Description
Focusing on ‘key moments’ of high production (density) where media objects spread across platforms (diffusion) and touch on different affective registers, spatial analyses from digital citizenship scholarship have already studied how the performative principles of online humour and memetic practices (Udupa, 2019) are used to negotiate civic belonging and to enact ‘incongruities as existing in and between states-discourse and practice’ (Guldberg, 2024). By foregrounding ‘diffusion’, however, what is missed is how those objects, and the linked claims to civic belonging, are constantly (re)negotiated already before picking up in use.
Building on this research, following Isin’s theorisation of acts of citizens, I examine the circulation and active remediation of image and text by foregrounding the intensification of communication that precedes those high moments. I claim that intensity of communication is as relevant for understanding how digital aesthetic media contributes to the formation of online communities and for advancing our theorisation of ‘netizenship’. The article takes as its empirical space online uses of Latin on 4Chan and Reddit. Turning to a ‘dead language’ with no clear link to a (national) community, I find attempts to institute such community and the civic obligations that come with it (i.e., ‘four rules for Latin citizen’). Foregrounding these ‘unserious acts’, I argue their enactment instantiates constituents of citizenship: the contestations of the ‘unserious’ material shows how intensification of communication at the point of production is ‘seriously serious’, and that the negotiation of civic belonging behind that work is missed if we only focus the output’s diffusion.
