On Digital Irony, Sincerity and the Rhythm which Binds the Two*
By: Abdo Hassan
Tags: Irony, Facebook, Track Insight, Online, Rhythm

Another tool for irony detection?

This disconnect has led to sparse and mechanized investigations in the field of data science for the sole purpose of detecting irony and sarcasm. Accounts like [1] [2] [3] look at Machine Learning (ML) methods of detecting sarcasm. The underlying assumption about irony which all these accounts make is that it’s absolute and self-contained. They isolate single statements for analysis, disregarding the context in which the statements were said. For example [1] uses ML classifier to detect the difference between an apparent sentiment and a database of objective truths as a marker for irony. For example, “ I just love being stuck in traffic” provides an apparent contrast between “I love” which is a positive sentiment and “being stuck in traffic” which is an objectively negative experience.

However, as online discourses and cyberspaces have increased in complexity, more ML efforts attempted to center context-aware understanding of irony . For example, [3] looks at specific user histories in order to define and understand each user’s attitude towards irony. Meanwhile. [4] tries to look at the corpus of nouns from an entire community to understand the underlying sentiment of the community. As some of these approaches might be costly, and still gamble on cultivating a coherent understanding of the lingo and subculture of each of the cyberspaces in question, a different framework was needed to better grasp the network nature of online irony.

Here debuts the notion of Lefebrvian rhythm; French philosopher Henri Lefebvre in his posthumously published book Rhythemanalysis provides a meditation on everyday rhythms and how they reflect and influence social processes. His study of rhythm has inspired multiple investigations in the field of urban studies, reclamation of space and collective memory. Seeing as cyberspace is also a space where rhythms contest, compete and reflect techno-cultural battles, and that irony is a multi-use cultural marker, how can we better expose the relationship between rhythm and irony?

The scope technocultural rhythms would be anything that falls within the human-machine collaboration that makes the web 2.0 possible; from the flow of packets as regulated by a protocol, to the sorting of a feed of information by a social media algorithm, to the flow of clicks, reactions and comments.

two different rhythms imposed on the same content [source]

A digital study of rhythm as pointed out by Shintaro Miyazaki can bean important analytical tool in studying the techno-cultures of the web. What can rhythm teach us about the way irony is used online?

Figure 1: a rhythmic experience of irony

Figure 1 is an illustration of a single user’s experience of irony; the user in question is experiencing a feed of posts. Based on the user’s cultural understanding of the content, they’re bound to project their own un(ironic)meaning on the post. Since Irony is also a shared and networked experience, the variety of ways in which different users can experience the same feed of content must also be considered [figure 2].

Figure 2: Networked rhythm of Irony

This sparsity of cultural understanding, and the different projection of rhythms when experiencing a feed of content teach us two things: