Monthly Archives: October 2012

“Swift”-ian rhetoric in the new media age

The digiscape was predictably flooded this week with “binders full of women” memes after presidential hopeful Mitt Romney inserted both feet into mouth during a town hall debate. In the aftermath, a lot of people are raiding the usual sites that serve as clip art generators for Facebook and other social media (repurposing is the lifeblood of new media) to distribute those little billboards of intertextual richness and variation: the immutable image, the malleable captions (“Trap Her, Keep Her!” the epitome of the moment). Sometimes my Facebook stream reads like an endless demonstration of the Kuleshov effect, expressed in the grammar of LOLcats.

But my favorite digital response was not the stream of snark, but rather a series of “reviews” posted to an Avery binder page on Amazon.com. (Thank you, Michelle, for cluing me into the phenomenon.) I wanted to include a couple of screen grabs, just in case Avery or Amazon decide to pull the plug, but they look terrible here. As of this writing, some 900 posts and thousands of “helpful” clicks have been logged in response to Romney’s binder comment.

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