Film Memes and the Global Scale
My matrix template touched upon the blog topic of this week. What issues can the film meme data collection community face on a global scale? It can affect a lot. The media is the message and in countries like Norway and Southeast Asia, steps are being taken by corporations and special interests groups to control the online narrative, especially surrounding films and pop culture.
The Norwegian government “conceptualize their social media strategies before the release of their films in movie theatres” (Holmers 2018). It’s presented as a way for independent films to get support from the government, but others see it as a way that corporations game the system. If there is a carrot used to weigh the suitability of art before its presented to the public, is that a form of censorship? Does it favor films that have messages deemed appropriate for a national narrative? Regardless of how much this system can set up misinformation, it’s already happening in real time. Looking at the U.S., it’s hard to imagine a similar system happening, just because production of studio films are a decade in the making and very few independent films make it to theatres. In a smaller country like Norway, the narrative can possibly be controlled prior to the release of a film, but can you imagine an independent film in the U.S. getting any traction on social media if it came out the same weekend as a Marvel film?
Schmidt (2022) explored how Indonesia used social media to make “these initiatives are marked by an aesthetics of authority, which constructs traditional figures of Islamic authority as role models”. In Indonesia, political parties use social media and the release of new films as a way to popularize their political figures in power. During the Superbowl, media outlets questioned whether Taylor Swift or any of the winners of the Superbowl would endorse Joe Biden, which they didn’t. Imagine an environment where she was persuaded to endorse regardless of her opinions and it was part of her job to do so. The simple ability to be a creator and have the right to present your art in the manner that you want, is something that cannot be taken for granted – especially in political climates where your message would be used to skew an existing agenda.
What are ways to combat this misinformation since the scope of controlling political and corporate interest groups is too large. Aswani (2020) studied over 1.5 million tweets to gauge how misinformation can be spread through viral posts. What she found was “Tracking and disruption in any one of the identified drivers could act as a control mechanism to manage misinformation propagation” (Aswani, pg. 13). There wasn’t a plan for stopping the misinformation in social media from happening, but the best way to approach it would be to track and highlight the tweets that are misinformed and written purposely to go viral with a political message.
Film meme data collectors run into each other on social from all walks of life. Within the U.S. we’re more concentrated on the viral posts that make us laugh regardless of any political leanings, what of the communities overseas? The key for information professionals is tracking and analytics. The volume of media consumption in the U.S. will continue to be studied and the LIS community will always be on the lookout for how this information is presented and absorbed by the public. Will other countries follow suit? It’ll be interesting to see how the next twenty years will affect the way information is spread across social media and how the public absorbs it. Today, we can sense when something isn’t right, but with more time dedicated to looking at our phones and consuming social media, will our tolerance for the processing of information change?
References
Aswani, R., Kar, A., & Ilavarasan, P. (2020). Experience: Managing Misinformation in Social Media-Insights for Policymakers from Twitter Analytics. ACM Journal of Data and Information Quality, 12(1), 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1145/3341107
Holmene, Ingeborg. “Paid or Semi-Public Media? The Norwegian Film Industry’s Strategies for Social Media.” Northern Lights (Copenhagen), vol. 16, no. 1, 2018, pp. 41–57, https://doi.org/10.1386/nl.16.1.41_1.
Schmidt, Leonie. “Aesthetics of Authority: ‘Islam Nusantara’ and Islamic ‘Radicalism’ in Indonesian Film and Social Media.” Religion (2022), vol. 51, no. 2, 2021, pp. 237–58, https://doi.org/10.1080/0048721X.2020.1868387.