is diffused and memetically reproduced through digital mass communication technologies.
Remixing war: An analysis of the reimagination of the Russian–Ukraine war on TikTok, Primig, Szabó & Lacasa 2023 – a strong prevalence of remixing practices among content creators; that is, they recontextualise images, sounds and embodied self-performance within the platform-specific affordances of trends.