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French Research Seminar: 'Vernacular mythologies: Instagram and meaning-making by non-elites at Paris Orly airport', Pr Robert Blackwood (University of Liverpool)
In the 1950s, the French philosopher, critic, and semiotician Roland Barthes wrote a series of texts which were published subsequently as a collection known as ‘Mythologies’ (1957), which constitute a dissection of popular culture from 1950s France. Barthes used theories embraced in linguistics and his approach has been replicated over the years, but in this paper, I argue that the participatory web, and in particular social network services (SNS), provide us with a perspective to rethink myth-making by non-elites, thanks to the networked language and semiotic practices of subscribers to a wide range of social networks. In other words, we look at how so-called ordinary citizens create a new set of myths by analysing the discursive presentations of a range of ‘things’ that individuals draw on at Orly, and how they are explicitly made to carry meaning, according to the captions, hashtags, and emoticons given by the original poster.