On hashtaggery and portmanteaugraphy: Memetic wordplay as social media practice

I wouldn’t necessarily consider myself a meme scholar outright; rather, the memes within my research have emerged from studying everyday practices and cultures of social media, within political and topical discussions, as well as popular culture and fandom contexts. This piece is an extension of ideas that have come out of my recent work around the “irreverent internet” (in the first and last of the blatant plugs, see this [sorry, paywall] and this). I’ve used this term as a descriptor for how play and silliness are popular strategies for the coverage and presentation of the topical and the mundane online. Here, I am especially focusing on playful and irreverent engagement with issues, events, and breaking news, where irony, sarcasm, parody, satire, snark, and more, are important framing devices on social media. While my work (and this post) generally falls on the side of “nice” irreverence, these approaches are also applicable for meaner, vindictive, hateful, offensive, and vitriolic comments. These include meme communities dealing in racist attitudes and content or various hashtags and related comments which promote racist, far-right views and/or denote contexts rife with abuse and harassment — and not just the Gamergate example. This is not positioning trolling as a single practice or intent, either— see Whitney Phillips’ work...

Mechanical properties and damage tolerance of Y2SiO5

Y2SiO5 has potential applications as functional-structural ceramic and environmental/thermal barrier coating material. As an important grain-boundary phase in the sintered Si3N4, it also influences the mechanical and dielectric performances of the host material. In this paper, we present the mechanical properties of Y2SiO5 including elastic moduli, hardness, strength and fracture toughness, and try to understand the mechanical features from the viewpoint of crystal structure. Y2SiO5 has low shear modulus, low hardness, as well as high capacity for dispersing mechanical damage energy and for resisting crack penetration. Particularly, it can be machined by cemented carbides tools. The crystal structure characteristics of Y2SiO5 suggest the low-energy weakly bonded atomic planes crossed only by the easily breaking Y-O bonds as well as the rotatable rigid SiO4 tetrahedra are the origins of low shear deformation, good damage tolerance and good machinability of this material. TEM observations also demonstrate that the mechanical damage energy was dispersed in the form of the micro-cleavages, stacking faults and twins along these weakly bonded atomic planes, which allows the "microscale-plasticity" for Y2SiO5.

The Chinese Television Industry

Television is a massive industry in China, yet fewer people are watching television screens. This ground-breaking study explores how television content is changing, how the Chinese government is responding to the challenges presented by digital media, and how businesses are brokering alliances in both traditional and new media sectors. Table of Contents Acknowledgments p. vi Introduction p. 1 1 Television in Transition p. 8 2 Nation Building p. 34 3 Soft Power p. 56 4 Formats p. 85 5 Channels and Content p. 111 6 Convergence p. 141 7 Rethinking Chinese Television Research p. 164 Bibliography p. 173 Index p. 184

Towards a typology of hashtag publics: A large-scale comparative study of user engagement across trending topics

Twitter’s hashtag functionality is now used for a very wide variety of purposes, from covering crises and other breaking news events through gathering an instant community around shared media texts (such as sporting events and TV broadcasts) to signalling emotive states from amusement to despair. These divergent uses of the hashtag are increasingly recognised in the literature, with attention paid especially to the ability for hashtags to facilitate the creation of ad hoc or hashtag publics. A more comprehensive understanding of these different uses of hashtags has yet to be developed, however. Previous research has explored the potential for a systematic analysis of the quantitative metrics that could be generated from processing a series of hashtag datasets. Such research found, for example, that crisis-related hashtags exhibited a significantly larger incidence of retweets and tweets containing URLs than hashtags relating to televised events, and on this basis hypothesised that the information-seeking and -sharing behaviours of Twitter users in such different contexts were substantially divergent. This article updates such study and their methodology by examining the communicative metrics of a considerably larger and more diverse number of hashtag datasets, compiled over the past five years. This provides an opportunity both to confirm earlier findings, as well as to explore whether hashtag use practices may have shifted subsequently as Twitter’s userbase has developed further; it also enables the identification of further hashtag types beyond the “crisis” and “mainstream media event” types outlined to date. The article also explores the presence of such patterns beyond recognised hashtags, by incorporating an analysis of a number of keyword-based datasets. This large-scale, comparative approach contributes towards the establishment of a more comprehensive typology of hashtags and their publics, and the metrics it describes will also be able to be used to classify new hashtags emerging in the future. In turn, this may enable researchers to develop systems for automatically distinguishing newly trending topics into a number of event types, which may be useful for example for the automatic detection of acute crises and other breaking news events.