Description
Social media provides the space in which content and users come together in unpredictable and frequently unregulated ways. This paper draws on extensive focus group research to explore how the public interacts with militaristic popular culture and recruitment materials on social media. We argue that to understand how militaristic content becomes meaningful we need to consider how it is acted upon, maneuvered and resisted within and on social media. Crucially, the implications of militaristic popular culture matters less in relation to the content itself instead being a product of who the user is and how they experience that content. We show that the way that militaristic content is experienced varies due to the affordances of social media and the agency of social media users. We thus address important gaps in present understanding of the significance of militaristic content on social media and, more widely, of how social media users consume and negotiate political content.
