Isabell Otto

Das letzte Jahrzehnt hat mit Fridays For Future, Extinction Rebellion und der Letzten Generation große klimapolitische Bewegungen hervorgebracht, deren Protestaktionen nicht nur auf der Straße f [...]

The protest practice of blocking roads by sticking to asphalt has brought the activist organization ›Last Generation‹ a great deal of attention, especially in 2023, and caused avery emotional public debate. The term ›Klimakleber‹,coined in this context, bundles rejection and indignation about the disruption of public life but is directly appropriated and used by the Last Generation itself to generate attention for the urgency of its cause. In our article, we examine how the hashtag #klimakleber translates this affective structure into image programmatics and algorithmic logics on TikTok. We choose the platform because the affective dynamics become particularly clear here and we describe the forms of interaction around the hashtag #klimakleber as an ›affective arrangement‹. We argue that (digital) activist practices surrounding the term ›Klimakleber‹ are characterized by an affective ambiguity, in which activists, car drivers, politicians, journalists, protesters and counter-protesters intertwine to form a social figuration. We connect this ambiguity with image aesthetics and platform logics ofthe examined videos by using the term ›tipping figure‹. Following the concept of climatic and social tipping points, which is central to the climate movement and denotes irrevocable turning points of an undesired biophysical change or a desired mobilization, the concept of the ›tipping figure‹ focuses on an oscillation between different views, a tilting back and forth of possible interpretations. We use this term to shed light on the media figuration of the hashtag #klimakleber and its ambiguity as an activist operator.

Collective intelligence can be successful if each of its components relates to it in collective visions. This idea characterizes utopia and descriptions, in which media appear as means of distributed intelligence. A consideration of the mediality of these media, however, highlights the volatility and instability of a formation of collective intelligence. Collective visions can be seen both as a strategy of stabilization and as representations from which the possibilities of collective intelligence emerge.

Die 2016 gegründete »Kulturwissenschaftliche Zeitschrift«, herausgegeben von der Kulturwissenschaftlichen Gesellschaft, versteht sich als ein offenes Forum der kulturwissenschaftlichen Debatte, [...]

Since September 2023 Billboard has been working with ByteDance’s global short video platform to determine the »TikTok Billboard Top 50« on a weekly basis. This new chart from the established entertainment magazine presents the current music trends on the platform, which has grown rapidly in recent times, based on video productions, views and other measurable user engagement. This ranking not only shows a change in the music industry, which is experiencing a surge in popularization through the appropriation and mashup practices of social media users. It also shows how ›second-order popularization‹ and thus the production of the popular based on rankings and charts is changingunder the conditions of digitallynetworkedplatforms. The following article examines the extent to which the influence of meme practices on the metrics of popularization reveals a new way of asserting popularity, for which, in addition to the quantifiable attention of the many, the inherent dynamics of practices are decisive. In a first step, the relationship between pop music and TikTok is analyzed. Secondly, there is a case study of a TikTok dance trend that emerges from pop cultural transfers from the Netflix series Wednesday and brings a sped-up version of the song »Bloody Mary« from2011 into the charts twelve years later. A third section uses further examples to shed light on how rankings on TikTok themselves function as meme templates and in turn produce new practices of evaluating popularity. Returning from the case studies material, a fourth section concludes by reflecting on the new development of observing viral and meme-generating social media songs in the standardized metrics of the popular culture music industry.