Caricature

• In 2022, the percentage of employees who are union members fell to 29 per cent from 38 per cent in 1981.
• Our recent research reveals that rather than revitalize the public image of unions, social media can sometimes have the opposite effect, underscoring a serious concern: the potential for unions to become invisible online.

Widening the divide

• First, it can increase the “us versus them” divide between unions and entities like companies, employers or governments.
• This growing divide can be partly attributed to the normalization of vehement or abrasive disagreements online.
• This effect is reminiscent of the heightened political polarization we are witnessing today with the widening chasm between left- and right-leaning groups.

Self-centeredness

• Social media has been shown to encourage narcissistic behaviour in its users and our research suggests this also applies to organizations like unions.
• Unions can unintentionally distort their online image by portraying their members in an overly positive way.

Becoming a caricature of themselves

• This type of distortion likely stems from the pressure to maintain an active online presence by posting frequently.
• All the unions in our study posted between five to seven messages weekly on their Facebook pages.

Disappearing behind the news

• This can result in a decline in an organization’s visibility and relevance online — to the point where the identity of the union almost disappears.
• This effect becomes more pronounced when there is no accompanying text or references connecting the shared news articles to the union or its members.

Invisibility on social media

• Social media can be a double-edged sword for labour unions.
• Since communication plays a key role in bolstering the power of unions, there is a legitimate concern that social media could weaken their ability to defend workers’ rights, instead of strengthening it.
• Our research underscores the need for unions to think about how they can transform their images online with more effective social media communication.

• While booking tickets for new horror flick, The Blackening, I began to worry.
• The Blackening revolves around a group of African American friends reuniting in a cabin in the woods for the US public holiday Juneteenth.
• As the evening progresses, the group find themselves assaulted by game-playing murderers who are, weirdly, armed with crossbows.
• The Blackening excels at subverting the very stereotypes it plays upon for its humour.

Meet the crew

• King (Melvin Gregg) is a reformed thug (the “badman” or “gangsta”), though he still secretly carries a gun.
• Shanika (X Mayo) is a large, loud, aggressive woman (the “sapphire”), who fusses at the killers, screaming: “Are you shooting arrows at me?
• No, stop it.” Allison (Grace Byers) is a biracial woman (the “tragic/devious mulatta”), determined to prove herself by decrying her white parentage.
• While we may laugh at them on the screen, embracing them as reality bolsters the subjugation of and violation against black people.

Questioning and performing ‘blackness’

• In another challenge, the friends must list five black actors who appeared on the TV series Friends.
• I watched Living Single’.” The exchange points to the “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” nature of performing blackness.
• While characters engage in stereotypical behaviours, they often follow it with profound, introspective observations which effectively counter their racialised performance.
• As the film acknowledges early on, African-American culture is neither stable, nor monolithic, but ever-changing and intensely diverse.

Reflection on stereotypes

• The Blackening also prompts reflection on hypocritical stereotypes about black drug culture.
• When Allison mistakenly takes Adderall from Lisa’s bag of drugs, her intoxication is presented as if she were a turbo-boosted character in a video game.
• Adderall may seem a strange choice as it’s not a drug typically associated with African Americans but with white college students.
• It also alludes to the racial bias that influences prison-sentencing for drug use, where black people are sentenced more harshly.

• The sensationalised media coverage of the recent suspected mushroom poisonings in regional Victoria expanded last week, to include children’s scribblings on a wall.
• The pictures, which comprised stick figures, rudimentary drawings and text that referenced death and dying, were removed last year from the former home of the woman who cooked the lunch.
• “You’d think they’d be drawing flowers and unicorns, not gravestones and death.” It was implied that these “eerie”, “scary” depictions of violence indicate something troubling.

Ethical concerns and the human condition

• In fact, the history of modern art suggests depictions of violence are often tied to deep ethical concerns and explorations of the human condition.
• In the wake of Freudian theories about the monster lurking inside “civilised man”, early 20th-century modernist explorations of violence were often a means of accessing unconscious human desires and fears.
• Man Ray’s 1921 Gift (or, Cadeau), a sculpture of a domestic iron studded with tacks, acknowledges the violent drives that unconsciously propel much human behaviour.
• A modernist impulse to shock and an attraction to the darker side of the human psyche are still common in art and popular culture.

Documentary and protest

• The legacy of such artists lives on in documentary photography and film.
• There, the violence of political and historical events is made widely visible, with the aim of influencing public opinion and forcing governments to act.

Violence using the artist’s body

• Violence enacted on the artist’s own body has been a powerful means to explore the limits of the human condition, but also to make literal the violence of social and political repression.
• The audience’s latent gendered violence is gradually manifested, without a word being said by the artist: men take to her clothes with escalating bravado, until Ono is left in tatters.
• By subjecting herself to violence, Abramovic tests her physical and psychological limits – and by extension, our own.

• ATLANTA, July 07, 2023 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- SkyView Partners, the owner and operator of the SkyView Atlanta Observation Wheel, is inviting the Atlanta community to celebrate the SkyView Wheel’s 10-year anniversary at a downtown birthday party.
• To the delight of the Atlanta community and out-of-town visitors, the SkyView Atlanta Observation Wheel took its first turn on July 16, 2013.
• “SkyView Atlanta has been an iconic fixture in downtown Atlanta for the past 10 years, and we are pleased to be celebrating this important anniversary with the Atlanta community,” said Al Mers, managing partner of SkyView Partners.
• Towering nearly 20 stories above Centennial Park at 168 Luckie Street NW, the SkyView Atlanta Observation Wheel features 42 climate-controlled gondolas.