Event Title

Ribbon Cutting: A Game for Breast Cancer Awareness

Presenter Information

Stephanie Vie, University of Central Florida
Jennifer Miller, University of Central Florida

Location

PSY-228B

Start Date

4-11-2017 10:00 AM

End Date

4-11-2017 11:00 AM

Description

https://youtu.be/cjGu78sVt6g

October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month. All year, but peaking in October, individuals, organizations, and corporations appropriate the pink ribbon symbol to engage with the breast cancer cause. The symbol has become increasingly ubiquitous, and the general consensus it that it represents awareness. However, awareness is a generic term representing a myriad of socially constructed concepts, most notably health and fundraising.

Ribbon Cutting is a digital Twine game that seeks to elucidate the hegemonic meanings of the pink ribbon, while simultaneously challenging and supplementing them. The non-linear game playfully builds from viewing the pink ribbon itself as a meme (Dawkins, 1976; Shifman, 2014), or cultural replicator; a genre (Wiggins & Bowers, 2015), or format for entry into a conversation; and an immutable mobile (Potts, 2014) organizing dialogue. From this theoretical lens, the game furthermore leverages the genre of memetics and its inherent irony to gradually and humorously move players from dominant views on health philanthropy to supplemental directions. Indeed, Ribbon Cutting seeks to defamiliarize or highlight the implicit entanglement of actors and belief systems underlying the cause.

Awareness ribbons serve as powerful symbolic containers organizing semiotic systems of visual simulacra or signs into an easily accepted narrative (Baudrillard, 1994). Typically, awareness ribbons representing causes function as virals (Shifman, 2014), or packets of information shared as intended by an original author. Ribbon Cutting, as an interactive game, unpacks the semiotic signs that collectively function in constructing the complex breast cancer narrative that currently traverses society as a viral message. These simulacra function in a system to direct two dominant breast cancer simulations: individual health ideals and collective directed philanthropy (fundraising).

Ultimately, Ribbon Cutting boldly advocates for a new paradigm (Kuhn, 1970) in health philanthropy that prioritizes grassroots digital citizens' networked activity over fundraising as the currency of power and change. Our aim with Ribbon Cutting is to demonstrate how both collective non-profit organizations and individual citizens may leverage the affordances of memes and games to expand digital citizenship beyond virality: fostering participatory culture and dialogue. Ribbon Cutting exhibits a digital process through which citizens' may be guided from hegemonic beliefs about causes to subtly and personally challenge and enhance directions for causes. Ribbon Cutting, albeit about breast cancer, showcases a process and approach that has the potential to impact any of the causes that digital citizens deem important presently or in the future.

Visit the exhibit at: http://www.ribboncutting.org

References

Baudrillard, J. (1994). Simulacra and simulation. Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press.

Dawkins, R. (1976). Memes: The new replicators. In R. Dawkins (Ed.), The selfish gene (pp. 245-260). New York: Oxford University Press.

Kuhn, T. S. (1970). The structure of scientific revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Potts, L. (2014). Social media in disaster response. New York: Routledge Taylor & Francis Group.

Shifman, L. (2014). Memes in digital culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Wiggins, B. E., & Bowers, G. B. (2015). Memes as genre: A structurational analysis of the memescape. New Media & Society, 17(11), 1886-1906. doi:10.1177/1461444814535194