The Medium Shapes the Message: McLuhan and Grice Revisited in Race Talk Online

Abstract

Compared with the wealth of research accumulated on face‐to‐face social interactions, relatively little research has examined race talk within anonymous Web 2.0 mediums. We investigated online threaded comments on YouTube video clips of two race‐related incidents involving New Zealand television presenter Paul Henry. Through thematic content analysis, thematic analysis, and discourse analysis, it was found that characteristics unique to Web 2.0 were associated with the appearance of old‐fashioned racism and high‐levels of obscenity (together with modern racism/symbolic racism). The hyper‐low context of communication led to interpretive ambiguity; conversation sequences failed to follow Gricean maxims for cooperative communication, with most comments attracting no replies and the modal sequence being two turns. There was almost never resolution to a disagreement online: rather there was points‐scoring against opposing opinions and a tangential style of dialogue influenced by the asynchronous and anonymous nature of communication. The YouTube medium shaped but did not determine the message, as obscenity and racist content in the target video from the eliciting public figure influenced the subsequent degree of obscenity and hostility in the responses. A third corpus that examined responses to our own research on race talk presented on a news website (stuff.co.nz) underlined this point by engendering a dramatically different response to the same subject, retaining the tangential style of communication, but with little to no obscenity. A framework to understand race talk as a function of both medium and context effects is proposed. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Racial microaggressions and perceptions of Internet memes

“…YouTube videos expressed overt racism in the form of openly negative affect and obscenities toward racial outgroups and People of Color (August & Liu, 2015). Racist comments are also made when responding to online content that is unrelated to race.…”

“…It should be noted that even though People of Color experience subtle (e.g., Clark et al, 2011;Steingeldt et al, 2010) and blatant (e.g., August & Liu, 2015;Kettrey & Laster, 2014) racial discrimination online, the Internet can have a positive impact on these individuals, for example through online support groups that may affirm their marginalized (but important!) social identities (see Bargh & McKenna, 2004;Daniels, 2012, for reviews).…”

“…Although previous research has examined the incidence and consequences of online racial discrimination, the majority of studies have used either qualitative observational designs to examine the extent to which users post discriminatory content in weblogs or comments (e.g., August & Liu, 2015;Clark et al, 2011;Kettrey & Laster, 2014) or correlational designs to examine the relationship(s) between experiencing discrimination online and health-related outcomes (e.g., Lee-Wong et al, 2015;Tynes et al, 2008;Tynes et al, 2012;Umana-Taylor et al, 2015). Despite the existence of racially discriminatory material online (Daniels, 2012), to date few studies have directly examined how Whites and People of Color interpret and respond to such discrimination.…”

“…Despite the potential of the Internet to offer an environment in which individuals may be freed from racial boundaries and the experience of racism, some users post blatant and subtle racially prejudiced content online (e.g., August & Liu, 2015;Clark et al, 2011;Hughey & Daniels, 2013) To contribute to this emerging research area, the current study utilized a within-subjects experimental design to compare Whites' and People of Color's perceptions of racial themed…”

Couch Revisited: A Theoretical Treatment of The Information‐Technological Media of Imgur, Reddit, and Twitter

“…In white supremacist websites, as well as in seemingly “neutral” websites, racism persists, both as overt racism and as color‐blind racist discourse (Daniels ; Julien ). When individuals log on the internet, they bring with them their knowledge, beliefs, and experiences that developed offline; individuals are not wholly recreated in digital spaces (August and Liu ; Daniels and Hughey ; Kolko, Nakamura, and Rodman ; Robinson ). In line with this, van Dijk () argues that it is the mental model individuals have of the internet (which includes interpretation and evaluation of specific content) that mediates communication therein, rather than the internet itself shaping all discourse that occurs within it (cf.…”