Date of Award

2017

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelors

Department

Humanities

First Advisor

Carrasco, Malena

Area of Concentration

Visual and Critical Studies

Abstract

In 1979 Dick Hebdige used the phrase “the rhetoric of crisis” to describe the visual language of the British punk scene. According to Hebdige, punk was a desperate attempt to assert, contrary to the hegemony of Pop, the individual’s role in the shaping of their own reality. In today’s cultural landscape this effort appears to have been in vain as the punk style is seen on runways and red carpets, the ultimate mechanisms for the filtering of objects into the mainstream. Moreover, this narrative seems to be repeated several times a year as new subcultural phenomena are constantly incorporated into a simultaneously complex and standardized vernacular of objects, images, and processes. This thesis is a study of conditions that facilitate cultural incorporation. Social media is identified as the primary mode of contemporary image circulation through which content is created and shared within the limitations of a hegemonic ideology: the feed. In effect, the user unconsciously contributes as both producer and consumer in an imagined economy of likes and comments, while the real value of this labor is concentrated within the ideology itself, in which nothing may be too subversive to escape the label of “stock imagery”.

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