Tag: social media

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“Let the bullets fly for a while”: an allegory from China

By Mei Zhan

Let me begin with a fiction.  Let the Bullets Fly, a Chinese “action comedy,” was wildly popular upon its release in 2010.  Witty, gory, at times bawdy, and determinedly absurd, the plot centered around the confrontation between Zhang Mazi, a fictitious Chinese Robin Hood impersonating a county governor (whom, upon being captured by Zhang, impersonated the governor’s secretary in order to survive) and his nemesis Master Huang, a mobster boss who turned out to have a body double.  The opening scenes of the film featured what appeared to be a steam-engine train, only to reveal a few seconds later that the train was pulled along the rail tracks by horses and the white steam arose from an impossibly large hotpot around which the governor and his entourage were dining and singing.  Zhang and his bandits took aim and fired several shots.  As the train continued roaring on, one bandit asked, “Did we miss?” Zhang calmly replied, “Let the bullets fly for a while”.  Neither horse nor train was hit.  But the train soon stopped as the horse reins came undone.

Although unable to pin down the historical and allegorical references in the film, many Chinese viewers understand it to be a political satire.  They marvel at the fact that it not only circumvented government censorship, but also generated a slew of catchphrases widely used in everyday discourse. “Let the bullets fly for a while” in particular has acquired an effervescent afterlife on Chinese social media, which is saturated with sensational news of all natures and scales: natural and human-made disasters, political scandals, abuse of police power, medical malpractice and violence against doctors and nurses, illegal trade and consumption of wild life, celebrity extramarital affairs, and so forth.  These dramatic events often unfold through multiple rounds of disguises, revelations, and revisions.

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Making Way, True or Not, in Jakarta

By Rika Febriyani and AbdouMaliq Simone

In a region of thirty million people, what would residents stake their futures on? How would they decide where and on what to devote their time and their, for the most part, limited resources? Readings of the landscape, in all of its multifaceted physical, social and political dimensions, would of course be replete with cues and trajectories. Certainly vast alterations of the built environment with their implications for where and how people reside, socialize, and operate economically to reinforce an intensive individuation of livelihood, obligation, and accountability. In a city where how the world was to be interpreted largely was contingent upon the everyday pragmatics of residents coordinating markedly heterogeneous backgrounds and ways of doing things within dense, collectively-evolved quarters, the ongoing disentanglement of these everyday relations attenuates the accompanying structures of interpretation.

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Tweets of Fury

By Theodore M. Porter

Someday, in the underground files of the Natural History Museum of Personality Anomalies, the curators will push aside the pale, red-edged Narcissus poeticus to clear space for a truculent orange mutant, N. bombastus, type specimen of a form that disables the faculty of reason. Narcissism, as everyone knows, is a not uncommon characteristic of the political class. Trump’s is distinguished by an astonishing level of insecurity and consequent need for affirmation. The rude applause of a boisterous crowd serves this purpose very nicely. The question of why such persons oblige is an unsolved mystery, and those who do not join in noisy admiration may suppose that he has done nothing to earn it. Yet the numbers are never large enough. At the head of this president’s parade of lies is the seemingly pointless one, unquestionably false, that the number of enthusiasts at his inauguration beats out every possible rival.

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When the Media Become the Opposition

By Pablo J. Boczkowski & Eugenia Mitchelstein

On January 25, just five days after President Donald Trump’s inauguration, chief White House strategist Stephen K. Bannon said “The media should be embarrassed and humiliated and keep its mouth shut and just listen for a while (…) The media here is the opposition party.” Three days later, President Trump tweeted “The failing @nytimes has been wrong about me from the very beginning. Said I would lose the primaries, then the general election. FAKE NEWS!”

These two episodes are consistent with the campaign communication strategy at the top of the Republican ticket and signal that neither President Donald Trump nor his staffers and loyalists plan to change course, at least during the early stages of his presidency. They thus raise the question: how might a confrontational stance between the government and the mainstream media affect the public’s perspective on their trust in politicians and the news? This post examines the practices, interpretations, and experiences of audiences to ascertain what could happen in a given certain set of circumstances—rather than laying out what should happen according to different ideals of public behavior. In this sense, our focus is different from, and complementary to, a normative approach.

Since there is no precedent of this level of confrontation in recent U.S. history, we will answer this question by drawing on our research in Argentina over the past decade to imagine possible scenarios based on some key findings. Although Argentina and the United States are different countries with diverging institutional histories, there are arguably some emerging similarities between the administrations of Presidents Néstor Kirchner (2003-2007) and his spouse Cristina Fernández (2007-2015) in Argentina and the initial stages of Donald Trump’s presidency. In fact, Guillermo Moreno, Secretary of Commerce to both Néstor Kirchner and Cristina Fernández, and one of the most powerful figures in both administrations, said in an interview that Donald Trump “is a Peronist (…) and is doing everything we did.” Continue reading “When the Media Become the Opposition”