Description
From concerns about terrorist radicalisation to the Twitter activity of the Trump presidency, the political implications of social media are ever clearer. The paper sets out to explore the reach and importance of militaristic content on social media, considering how pro-war and anti-war content on social media is engaged with by social media users in highly gendered ways. Such content comes in many forms from militarised pop videos, military videogame trailers, recruitment campaigns by the army to promos for fighter jets and has been engaged with literally billions of times by the public.
YouTube comments provide rich data given that social interaction is widespread and often highly nuanced. As da Silva and Crilley (2017: 166) argue, they can ‘provide illuminating insights into everyday narratives of global politics’. They are often ‘less contrived’, more reflective of the people’s real opinions, than those given in interviews (for example) (ibid). Given this, it is surprising that they are so seldom used by researchers in the social sciences (for exceptions see Dodds, 2012; Croft, 2012; Crilley, 2016). The paper addresses this lacuna through an exploration of the engagement with what might appear everyday banal militaristic content by YouTube users. It makes two key points. First, in terms of methods, that YouTube comments provide a rich source of potential material for researchers. Second, in terms of findings, that YouTube users demonstrate a surprisingly diverse range of articulated emotional responses to militaristic content such as deference, loss, suffering, nationalism, romanticisation and hostility.
