“fail, clickbait, cringe, cancel, woke”: vernacular criticisms of digital advertising in social media platforms

Abstract

Within the commercial landscape of “social networking sites” turned into “social media platforms”, the aim of this paper is to gain insight on the ways in which ordinary users express criticisms towards digital advertising. In order to highlight the existence of a specific digital advertising literacy, we focus on the study of a new generation of vernacular expressions which seem to characterize a critical experience of ads and promotional contents on social media platforms: “fail”, “clickbait”, “cringe”, “cancel”, “woke”. A corpus of French-speaking Twitter contents documents the use of such terms as criticisms aimed at different digital promotional genres (ads, hashtags, sponsored posts, articles, banners, embedded videos). By conducting a micrological analysis of platformized user reactions, we show that an entire set of digital literacy skills can be conceptualized by observing the vernacular development of a vocabulary for the criticism of promotional contents and everyday ads.