Renée Pastel on Viral Videos at the PCA

Renée Pastel on Viral Videos at the PCA

Renée Pastel received a Spring 2019 BCNM Conference Grant to help cover her costs attending the Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association Conference in Washington, D.C​. Renée presented "Viral Videos as Metonymic Homespace in the “War on Terror”: Globalizing American Popular Culture." Read more about her experience in her own words below!

I am grateful to have received a BCNM Conference Grant to support my attendance of the annual Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association Conference in Washington, D.C. The conference ran from April 17-20, 2019, and I presented a paper in the Internet Culture Area titled, "Viral Videos as Metonymic Homespace in the “War on Terror”: Globalizing American Popular Culture." This paper, which was excerpted from my dissertation, considers viral videos produced by soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan. Specifically, I analyze how their participation in circulating viral lip dubs of Carly Rae Jepson’s "Call Me Maybe" problematizes views of the Internet as globalizing force. I propose that the same connections to the homefront afforded to deployed soldiers by the Internet in fact isolate and alienate soldiers upon their return by giving them a false sense of continuity between home and war.

This was my first time attending the PCA/ACA annual conference, and I was struck by the range of scholarship being performed in a variety of subject areas from Journalism & Media Culture to Circus and Sideshow Culture, from Rhetoric, Composition and Popular Culture to Virtual Identities and Self-Promoting. One panel I found noteworthy was called "Television Rhetorics," which offered several papers that traced the structuring rhetoric at play in different forms of television. Two speakers dealt with issues of spin in contemporary media, raising questions of truth and values in our age of "fake news."