Catherine Bouko

Reactions to Brexit in images: a multimodal content analysis of shared visual content on Flickr

In this article, the authors analyze citizens’ reactions to Brexit on social media after the referendum results by performing a content analysis of 5877 posts collected from the social media platfo...

Youth’s Civic Awareness Through Selfies: Fun Performances in the Logic of ‘Connective Actions’

Can we raise the youth’s civic awareness via selfies? This is the bet that several non-profit organisations aiming at raising the youth’s civic awareness have made. In injecting a fun dimension to civic mobilisation, campaigns via selfies place the young participants’ performance as a constitutive element of their civic action. This chapter analyses six youth campaigns based on selfies (#DiversifyMyEmoji, #SuperStressFace, #UpdateYourStatus, #WeAreAble, #MakeItHappy, #ShowYourSelfie) and shows that they privilege awareness techniques that fall under the ‘actualizing citizenship paradigm’ (Bennett et al. Journal of Communication 6:835–856, 2011), in which self-expression and ‘connective action’ (Bennett and Segerberg, Information, Communication & Society, 15(5):739–768, 2012) are favoured, instead of more traditional collective actions.

My friend is a WWI soldier: docufictions on social networks

At the beginning of the twentieth-first century, notable for the triumph of both fiction and a taste for reality (Veyrat-Masson 2008), interactive documentary-dramas appeared on social networks. These Internet-based audiovisual productions invite semiotics to reconsider its tools in order to grasp their complex, hybrid nature, above and beyond the binary opposition of reality and fiction. After considering the semiotic systems which characterize social networks and condition enunciation (Van Dijck, 2013), we proceed to examine the Leon Vivien, Louis Castel and Little Suzon documentary-dramas from a semio-pragmatic point of view. We will examine the relationship between reality, fiction and realism on the basis of the semiopragmatic models developed by Hanot (2002) and Jost (2001) in order to analyse these audiovisual productions on four levels: profilmic, plastic, iconic and diegetic. By adapting these models to Internet, we will be able to identify the authenticating and fictional strategies employed in such online productions to make the archive images waver between the status of index and icon.