Open Access“DEAR CONGRESS, JUST PLAY DEAD”: TIKTOK’S ABSURD GUIDE TO SURVIVING #LOCKDOWN
Author(s) -
Jacqueline Ryan Vickery,
Jen Cardenas
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
selected papers of internet research
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
ISSN - 2162-3317
DOI - 10.5210/spir.v2021i0.12257
Subject(s) - carnivalesque , politics , sociology , media studies , imitation , citizenship , criminology , aesthetics , law , political science , psychology , social psychology , art
This paper examines how young TikTok creators enact strategies ofplayfulness and absurdity in response to gun violence and trauma. Through aludic-carnivalesque reading of young people’s irreverent engagement with school shootings,we demonstrate how youth use TikTok to reclaim emotional control of uncontrollablesituations. We situate our analysis of playful #schoolshooting videos as part of animitation public that is constituted through practices of mimesis, replication, andimitation. However, we broaden our focus to consider the latent political potential of thepublics that memetic practices create. Within this framework we ask: What discourses andshared practices emerge through playful #schoolshooting memes on TikTok and what are theimplications for the everyday politics of youth citizenship? Our methodology consists of twophases conducted over an 18-month period. The first phase of analysis, performedAugust–December 2019, relies on collated systemic searches for specific hashtags and soundsthat young people use to memeify school shootings. In the second phase, we identified twoseemingly unrelated events that young people discursively and memetically linked to schoolshootings: COVID-19 lockdowns from March-May 2020 and the storming of the U.S. Capitolbuilding by radicalized Trump supporters on January 6, 2021. By analyzing these practicesthrough the lens of the ludic-carnivalesque, patterns reveal the ways young people enactstrategies to demarcate boundaries, articulate cogent critiques of policies and policymakersthat do not prevent school shootings, and to turn painful and traumatic realities into a funand harmless Bakhtinian carnival.