SRSLY?? A typology of online ironic markers

ABSTRACT

Social media constitute a fertile though challenging arena for the use of ironic humor. A combination of facilitating and hindering factors turns the production and identification of irony in this sphere into a complex venture, positioning it as a powerful tool in consolidating group boundaries. The main aims of this paper are to identify the markers of ironic humor on social media and to explicate their workings within the dynamics of digital interactions. Existing literature about ironic markers addresses mostly face-to-face and mass-mediated interactions, while there is a gap in our understanding of the production and interpretation of irony in the unique communicative conditions of social media. An analysis of a bilingual corpus of successful and failed ironic utterances extracted from five social network sites yielded a novel typology of five ironic markers: platform, participants, style, intra-textual content, and contextual knowledge. These markers both resemble and deviate from features of irony in non-digital settings. Media affordances often allow access to necessary complementary information, yet such forensic activity is only accessible to active users, who recognize the need for further investigation of the meant. Hence, using certain types of ironic markers forms utterances that are decipherable to some audiences but opaque to others. In this sense, the marking of digital irony and its decoding both rely on group boundaries and play a central role in their delineation. We conclude by evaluating the roles of this new regime of ironic markers in processes of boundary work.

KEYWORDS:

• Irony
• social media
• boundary work
• polysemy
• interpretive failure

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Also see Joshi et al. (2017) for an extensive review regarding the adjacent case of sarcasm, defined by the authors as a specific case of verbal irony.

2 ‘The Lion’s Shadow’ is an extreme hawkish Israeli group, organized during the 2014 Gaza War. The group, led by an Israeli rap singer known as ‘The Shadow’ (‘HaTzel’), took as its mission to violently prevent anti-war demonstrations from taking place during the active conflict in Gaza. While most of its activity took place in the off-line sphere through violent attacks on peace activists, the vast majority of response to this group appeared online in both serious and humorous texts posted on social media (mostly Facebook). This plethora of humorous texts, including dozens of parodic groups and some individual posts, composes the first part of our corpus.

3 We use the term platform in a non-traditional manner to refer to the sociotechnical concept of distinct communicative spaces within social media operating as relatively public arenas, contrary to the ‘personal public spheres’ constituted by personal profiles (John & Gal, 2018). These spaces (e.g., groups, pages, communities, forums) claim to represent a group of participants, rather than a specific person (or persona), are managed by an admin(s), engage in a defined topic or communicative activity, and often operate under relatively explicit definition and discursive rules.

4 Information about the addressor (e.g., previous postings) was found to be highly effective in automatic detection of sarcasm (Bamman & Smith, 2015).

5 Karoui et al. (2015) did exploit search options in automatic irony detection, focusing on the structure of negation and examining occurrences of opposite statements on the web.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the Smart Institute at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Notes on contributors

Noam Gal

Noam Gal is a PhD candidate at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the Department of Communication and Journalism. Her scholarly interests are social media, collective identity, ironic humor, and queer studies.

Zohar Kampf

Zohar Kampf is Associate Professor of Communication at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His main research interests are media discourse, political discourse and pragmatics. He is currently associate editor of Journal of Pragmatics.

Limor Shifman

Limor Shifman is a professor at the Department of Communication and Journalism, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Her main research interests are new media, popular culture, values and the social construction of humor.