In September 2010, a video titled “It Gets Better” was uploaded to YouTube, responding to suicides of gay teens who had suffered from homophobic bullying. Before long, thousands of Internet users added their own versions of the clip, creating a mass appeal to young people while simultaneously negotiating the norms of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) collective identity. Conceptualizing this body of videos as an Internet meme, we examine the extent to which participants imitate or alter textual components presented in previous videos. A combined quantitative and qualitative analysis of 200 clips shows that in an arena ostensibly free of formal gatekeepers, participants tend to police themselves, toeing the line with conformist norms. We also identify domains of potential subversion, related not only to the content of the videos but mainly to the forms facilitated by digital media.

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Although the theme of forgiveness has been studied extensively in various fields of humanities and social science, it has thus far been neglected by discourse scholars. Drawing on data from the Israeli political discourse between 1997 and 2004, this article analyzes the ways in which apologies are interpreted and judged by political actors as members of a distinctive interpretive community. The findings show that although realized infelicitously, most of the apologies made by Israeli political figures were accepted by the offended parties or their representatives. One explanation for this finding is that the traditional felicity conditions are replaced in the political arena by the `embarrassment condition', that is, the extent to which the gesture is perceived by the forgiver as threatening the apologizer's political image. Other reasons to forgive are less dependent on the judgment of the linguistic performance than on the various interests on the part of the forgiver. In cases in which the interest of the offended party is to detract from the symbolic power of his/her rival, even a full and humble apology may be refused. Inversely, even an incomplete form may be accepted if the offended is motivated to forgive. These findings are in line with Mills' argument regarding the total dependency of the apology on the way in which it is judged by its recipient.

Since the beginning of the 1990s, there has been growing academic interest in the speech act of apology. Both the nature of apologetic communicative processes and the potential of apologies to promote reconciliation remain, however, under debate. The aim of this article is to map common types of rituals found in what is termed ‘the age of apology’, to identify the processual and structural characteristics of these rituals, and to understand their contribution to restoring relations in the global arena. The analysis yields three types of rituals of apology: purification – that is, asymmetrical rituals in which the offender issues an apology in order to purify his or her dismal past but does not necessarily need the approval of an offended party; humiliation – that is, asymmetrical rituals in which the offended party forces the offender to participate in a degradation ritual as a condition for closure; and settlement – that is, symmetrical rituals in which both sides strive to restore relations. The theoretical and practical implications of these rituals are discussed.

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