Talk:Post-irony

Other examples?

I would wonder whether somewhere (probably film/media academic journals that I don't have full-text access to) various RS have not assessed some other major films as post-ironic. The two that most immediately come to mind are American Psycho and Fight Club. (Not too sure about the books they are based on.)

It would probably help readers understand this topic better (especially since the average person has gotten confused about what "irony" means to begin with) if there were additional explanatory/analytic material, especially about something(s) a lot more people have seen/read.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  06:23, 25 January 2021 (UTC)

What is post ironic about Psycho and Fight Club? Try as I may, I can find no irony in Fight Club, much less post irony. I can find plenty of daftness. Chisme (talk) 06:33, 25 January 2021 (UTC)

Suitability of Viveca Greene source.

@Procyonidae and Alduin2000: I noticed there is a contention emerging regarding the quality of the Viveca Greene source. I checked the source and it is nothing more than a summary of a presentation by the author. The material is interesting and plausibly true, but the article shows no conducted research, presents no evidence, and is not presenting any information aside from "the encapsulation of views presented by the speaker" as stated on the article's title page. It is so inconsistently written as to make blanket statements such as "Memes not only encourage violence by celebrating extremism [...]" and "Memes draw distinct lines between insiders and outsiders, promoting an “us vs. them” ideology [...]" and while these sentiments can be true on a per-instance basis, implicitly stating that ALL memes do this is itself disinformation.
The claim that post-irony memes are used to radicalize people into specifically right wing extremist views is a tall and not-unbiased claim, which should require some basic quality of sources. I would posit

• While it's entirely possible that right wing extremism uses specifically post-ironic memes to garner attention, its inclusion here should require a quality source that addresses why this kind of meme is used moreso than others, as well as the disproportionate use of it by one political affiliation rather than the other (this latter part should be fairly easy)
• This abovementioned source already present in the article should be replaced by another or be deleted. The source just does not present any foundation or evidence for the views it presents, making statements of fact without demonstration of its veracity. If the presentation itself could be found, it may contain this information, but the document cited does not.
  

I've pinged Procyonidae for your upholding of the content and Alduin2000 who appears to be the user who added the content originally. In the meantime, I'm going to reword the cited statement to refer to extremism in general, and leave out the partisanship while this is resolved. GabberFlasted (talk) 15:15, 7 June 2022 (UTC)

I reverted the original removal as it came without any discussion. I'm not involved in this debate but just want to say thank you for bringing this to the talk page. I hope you find consensus. SamWilson989 (talk) 15:45, 7 June 2022 (UTC)

First, I definitely understand your concern and, based on the Greene et al. (2021) source, agree with your edits. However, after reviewing some of the literature (e.g. Greene's 2019 paper in Studies in American Humor), there does seem to be a specifically right-wing bias in the utilization of post-ironic humor. Now, that's not to say there's anything implicitly right-wing (in the American sense) about the applications of post-irony in memes; that's just what's been most widely discussed and studied. But that means there are more reliable sources for it. Another good one, although significantly longer, is Woods and Hahner's Make America Meme Again: The Rhetoric of the Alt-Right (ISBN 1433159740), or the excellent book summary by Nagel in 2020. (Tangentially, both Woods and Hahner have written quite a bit about technology and society. Most of the audience for that type of discussion tends to prefer a more serialized or cultivated literary form (à la Chuck Klosterman or Tricia Lockwood, who are both amazing writers) rather than something so academic. But they're worth reading if you want a deeper dive on the topic, or to perhaps better understand the argument they're constructing.) I will go in and add these sources and edit the section of note, and hope you double check my work. Thanks for pointing this out. It will be interesting to see how this article develops, especially through multiple political movements and the evolution of digital communications. - Procyonidae (talk) 17:56, 7 June 2022 (UTC)

Some further references that were not added to the page but might be suitable for future additions, in case that's of interest:

• Jarvis, M.R. (2018). "The Political Aesthetic of Irony in the Post-Racial United States". University of California, Riverside (PhD dissertation).
  • I haven't read the entire document but much of it is relevant to the discussion here.

Tebaldi, C. (2021). "Speaking post-truth to power". Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies. 4 (3): 205–225. doi:10.1080/10714413.2020.1729679.

• More a development of a particular rhetorical framework than specific cited evidence but would be useful if someone wants to write up a more thorough page here someday.

Hodge, E.; Hallgrimsdottir, H. (2019). "Networks of Hate: The Alt-right, "Troll Culture", and the Cultural Geography of Social Movement Spaces Online". Journal of Borderlands Studies. 35 (4): 563–580. doi:10.1080/08865655.2019.1571935.

• This one starts to get into the regionalization component, which probably could be curated into its own section of this article.

Procyonidae (talk) 18:30, 7 June 2022 (UTC)

@Procyonidae: Thanks for gathering further sources on this. When I added the source I felt that it met the requirements set by WP:RS as it's a paper by a professor of media studies specialising in the intersection between satire/irony and politics published in a reliable, peer-reviewed journal (published by Simon Fraser University) and is secondary and independent of the subject. However, on reflection, I think it would have been more appropriate to attribute the statement rather than put it directly in wikivoice as it's only a single presentation paper. If there are better sources to replace it, I would definitely prefer to replace the Greene source. Otherwise, I do think that it is reliable enough to be kept but should be attributed rather than stated as established fact. Alduin2000 (talk) 18:51, 7 June 2022 (UTC)

I agree that it's a reliable source on its own. I just added a few more. - Procyonidae (talk) 19:11, 7 June 2022 (UTC)

Thank you both for your contributions, you went above and beyond what I was imagining. Looking forward to further developing this topic. GabberFlasted (talk) 11:27, 14 June 2022 (UTC)