New publications: Comedy Infrastructures & Criminal Influencers
As it happens with academic research and its incredibly slow pace, the last time I updated this space was back in February. This time I am happy to bring two significant updates: an open-access journal publication and a book chapter. Both follow now established strains of research I have been following for years, and I am now in the process of combining and finalising into a book project.
The first publication is a Television & New Media paper about the popular Joe Rogan Experience podcast and its role in stitching together a cross-platform infrastructure for both edgy comedy and controversial topics. The paper is part of a special issue about cancel culture and it argues Rogan relies on this concept to shape “cancel discourses” (Ng, 2020) and generally maintain both JRE and the constellation of comedians that surrounds it culturally relevant. Here’s the abstract:
This paper outlines a cultural critique of the Joe Rogan Experience. Framing the podcast as an adaptive cultural platform, I emphasize how it is ideologically informed by both the established infrastructure and dynamics of communicative capitalism and Joe Rogan’s ethos as a comedian. The paper discusses three ways Joe Rogan and his format negotiate their relationship with platform infrastructures. The first is Rogan’s relationship with Spotify and his interest in shaping “cancel discourses” and, subsequently, his own role as an embedded, “uncancellable” skeptic. The second is the combination of Rogan’s roast universalism and pioneering speech-a-ton format, designed to establish an infrastructure for platforming his cohort of podcasting comedians on YouTube. The third is Rogan’s relationship with platform-owner Elon Musk, whose communicative capitalist agenda has political implications. The paper establishes a theoretical connection between studies of platformisation and the under-studied cultural influence of podcasting comedians.
If you are interested in the understudied phenomenon of podcasting comedians and their cultural affinities with both free software movements and platform capitalists like Elon Musk you might enjoy the article.
The second publication develops my research on the many ways social media cultures draw from social stigma and hypermasculinity in marginalised classes, a topic I have previously published about on this blog and in another book chapter. On this occasion I have teamed up with Stefano Brilli (author of a book about fame and derision on Italian YouTube, which you should read if you understand Italian) to discuss two Italian “criminal influencers” who happened to develop a very productive relationship during the pandemic, most notably by developing an insult-based format on Instagram Live that heavily relied on their “bandito” affectations. Abstract below:
Building on previous analysis of the “gangsta” identity on social media, this chapter investigates the construction and management of a criminal persona as a visibility strategy in influencer culture, observing how the deviant online celebrity is framed and leveraged by different media in the current cross-platform ecology. To this end, the chapter looks at the cases of two self-styled “criminal” Italian influencers, whose fame exploded during the 2020 lockdown: Algero Corretini, aka “1727wrldStar”, and Massimiliano Minnocci, aka “Er Brasiliano”. These two controversial celebrities are examples of “bandito influencers”, where the Italian word “bandito” is intended both as “street thug” and “banned” from a specific site or group. Combining literature from criminology, celebrity studies and internet studies, this chapter aims to fill a range of gaps. On the one hand, from a cultural criminology perspective, the online dynamics of celebrification and the link between crime and influencer culture have been scarcely investigated. On the other hand, celebrity studies and media studies addressed the theme of criminal deviance labelling primarily in relation to legacy media. With our account, we also wish to contribute a more localised perspective on the Italian context, which also appears to be understudied in these respects.
This is a book chapter and, as such, it is not open-access :( You can, however, ask me for a draft and I’ll send it to you.
