Military Mashups: Remixing Literacy Practices

Mashing Military and Popular Culture

Mashing Military and Popular Culture. In this video, I examine the ways that the military is "mashed" into everyday popular culture. More specifically, I analyze the rhetoric of train station advertisements in the central Tel Aviv terminal to examine how complex military rhetorics are “knotted” into the fabric of everyday life and bound up in cultural ecologies (Hawisher, Selfe, Guo, & Liu, 2006). The advertisements themselves are aimed at soldiers in the military traveling back and forth between their military bases and homes on the weekends. Advertisements are a particularly powerful medium for exploring wider cultural ideologies because they can amplify key tropes and narratives in society. Key for understanding the ways that the rhetorics from these advertisements circulate is what Israeli scholar Daniel Lefkowitz (2004) referred to as “an ongoing spiral negotiation” as the media shapes the public perceptions, discourses, and identities, while in turn the public shapes the representations in the media. Central to this analysis is the remixing of text and image. Drawing on Bakhtin’s (1984) dialogic understanding of language, we might understand the ways that all images (re)image(ine) or reframe existing images--accented with histories, ideologies, and narratives of the local culture.

 

 

 

by Steven Fraiberg