The Rise of Meme Culture: Examining the Language of Memes as a Satirical Tool to Promote Socio-Political Awareness (original) (raw)
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Internet Memes and Their Socio-Linguistic Features
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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...
Journal of Content, Community and Communication Vol. 6 Year 3, June - 2017 [ISSN: 2395-7514 (Print)], 2017
Humor has been used as a tool against oppression since ages. With the advent of digital technologies, internet memes have gained prominence. Memes are mediums that communicate information through humor and satire. Today, internet memes have become a part of the political campaigning. This research paper thus analysis how internet memes have been used to communicate political satire. The study deals with the impact of internet memes on digital natives and digital migrants in India. Parameters like political engagement, influence on political views and voting behaviour are used to analyse the impact of memes. Using questionnaire as a tool for data collection, the research concludes that internet memes are used as a tool of political discourse but does not have a major impact on audience although it improves political engagement of the digital natives.Elaboration likelihood model and Agenda setting theory is used as a theoretical base for the study.
Social Science Research Network, 2017
Humor has been used as a tool against oppression since ages. With the advent of digital technologies, internet memes have gained prominence. Memes are mediums that communicate information through humor and satire. Today, internet memes have become a part of the political campaigning. This research paper thus analysis how internet memes have been used to communicate political satire. The study deals with the impact of internet memes on digital natives and digital migrants in India. Parameters like political engagement, influence on political views and voting behaviour are used to analyse the impact of memes. Using questionnaire as a tool for data collection, the research concludes that internet memes are used as a tool of political discourse but does not have a major impact on audience although it improves political engagement of the digital natives.Elaboration likelihood model and Agenda setting theory is used as a theoretical base for the study.
Memes and their impact on politics
2018
It comes as no surprise to today’s generation that memes play an extremely important part in everyday life. Ranging from mere entertainment purposes in the form of funny images with relating text, to serious forms of message conveyance, these phenomena are something extraordinary. Therefore, the aim of this paper will be none other than to dissect and examine just what makes memes what they are – a source of both entertainment and knowledge. The methods used to achieve this will be in-depth analysis of meme archetypes, syntactic and grammatical analysis, and questions answered by third parties. This leads to the thesis statement: Memes have a major impact on the political field, especially in the current generation.
TEXTUALITY OF INTERNET MEMES IN ENGLISH POLITICAL DISCOURSE
Науковий вісник Міжнародного гуманітарного університету. Сер.: Філологія. 2021 № 48 том 1, 2021
The article is devoted to textual peculiarities of Internet memes in English political discourse. The aim of this work is to figure out the classification of Internet memes political discourse based on their textuality. To achieve the aim there were completed the following tasks: observed the latest works devoted to Internet memes, figured out the types of memes implementation in political discourse, detected the specificity of political memes realization, and analyzed the frequency of political Internet memes usage based on their type. The author defines three key types of political Internet memes based on the levels of their textuality such as: textual (original, symbiotic, integral, fused, and phrasal), non-textual (original, fused, and pictorial), and animated (GIFs and fragmental). The practical material was purposefully selected from trendy social network such as Instagram; namely, the whole amount of material was chosen from official news agencies represented online such as BBC News, CNN, MSNBC, NBC News, The Times, Politico, and Washington Post. The author works out Internet memes based on political posts concerning the United States of America as well as the United Kingdom. The intention of memes' creation depends on the verbalization circumstances-in 2021 these factors are determined by the worldwide pandemic Covid-19, riots in the United States of America, British Royal family, lockdowns, and elections between the representative of the Republican Party the 45 th President of the United States of America-Donald Trump and the representative of the Democratic Party just-elected 46 th President of the United States of America-Joe Biden. Covid-19 is represented in a range of protective medical means such as: masks, medical gloves, and distancing, riots are verbalized through black-and-white colours. So, this selection of Internet memes targets at politicians' abilities and disabilities to override the chaos of recent days. The author concluded that textual memes have the biggest quantity of posts, non-textual memes occupy the second position, and animated memes occupy only the third position.
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.
Meme Viability: Elements of Effective Political Internet Memes
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The word meme was coined by Richard Dawkins (1976) in his book, The Selfish Gene. According to him, memes are cultural accretion of knowledge and ideas that can be passed on to others. Gil (2016) described memes as a virally-transmitted cultural symbol or social idea. According to him, meme behaves like flu or a virus that travels from person to person quickly. Today, it travels much faster than simple speech. Memes travel instantly through the internet such as email forwards, chats and web page links. Nowadays, political memes have become increasingly prevalent, and become an effective tool for political commentaries (Pleviriti, 2014). Also, memes are highly shareable through social media and are becoming tomorrow’s campaign slogans and firewood for negative ads (Nasri, 2012). Using qualitative methods of research by conducting a thematic analysis of interview excerpts, this study has found that political memes are considered viable when these elements are present: satire, persuasi...
Educational Administration: Theory and Practice, 2024
This study investigates the sociological impact and linguistic characteristics of memes, focusing on their prevalence in online social media platforms. Utilizing content analysis, a diverse collection of memes was systematically analyzed to identify themes, linguistic elements, and cultural references embedded within them. In the age of information, memes are cultural units that are replicated and widely disseminated from one person to another through jokes, rumors, videos, animation, photographs Dube, et al (2018).). The data collection process involved gathering memes from various online sources, while the data analysis encompassed thematic exploration and linguistic examination of the memes. The findings reveal insights into how memes serve as mirrors of societal trends, generational disparities, and cultural dynamics. Memes emerged as potent vehicles for social connection, selfexpression, and cultural commentary within digital communities. This study underscores the multifaceted nature of memes and their significance in contemporary digital discourse, emphasizing the need for a nuanced understanding of their sociological and linguistic dimensions.
Sociological Features Of Urdu And English Memes: An Analysis
Journal of Namibian Studies, 2023
In the contemporary realm of digitized existence, memes have become the norm of our virtual culture, omnipresent across the various platforms of social media. Functioning as a distinct and advanced mode of communication, memes enable social media users with an unfettered avenue to communicate their thoughts, jokes, ideas, critiques, etc. This study focuses on English and Urdu memes as one of the internet communication phenomena and their specific sociological features that make these memes interesting sociologically. Here mainly the memes that are in the form of images with a piece of written text on them are considered. Within the purview of this exploration, the General Theory of Verbal Humor presented by Raskin and Salvatore in 1991, has been undertaken as an analytical lens. Six memes apiece from both English and Urdu have been selected for the analysis. From the results, it was shown that memes are used as strong social expressions. These reflect public reactions to political, social, and economic events, depicting the strong influence of technology on social behaviors. Urdu memes, being intrinsically rooted in the national fabric of Pakistan, emerges as more understandable and relatable to a Pakistani layman. In this way, Urdu memes stand distinguished for their contextual alignment with the Pakistani society, when put against English memes.
The Rise of Meme Culture: Internet Political Memes as Tools for Analysing Philippine Propaganda
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This research paper was aimed at providing a thorough content analysis on memes' linguistic aspect and further understanding them in the light of their usage as political propaganda. A total of 60 memes were culled from July 2016 to December 2018. According to the memes' linguistic and visual organization, they have the ability to create and simplify complex political narratives by employing primarily the categories of Shops, Text, and Stacked Stills based on Milner's (2012) Taxonomy of Meme Collectives. The memes' humor signifiers were mainly intertextuality, parody, and binary opposition which highlighted how memes are contextual in nature and use exaggeration and opposing concepts to elicit humor. On the other hand, the memes vary in their respective denotations as well as in their connotations which often point to humanization and discreditation. Lastly, for the memes' propaganda characteristics, they possess all 10 of Walton's (1997) propaganda characteristics while the audience perceived 9 out of 10 through the conducted survey. This proves that memes do have the potential to be used as tools for propaganda because of their inherent manipulation of complex political narratives which are furthered through the use of humor.