#HearMyHome

Added by for Make Create an Audio Soundscape Story

Examining everyday people produced soundscapes, #hearmyhome is an open learning experience that explores how hearing difference and listening to communities can re-educate the senses and attune us towards cultural difference.

This site has a wealth of resources that are useful in thinking through and developing soundscape stories.

Binders Full of Election Memes: Participatory Culture invades the 2012 U.S. Election

Added by for Make Making a Political Statement

Participatory culture handed the 2012 U.S. presidential election season a bumper crop of political memes. These “election memes,” largely in the form of image macros, took sound bites from the candidates’ debates and speeches and turned them into “digital content units” of political satire “circulated, imitated, and/or transformed via the Internet by many users,” to paraphrase Limor Schifman’s definition of “internet meme” (2013, 177).

Image macros like the lolcat, feature bold text on top of an image, often a “stock character,” and like all Internet memes are “multi-participant creative expressions through which cultural and political identities are communicated and negotiated” (Ibid.). This case study focuses on three popular image macro-based election memes that came out of the 2012 US presidential election cycle: "Fired Big Bird," "Binders Full of Women," and "You Didn't Build That," and argues that sharing such memes is a valid form of political participation in the style of what Tommie Shelby calls “impure dissent” (forthcoming).