Please Disregard

This webpage emerges out of my desire to want to answer the following two questions:

  • What is an event? and
  • How does an event contribute to the formation of a networked public?

I began to think of this project vis-a-vis the online social movement "not the Onion." I hesitate to call not the Onion a "social movement," but I don't know what else to call it. Sure, a "social movement" recalls images of the Civil Rights Movement and Occupy Wall Street, and not the Onion is a lot less "weighty" than that. Not the Onion does not hinge on protesting an unjust policy, nor does fit itself into a struggle for social justice. All the same, though, it is, shall we say, an "attractor" that gathers together bodies for the sake of a common purpose: identifying news that sends the same signals as the satirical newspaper the Onion, yet is not the Onion, since the news is real. I was therefore initially attracted to not the Onion as a movement--which is a hashtag (#nottheonion) but also a subreddit (/r/nottheonion)--because it's what Jenny Rice would call a "weird archive." That is, not the Onion seemed to count as "an event," that is, as Brian Massumi says, a taking a dose of the world's general activity and selectively channeling it into its own special activity (2). Differently put, people enjoy the activity of "augmentation" (Boyle and Rivers). And in exactly the same way that people photoshop dildos over conservative lawmakers with guns on social media (see Jenny Rice's "Circulation Exhaustion"), everyday people augment a certain kind of news with the label "not the Onion" as a way of empowering themselves, working through exhaustion, and so on.

To be clear, then, that's what I think "an event" is, or at least that's how I've defined "an event" for the purposes of this project: again, a channeling of the world's general activity into a special activity (Massumi 2). A news item emerges that sends the signals of an Onion article (and therefore the signals of "fake news"); then, a person recognizes this signal and accumulates social currency by re-categorizing the item as "not the Onion." However, to frame the re-categorizing (or: archiving) like this would, I feel, be to succumb to a humanist logic of the hero. Maybe we could flip it around and say this: not the Onion as a system sends of signals to sustain itself, and that signal is the human's recognition of the new's items capacity--the capacity to be recategorized as not the Onion, to pass as news that's not not fake (more on the double negative later). This signal-sending is affective insofar the human's recognition of the capacity is the system starting itself over.

What I did, then, in this event text, is chart the arc (Massumi 3) of a particular news item's journey into the archive of #nottheonion. That news item is when Trump was reported to have supposedly wanted to shoot immigrants in the legs and architect a moat filled with snakes and alligators between the United States in Mexico (which occurred around 9/30/19), but, in keeping with my definition of the event, the dropping of that news item isn't the event; rather, the event is the weird reorganization of time that occurred thereafter, which itself led to the news item's re-categorization as a not the Onion news item. To give you a sense of how this process works, then-President Obama makes a joke about a moat with alligators in 2011. At the time, this joke didn't matter too much; it was only after Trump was reported to have price checked a moat of exactly that sort that the joke came back from the past and began to matter (see Laurie Gries 10). In fact, in 2007, the Onion itself joked about the U.S. building a security moat on the boarder with Mexico, which was also remembered at this time (9/30/19). And in this way, I'm not so much interested in the content of the allegations as I am in organization of time. What was in the past but didn't matter recurs in the present, albeit with a force it didn't previously have. To me, it is this re-ordering that's constitutive of the event.

Of course, lots of, shall we say, smaller news items still get categorized as not the Onion, but with much less fanfare. For example, the other day, while I was doing research for this project, I saw a not the Onion tag on the following news piece: a couple in France are having sex on the top of a castle, then they slip and fall 400 feet to their deaths. While these deaths are certainly unfortunate, these deaths didn't reorganize time like the Trump news item did. To be clear, then, I think I would have to say that they were both events, it's just that the Trump one is much more obviously an event, because it much more obviously reorganizes time. In the French Castle deaths, given what I said earlier, the re-categorization of that news as not the Onion has to be an event because of its augmentation, which is to say, its stamping with the hashtag #nottheonion, and its becoming a part of that archive. Maybe it will make more sense if I say it like this: the French Castle deaths is an event still because of how it's brought into a different network. It emerges as news in one network, yet is made to exist in another network because of how it sends off certain signals. I think the Trump story does this same thing, albeit on a much greater scale. Or maybe we could say that the Trump story does this, albeit with a database sort of logic. The news item sends out certain signals, and therefore has a certain capacity, thus inviting citizens to turn to the internet as a database, doing a kind of citizen history--just like citizen science, but this time citizen history, or citizen criticism.

One of the questions I had while doing this project was (apart from the two question I asked above), are people just pointing to a coincidence? In other words, is it merely a coincidence that Obama talks about a gator-filled moat years before the Trump news item? Probably, but maybe that's where the importance of the hashtag comes in. As Boyle and Rivers discuss, augmentation is "not so much quantitative addition as ongoing qualitative change" (87). Yet now, after hearing Casey talk in class a few more times, I think maybe I misread this quote. Originally, I was thinking #nottheonion works because it's an ongoing project. People add to the archive all of the time, and, since there's no being able to get the bottom of the archive, that's augmentation, right? That can't be right, since, in the Boyle and Rivers, the "ongoing qualitative change" is the change from Google maps to that one portal game to Pokemon Go. I don't have that in this case study. Hmmmm.

I'm almost inclined to think that Trump with the sharpie would be more of an event now, because that event? has the capacity to be a database of sorts.

But actually, that wouldn't really make sense either, since that would be a repetition of the same, since it's clear what the context is. In the Boyle and Rivers, you can't really tell that a change is taken place, because you would never really know that the same database is undergirding the surface changes. That database has a lot of capacities, which is also to say that is has the capacity to manifest itself as Google Maps, that one portal game, Pokemon Go, and so on, all of which, unless you know the history, are totally dismissal, whereas the repetition of the sharpie resembles the original context. Hmmm.

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