Structuralism In Digital Media

Structuralism in digital media and editorial cartoons in post-9/11 America

There are over two billion social network users as of the year 2015 with a projected annual increase of around two hundred million (Statista). These social networks and in a wider scale, the digital media are one of the trademarks of the 21st century. It has led to the emergence of a digital media culture that reflects common place culture in different societies based on the structuralism theory. Digital media has also been utilized by groups and activists that carry different ideas and influence to promote their status and development. One example is the growing number of extremist organizations on digital media, following the U.S. war on terror, competing for hegemony

The posting of the cartoon and puppet images with images of terrorists by various media users was perhaps to draw the connections between the effect of cartoons and comedy and that of radical extremism. It is also important to note that at around the same time there was a widely held belief that the American government was involved in the activities of terrorists directly, through foreign invasions and indirectly through influencing governments to adopt poor policies. This, in a way, explains why images were being printed on signs and poster that were anti-American. One of the images used to convey growing anti-Americanism were a creation of a Filipino-American high school student, photo editing Bert, a well-known figure of Sesame Street, interacting with Osama Bin Laden as a part of the parody collage, Bert is evil (Jenkins 1). The student later took down his collage after the photos gained worldwide attention and were being used to promote

Social media has, especially become a dominant platform for activists to communicate and raise their agenda (Shorter 39). Cyber activism is based on the fact that digital media is perceived to be revolutionary. According to Barker, digital media has characteristics such as interactivity, interconnectivity, and informational activity which assist in explaining the ease with which people that are not professionals can produce and edit as well as consume content (365). Jenkins highlights the fact that new media technologies have enabled the flow of content through many channels (11). This is shown by how sharing of content, collection of content through the search for images and publication in platforms that material could easily be shared. This distribution of content and creation of identities is easily done on the Internet, in part due to the contemporary myth that the Web is an alternative media space which boasts of a more democratic forum than other communication media outlets (Buren