Twenty-Third International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

An international interdisciplinary academic team conceptualizes, builds, and then explores a virtual tool (Headliner) to better understand the impact of cultural intersectionality on social media communities based on sharing behavior and thus participating in and contributing to encoding/decoding (fake) news narratives. A Grounded Theory approach was adopted to gather both quantitative and qualitative data from parallel groups in Brazil, India, and the United States. In this virtual tool, given a news headline, the participant swipes left or right to share or not, and later faces their decisions to determine whether those headlines were fake or not. In the case of the present research, news organized across six topics was presented to participants. The authors present a constant comparative analysis of the headlines shared by men (n=73) v. women (n=86), individualist (n=83) v. collective-minded (n=32) people, and Brazilian (n=31) v. North American (n=85) and Indian (n=28) samples. The study reveals how certain kinds of news typically carry more cultural capital among different audiences based on phenomenological differences regarding how cultural expression is encoded and decoded. Additionally, the sharing of online media narratives is in itself a distinct cultural process for (de)constructing community resilience through the expression and recognition of intersecting identities. In conclusion, this research extends Walter Benjamin’s (1936) dialectic to the age of digital reproduction in which we currently live and offers an intersectionality- based perspective of current and future challenges associated with research across technology, digital humanities, and cultural studies.