The cute and the fluffy Laineste, Liisi; Fiadotava, Anastasiya; Šipöczová, Eva ...
European journal of humour research,
01/2023, Letnik:
10, Številka:
4
Journal Article
Recenzirano
When serious official political statements are not enough to get people’s votes, politicians often turn to attention-grabbing and emotion-triggering self-presentation. They give the public access to ...their “normal, everyday” lives through personalisation and use other tools of “new” politics to create a favourable image of themselves. They can also show the unexpected, backstage aspects of their lives, such as their interactions with their pets. The paper analyses four case studies from different countries (Belarus, Estonia, Slovakia and Spain) in which politicians’ references to their pets became a prominent topic in internet communication and provoked numerous humorous reactions in the form of memes. By looking at various degrees of politicians’ personalisation strategies, we show that “new” and “old” politics should be regarded as the poles of a continuum rather than a binary opposition. We also discuss the content, form and stance of the humorous internet memes posted in reaction to the appearance of politicians’ pets in the news. Our research indicates that such memes function to provoke a discussion and, as a result, form a polyvocal commentary on events; the politicians, however, must take risks accompanying unconventional, revealing political communication and hope that “there's no such thing as bad publicity”.
The problematic aspects of internet research are slowly becoming manifest in all the Humanities. The primary concern of ethnology and folkloristics is contemporary folklore – anecdotes, urban ...legends, rumours, conspiracy theories, all of which are abundant on the internet. Neverteless, the nature of virtual reality has given rise to new methodological problems and uncertainties. How should we collect folklore material on the internet? A conflict rages between classic face-to-face research, and the physically distanced research of the vitrual space. Virtual space has diffrent rules and principles of communication; it functions in a diffrent way. Who is our informer? who is the proprietor of folklore on the internet? And how can we give relevant context to collected materials? The next ambuscade is the fact that the internet creates a inexhaustible quantity of folklore material which lives in databases, discussion forums, emails, chatrooms, social networks, etc.--How can we use this huge database? This contribution does not profess to provide a correct methodology for conducting qualitative folklore research on the internet. Its purpose is to point out the problems and thus join the discussion already taking place around the world, and increasingly in our region.
The cute and the fluffy Laineste, Liisi; Fiadotava, Anastasiya; Šipöczová, Eva ...
European journal of humour research,
2022, Letnik:
10, Številka:
4
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
When serious official political statements are not enough to get people’s votes, politicians often turn to attention-grabbing and emotion-triggering self-presentation. They give the public access to ...their “normal, everyday” lives through personalisation and use other tools of “new” politics to create a favourable image of themselves. They can also show the unexpected, backstage aspects of their lives, such as their interactions with their pets. The paper analyses four case studies from different countries (Belarus, Estonia, Slovakia and Spain) in which politicians’ references to their pets became a prominent topic in internet communication and provoked numerous humorous reactions in the form of memes. By looking at various degrees of politicians’ personalisation strategies, we show that “new” and “old” politics should be regarded as the poles of a continuum rather than a binary opposition. We also discuss the content, form and stance of the humorous internet memes posted in reaction to the appearance of politicians’ pets in the news. Our research indicates that such memes function to provoke a discussion and, as a result, form a polyvocal commentary on events; the politicians, however, must take risks accompanying unconventional, revealing political communication and hope that “there's no such thing as bad publicity”.
The study is devoted to the old age as a specific period of life, conditioned culturally, politically, socially and economically and variable in history. On the basis of the status of the oldest ...members of a traditional family and the society the author points out changes in the life of seniors from the period of the industrial revolution to the present. The role of grandparents and retirement are perceived by the society and the state as two milestones changing the status of individuals within the family and within the population. On the other hand there is perception of self in the new life situation, personal experiencing the retirement age, life strategies and perception of aging in everyday life.