Memes as the Phenomenon of Modern Digital Culture (original) (raw)
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Internet Meme: A Virtual Visual Artefact of Digital Visual Culture
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The internet is one of information, business and entertainment source to date. It’s also the apparatus for communication. Thus, the internet become one virtual world, it possessed almost the same mechanism as the real world, and subsequently rising new culture. One of the internet cultures is internet meme. Recent study conducted on internet meme conclude that the internet meme is another way of communication and the sample of the study is fairly obsolete. This study is an endeavor of new approach on internet meme, seeing it as a visual culture and phenomenon rather than mere communication phenomenon. This research also seeks to provide a novelty of understanding about internet memes. Three samples of internet meme were taken, ranging from 2018 to 2020. Samples is analyzed using visual methodology by looking at 3 sites of the sample image: production, image, and audience. Each of the sites contain 3 modalities: technology, compositionality, and social which will be elaborated throug...
A PROPOSAL FOR A METHODOLOGICAL ANALYSIS OF THE DIGITAL MEME GENRE (Atena Editora)
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The general objective of this work is to carry out a methodological analysis of the digital meme genre, through the application of genre analysis categories elaborated by Motta-Roth (2011) and others, articulated to theoretical aspects formulated by Bakhtin (2011). In this sense, the analysis undertaken here starts from the production conditions of the genre, to then contemplate its compositional structure, its thematic content and its style. As a research problem, the following question was proposed: how is the digital meme genre characterized, in view of its specific characteristics, such as production conditions, compositional structure, thematic content and style? To find possible answers to this question, initially, a bibliographical survey was carried out regarding genres, genres and multimodality and digital genres, with the consultation of authors such as Bakhtin (2011), Motta-Roth (2011), Marcuschi (2005) and Rojo and Barbosa (2015), among others. Then, several websites and social networks were consulted for the selection of memes and subsequent composition of the corpus; finally, the theoretical categories were applied to analyze the selected corpus. Thus, in methodological terms, the research can be defined as qualitative, applied in nature, with bibliographic procedures and the objective of describing and analyzing the corpus composed of digital memes, with thematic content focused on female empowerment.
A Study of Memes using Semiotics
Due to the technological advancement, communication between the individual and the society becomes faster through the world's largest encyclopedia which is the so called Internet, and also easier because of the social media websites and the social network applications, where the users of this digital age can share their thoughts and ideas not only through the computers but also with their updated android mobile phones. The meme becomes popular among these digital users, as it provides platform for those who are tracking the happenings of the society. Many people started creating memes and posting in the face book, twitter, whatsapp, hike etc., and many people created own websites like Chennaimemes.com, tamilmemes.com etc., Print medium also started incorporating these memes in to their medium. This research will analyze how the memes are created and how the reality is represented in the memes using semiotics. This research is qualitative in nature with purposive sampling. Samples were collected from Tamil the Hindu newspaper-whatsapp kalakkal page, where the maximum messages in circulation among the digital users are getting published every week. The memes which follows Image macro memes format were taken for analysis.
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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.
Memes Da Internet: Perspectivas Para a Sala De Aula No Contexto Das Culturas Digitais
Educação & Formação, 2019
This paper aims at presenting some reflections upon adopting Internet memes as possibilities for teaching in the context of digital cultures. In Brazil, millions of people interact in social media, on a daily basis, by editing, sharing, reading and reacting to a great variety of graphic texts, videos, photos, and songs that reflect their everyday relationships, namely, they produce internet memes. This study is grounded on the multiliteracies perspective (COPE & KALANTZIS, 2000, 2008; LANKSHEAR & KNOBEL, 2007; LEMKE, 2009; MENEZES DE SOUZA, 2011), as well as on the studies on memes, made by Dawkins (1976), Shifman (2013, 2014), Shifman et al (2016), Chagas (2017, 2018) and Glaveanu (2018). The teaching suggestions are based on categories of memes analysis; remixing existing memes in order to explore discourses of dominant ideologies, issues of race, age, gender and social class; and reading and writing political memes, that operate as instruments of persuasion.
MEMES AND THE WAY THEY INFLUENCE MASS CONSCIOUSNESS IN CYBERSPACE
International scientific and practical conference "Research of different directions of development of philological sciences in Ukraine and EU". North University Center of Baia Mare, 2019
The article is devoted to the analysis of the role of memes in the formation of mass consciousness in cyberspace. The article presents the main types of memes’ realization, key intentions of their creators and the possibility of these lexical and graphical units to influence the formation of mass consciousness of Internet users in social networks on political issues which nowadays occupy an essential and important place in the sphere of digital communication. The author has followed trendy tendencies and directions of analyzing the chosen topic that has proven the urgency of the proposed work in general and has served as the fundamental principle of the article’s aim formation. The article presents systematized aspects and features of the concepts such as “meme” and recently coined out “Mandela Effect”.
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.
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/
This study analysed popular internet meme templates as a form of cultural expression by using the theories of semiotics and symbolic interactionism. It revealed the popularity of these templates, how it allowed a select group to communicate particular emotions in a distinct culture than other forms of language representations permit and if a specific group can understand the semiotic and symbolic-interactionist meaning of memes by making their own templates. An explanatory sequential mixed method was used which included thirty Graduate School students from a selected private university. Five templates were presented and respondents were asked to answer questions intended to reveal their culture and perceived understanding of the context and purpose of memes. The study showed that respondents were able to identify the semiotic meaning of the memes presented, and can identify the signifier-signified used in each template. The difficulty lies on the understanding of the symbolic-interactionist meaning where respondents tend to take the "surface" rather than the "subliminal" meaning. This was affected by some factors: a) familiarity and interest with memes. b) personal understanding of meme semiotics. c) syntax used in the creation of memes. The study recommends that people who intend to use memes for instruction such as educators should be exposed in the appropriateness of memes relative to their use in teaching. This can be done by coaching teachers on both semiotic and symbolic-interactionist contents of a meme template they wish to use in their instruction.