Memes as speech acts (original) (raw)

MEANING-MAKING OF INTERNET MEMES TO CREATE HUMOROUS SENSE: FUNCTIONS AS SPEECH ACTS

Language Literacy: Journal of Linguistics, Literature and Language Teaching, 2021

This research explored how the memes were created with multimodal elements that could make meaning to create a humorous sense and function as speech acts. With the complexity of meaning-making, nowadays, it had become a trend that people could communicate online through Memes. Semiotics provides how the combination of modes, media, and potential meanings, that were applied to make meaning in memes. At the same time, pragmatics proposes details on how memes can function as speech acts. This research adopted a qualitative method using multimodal analysis by Leeuwen (2005) and speech acts theory by Bach and Harnish (1980) that were employed as the theoretical framework. A total of 16 memes were retrieved and captured as JPG files from social media and other internet websites; therefore, documentation was the only technique used in this research. The results of the study showed that (1) the integration of semiotic resources such as mode, media, and meaning potentials in memes aided the readers to understand the background knowledge of memes (2) two types of communicative illocutionary acts were found in the memes: constative and directive illocutionary acts which function to express the emotion or opinions and question something (3) the effects of using internet memes could be seen through verbal and nonverbal perlocutionary acts which showed an agreement and had the same feeling as in the memes. Finally, the memes containing multimodal components composed of semiotic resources interacted creatively to make humorous sense, and it could aid the readers to communicate online.

Internet Memes and Their Socio-Linguistic Features

2018

Social networks’ users as well as Internet portals, forums, web-pages, blogs etc. have developed their own unique communicational system that might seem incomprehensible to people above a certain age, with little to no internet presence. These systems enables them to communicate freely their ideas, thoughts, jokes, funny anecdotes as well as their critiques towards their societies and political leaders in a much more creative way than the traditional. This Internet-communicational system mostly relies on the usage of emoticons, GIFs and memes. This paper will focus on the memes as one of the internet communication phenomena and their specific socio-linguistic features that make them vastly interesting to both linguists and sociologists. Memes, as defined, are part of the online culture; mostly jokes, that are presented through mediums such as image+text or GIF+text combinations or just plain text and are spread virally on all Internet-based platforms, changing along the way. This pa...

On the Language of Internet Memes [Dissertation]

Internet Memes transverse and sometimes transcend cyberspace on the back of impossibly cute LOLcats speaking mangled English and the snarky remarks of Image Macro characters always on the lookout for someone to undermine. No longer the abstract notion of a cultural gene that Dawkins (2006) introduced in the late 1970s, memes have now become synonymous with a particular brand of vernacular language that internet users engage by posting, sharing and remixing digital content as they communicate jokes, emotions and opinions. For the purpose of this research the language of Internet Memes is understood as visual, succinct and capable of inviting active engagement by users who encounter digital content online that exhibits said characteristics. Internet Memes were explored through an Arts-Based Educational Research framework by first identifying the conventions that shape them and then interrogating these conventions during two distinct research phases. In the first phase the researcher, as a doctoral student in art and visual culture education, engaged class readings and assignments by generating digital content that not only responded to the academic topics at hand but did so through forms associated with Internet Memes like Image Macros and Animated GIFs. In the second phase the researcher became a meme literacy facilitator as learners in three different age-groups were led in the reading, writing and remixing of memes during a month-long summer art camp where they were also exposed to other art-making processes such as illustration, acting and sculpture. Each group of learners engaged age-appropriate meme types: 1) the youngest group, 6 and 7 year-olds, wrote Emoji Stories and Separated at Birth memes; 2) the middle group, 8-10 year-olds, worked with Image Macros and Perception memes, 3) while the oldest group, 11-13 year-olds, generated Image Macros and Animated GIFs. The digital content emerging from both research phases was collected as data and analyzed through a hybrid of Memetics, Actor-Network Theory, Object Oriented Ontology, Remix Theory and Glitch Studies as the researcher shifted shapes yet again and became a Research Jockey sampling freely from each field of study. A case is made for Internet Memes to be understood as an actor-network where meme collectives, individual cybernauts, software and source material are all actants interrelating and making each other enact collective agencies through shared authorships. Additionally specific educational contexts are identified where the language of Internet Memes can serve to incorporate technology, storytelling, visual thinking and remix practices into art and visual culture education. Finally, the document reporting on the research expands on the hermeneutics of Internet Memes and the phenomenological experiences they elicit that are otherwise absent from traditional scholarly prose. Chapter by chapter the dissertation was crafted as a journey from the academic to the whimsical, from the lecture hall to the image board (where Internet Memes were born), from the written word to the remixed image as a visual language that is equal parts form and content that emerges and culminates in a concluding chapter composed almost entirely of popular Internet Meme types. An online component can be found at http://memeducation.org/

Generated Function of Meme In Online Conversation

2017

Meme digital content has becomes widely copied, imitated, and deployed by a lot of people through the Internet. WhatsApp messenger group became one of the instruments to spread of the meme. This study aims to understand the form and function of meme in WhatsApp messenger group conversations. This study is a qualitative study, using a grounded strategy approach. The results showed that there are three types of memes that are being used, that is text, image, and video. All three are presented in variety different forms. Of the different forms there are two functions that generate memes in conversation, which is the decoy and instrumental function. Keywords—Meme, Online Conversation, Function of meme, Online Communication

MEMES AS A WAY OF MANІPULATION IN THE PROCESS OF DIGITAL INTERACTION

International Multidisciplinary Conference SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY OF THE PRESENT TIME: PRIORITY DEVELOPMENT DIRECTIONS OF UKRAINE AND POLAND, 2018

The article is devoted to the manipulative possibility of memes due to level of memes spreading on Internet social networks especially memes on political issues with both positive and negative background and informative load. The modern world of developing Internet communication spreads out using new technics, thus it is necessary for our research to highlight trendy means of interaction such as meme. Being cultural inheritance it serves to promote different intentions or simply to substitute words which are turned to show emotional state of an interlocutor to make the process of communication easier and to make the process of sharing emotions more picturesque. Communication does not stop developing and those changes depend on the numerous aspects which include lexicology, semantics, pragmatics, grammar, and what is more – psycholinguistics. The article highlights the latest studies of the scientists turned to the memes as a way to manipulate users’ thoughts and ideas. Moreover, the article provides the information which serves to highlight the basic ways and methods of pushing thoughts into the Internet users’ mind in the process of digital interaction. Summing up it is important to stress out that after working out the most popular social networks; there has arisen a need in carrying out an experiment to calculate the statistics of the level of manipulation which is caused by memes.

Digital memes as visual communication

The semeful sociability of digital memes : visual communication as active and interactive conversation, 2017

This chapter consists of two main sections. In the first I consider the literature defining digital memes and suggest that digital memes can be conceptualised as an everyday social interaction involving movement, and need to be understood as groups of images. I also define selfies as digital memes. In the second section I draw on the previous chapter to locate digital memes as ideas of looking involving self, others and community. I then locate digital memes within the literature about visual speech and conversation.

Internet Memes – A New Literacy?

2014

This paper examines the recently emerged multimodal artefacts commonly known as Internet memes in the light of the new literacies that are rapidly emerging in the digital age. Attention is paid particularly to the most popular type of Internet meme – image macros – with Joseph Ducreux as a model meme, analyzing and demonstrating their features as well as their correlation with the theoretical framework of new literacies. The paper includes a brief introduction to the theory of new literacies in relation to Internet memes followed by a description of memetic selectivity, distribution, classification and the linguistic and non-linguistic peculiarities of this phenomenon that expand the traditional notion of literacy.

Meme language, its impact on digital culture and collective thinking

2021

Memes have become an increasingly common form of modern communication, which has recently attracted great research interest. In this article we analyze "language - memes", its influence on digital culture and collective thinking. The Internet, by expanding social content, contributes to the variability of cultural codes and consequently changes an individual’s cultural identity throughout life. The culture composed of cultural groups is defined as a kind of macro-code, consisting of numerous codes that are commonly used to interpret reality among members of the cyber community. Identity is also transmitted through the use of a specific language during interaction, which is a marker of discourse, in which Memes represent a distinctive business card. Linguists, as well as specialists in other disciplines (such as philosophy, anthropology) use each other’s work to study the interrelationships and mutual influences of language and culture. The study proposed a hypothesis about...

DISCOURSE PECULIARITIES OF INTERNET MEMES

ISSN 2409-1154 Науковий вісник Міжнародного гуманітарного університету. Сер.: Філологія. 2021 № 52 том 1, 2021

The article is devoted to the discourse analysis of the internet memes. It highlights the peculiarities of the internet memes and figures out the features which implement political discourse based on the classification proposed by the Netherland scholar T. van Dijk in his book "Discourse and Power". The proposed theoretical material has been reworked stressing out the prior directions of contemporary linguistics. Practical material was purposefully selected from official pages of news agencies in social network Instagram among which there are: BBC News, Telegraph, the Independent, and the Times. All the mentioned resources are official representatives in social networks. The aim of this work is based on the process of figuring out discourse peculiarities of internet memes. To achieve the proposed aim there is a need to identify key information concerning internet memes themselves and the way they implement political discourse on the internet. The author proposes basic information concerning the research on discourse, political discourse and internet memes. Moreover, the article points out key classifications on discourse and internet memes. Being based on the classification by T. van Dijk the work analyses pragmatical, lexical, and semantical features which are appropriate for political internet memes. The article figures out separate phrases and word-combinations which express the highest level of emotional marking and implement core intentions posed by news agencies in Instagram. The priority was granted to internet memes which depict political situation in two countries-the United States of America and the United Kingdom. In conclusion the author proposes the results of the comparative analyses which presents distinctive as well as common features of political discourse verbalization of internet memes.

Defining and characterizing the concept of Internet Meme

2013

The research aims to create a formal definition of "Internet Meme" (IM) that can be used to characterize and study IMs in academic contexts such as social, communication sciences and humanities. Different perspectives of the term meme were critically analysed and contrasted, creating a contemporary concept that synthesizes different meme theorists' visions about the term. Two different kinds of meme were found in the contemporary definitions, the meme-gene, and the meme-virus. The meme-virus definition and characteristics were merged with definitions of IM taken from the Internet in the light of communication theories, in order to develop a formal characterization of the concept. Lastly, the use for characterization and research of the developed concept is exemplified by analysing two internet memes.