The linguistic function of "lmao" in this sentence is interesting to me given no one is laughing. It's closer to punctuation which indicates to everyone that the sentence has already been through circulation in social media and filtered back in meme form. Lmao is like the "rage face" image that accompanies text and tells you how you're supposed to feel as well as assuring you that it is socially acceptable to commit to that feeling in the form of language. Obviously this shields the speaker given the sentence has already been legitimized and doesn't need to function on its own. But more interestingly is the relationship between the image and language which has undergone mutations not only under a new regime of smartphone images but a new kind of mass subjectivity on social media sites. Did Japanese television anticipate the new image which is always accompanied by a face which interpellates it? Do language and image even exist separately anymore or has advertising completed its domination of the word by the image despite the so-called resistance of postmodernism to the spectacle?
I like Martin Jay's Downcast Eyes but like all studies of vision it stops at postmodernism which I'm not sure describes fully the post-2007 (the beginning of the long depression and the invention of the iphone) scopic regime. We should discuss the relationship between the "real" movement in the streets and social media representation. Is there anything left in the former that escapes the latter or is it already constituted by it, given the "BLM" slogan is already a mutation of language around the structure of twitter?