BATTLE OF NARRATIVES: POLITICAL MEMES DURING THE 2019 UKRAINIAN PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION (original) (raw)
Related papers
Political memes in the 2018 presidential campaigns in Russia: Dialogue and conflict
Lukianova, N., Shteynman, M. and Fell, E. (2019), ‘Political memes in the 2018 presidential campaigns in Russia: Dialogue and conflict’, Empedocles: European Journal for the Philosophy of Communication, 10:1, pp. 71–86, doi: 10.1386/ejpc.10.1.71_1 The authors seek to contribute to the existing discussion of the communicative function of political memes by bringing into discussion political memes used by opposition leaders in the 2018 Russian presidential election campaigns as examples of memes being purposefully deployed in targeted political communications. Specifically, they focus on Navalny's use of the 'yellow duck' meme. Drawing on the existing research of memes' mythological properties, the authors claim that the combination of dialogue and conflict as two main functions entailed in the political meme is a likely key element that increases the popularity of a meme and makes it viral. The discussion of concrete examples is preceded by a discussion that contextualizes the study of a political meme within the field of communication studies as a device that offers clarity in the chaotic flow of information, is constructed by both addresser and the addressee and serves as an effective tool for promoting ideologies.
The rapid emergence of the participatory internet culture produced new, rarely seen before ways of commenting on political and social issues. While the role of the internet memes is, of course, not strictly limited to that of social commentary, and, in fact, is rarely thought to be so, modern political internet memes at times enter even the mainstream political discussion. User-generated internet memes also often appear in mainstream media. The United States presidential elections were even branded ‘the meme election’ by some political commentators, underlying the importance of the internet memes as a means of political commentary during these elections. At the same time the research on political internet memes remains limited. The internet memes are a product of a modern internet culture. Because of that it is important to discuss the concept of internet culture, its position as a part of culture in general, its key characteristics and its evolution from the supposedly less participatory culture of the early days of the World Wide Web to a more participatory period of Web 2.0. This latter era is characterized by the presence of certain technologies which are also discussed in chapter 1. These technologies allowed more participation and content creation by users, thus effectively being crucial to both creation and dissemination of internet memes. At the same time the visual structure of internet memes is not new. ‘Image macros’ - the most popular type of internet memes represents an image which usually repeats from meme to meme with superimposed text. As such, in order to grasp the meaning of political internet memes, it might be useful to turn to semiotics. I discuss Roland Barthes’ collection of essays Image-Music-Text due to it being particular useful to discussion of images with text. Later I have also analyzed the case study of Rushka Kvadratnyi Vatnik using semiotics to test my hypothesis of political internet memes serving as examples of political caricature and means of reaction to propaganda. Discussion of political internet memes is impossible without the general introduction to the concept of internet memes. In chapter 2 I discuss briefly the history of the concept, the reasons why people choose to produce internet memes, the role of affinity spaces in meme production, and what makes internet meme successful with a particular attention to the role of humor in political internet memes. In that chapter I also discuss the previous research on political internet memes which remains very limited. I also make a particular distinction between internet memes originally created as a form of social or political commentary and internet memes which were originally created for other purposes but may be used as a form of social or political commentary. As a case study I have chosen the case of the internet meme Rushka Kvadratnyi Vatnik which became very popular in the Russian-speaking segment of the internet as form of criticism of Russian jingoist patriotism. I also discuss how certain manifestations of this internet meme are used as a form of a political caricature and as a means of reaction to the official Russian propaganda using semiotic analysis. The source materials I have used throughout the paper are mainly academic research papers on the subject of the Internet, internet culture, and internet memes. I have also used Roland Barthes’ and Umberto Eco’s writings in the sphere of semiotics. Writings on the interrelation of humor, propaganda and politics were also important. Finally, I have used news from reliable mass media to illustrate my points – such sources were mostly used as a means of illustrating the coverage of certain events in the mainstream media.
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.
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.
The transition between traditional politics to social media has given rise to new spaces, forms and languages for political communication. Visual aspects have been crucial in this process and political parties have tried to integrate them into their web presence. Those images are carefully selected in order to have an impact and foster engagement on Twitter, especially in the form of memes. This paper therefore analyses the use of images in the digital discourse of Spanish political parties on Twitter. Content analysis is used as the preferred research method to study how such visual content was used by the main political party accounts –typology of images, communication strategies, main hashtags, impact, etc – during the 2015 State of the Nation Debate in Spain. Likewise, content analysis was complemented with the thematic tagging of graphics memes by analysing the meanings of the text (image and text). Our work has revealed significant differences in the use of memes by political parties in the Spanish Parliament. The paper also highlights Twitter accounts with high memetic potential.
The essence of democracy lies in the possibility to express different views freely, challenge widely held believes publicly and criticize those in power. In highly developed democracies, the criticism of democratic processes through humor in public discourse, ranging from jokes and political cartoons to late-night comedy shows, has proven to be very powerful. Such power lies in engaging an apathetic public in democratic processes, as well as revealing hidden ideologies. Recently, new forms of criticism have been gradually emerging on social media and the Internet as forms of the grassroots political activism in the form of Internet memes. The aim of the paper is to uncover the extent to which political memes as forms of grassroots political activism can criticize the current political affairs and the state of the society in general and thus discern the political rhetorical and ideological goals. Specifically, applying conceptual integration theory, the paper analyzes the construction of meaning of humorous political memes as innovative ways of providing political commentaries on current political affairs. The meaning of political memes is constructed in conceptual blending as a basic cognitive mechanism. As it is claimed (Coulson and Pascual 2006, Coulson and Oakley 2006, Coulson 2006, Oakley and Coulson 2008) that blending can be used as a rhetorical tool influencing the audience to change the reality and even act upon it, the analysis of the construction of meaning of political memes as products of conceptual integration can reveal hidden ideologies in political discourse.
Memory, politics and emotions: internet memes and protests in Venezuela and Ukraine
Continuum, 2020
The article discusses interactions between emotions, memory and user-generated digital content in the context of online protest campaigns. Using as a case study anti-government protest in Ukraine (2013-2014) and Venezuela (2019), it compares how pro-and anti-government communities use visuality and memoricity of internet memes to stir affect and promote their political agendas. It shows that despite differences in the use of visual content elements, Ukrainian and Venezuelan memes have similar political functionality. In both countries, pro-government memes usually rely on simple emotional messages for propaganda/ polarization purposes, whereas anti-government memes produce more nuanced statements used as a form of creative criticism/coping mechanism. These political functions are often amplified by memoricity, which is used to stigmatize regime's opponents by pro-government communities and to legitimize protesters' demands by anti-government communities.
The European Journal of Humour Research, 2023
The paper deals with Ukrainian President's Zelensky image in political cartoons and memes. They are forms of political humour and can be examined in an interdisciplinary manner. The first part describes theoretical aspects, functions, and elements of political humour and political satire, main features and types of cartoons and memes. In the second part, the corpus of 198 political cartoons and 1121 memes from March 2019 to December 2020 is analysed with computer-aided content analysis and multimodal discourse analysis. The analysis units are social context, formed by the domestic and foreign political events in Ukraine in the research period, joke techniques and communication levels in the cartoons and memes. These units are examined chronologically and thematically. The research is based on the hypothesis about the interdependence of social context and subversive/supportive humour in the construction of Zelensky's image.
First Monday, 2019
This paper aims to discuss preliminary results of a comprehensive research on the uses and appropriations of political-electoral memes. Our main goal at this stage is to develop, following former propositions from other scholars, a taxonomical matrix able to assist researchers interested in dealing with online political memes with greater objectivity. Therefore, we tried to perform a content analysis of memes that circulated on Twitter during Brazilian 2014 presidential elections.
MENTAL SPACES AS A WAY OF MEMES’ IMPLEMENTATION IN POLITICAL DISCOURSE
ВЧЕНІ ЗАПИСКИ ТАВРІЙСЬКОГО НАЦІОНАЛЬНОГО УНІВЕРСИТЕТУ ІМЕНІ В. І. ВЕРНАДСЬКОГО, 2020
The article is devoted to the mental spaces as a way of memes’ implementation in political discourse. It highlights the specificity of analyzing mental spaces as well as the contextual component they represent in the process of verbalizing Internet-memes in political discourse. The article is aimed at distinguishing main principles of forming mental spaces in memes with contextual component in political discourse basing on the presidential elections in the United States of America 2020. The urgency of the article is formed due to the challenges which may arise in the process of interpreting Internet-memes which are involved into verbalization of political discourse. The author points out the core aspects of mental spaces, Internet-memes and political discourse including detailed analyzes of the latest researches in the mentioned fields. To achieve the aim of the article there have been distinguished the correlations between mental spaces and political discourse, the peculiarities of contextual component of the Internet-memes and direct interactions between mental spaces as well as Internet-memes. The author highlights six types of mental spaces. The article presents a number of practical examples of Internet-memes with contextual component which illustrates the presidential elections in the United States of America 2020 and is devoted to the confrontation between the representative from the Democratic Party Joe Biden and current President of the United States of America Donald Trump from the Republican Party. All the practical material has been purposefully selected from official news agencies presented in social network such as Instagram: BBC, Fox News, ABC, and CBS. Additional attention has been payed to comparison of posted in the mentioned resources Internet-memes to distinguish the difference between contextual components chosen to be presented by different news agencies. In conclusion the author has stressed on the possibility of contextual component of Internet-memes to form the mental spaces. Key words: Internet-memes, mental spaces, political discourse, presidential elections 2020, contextual component, news agencies.