E-relevant web text sites (EWT sites) are a relatively new phenomenon featuring banal yet remarkable user-generated texts on dedicated websites. This thesis analyses the sociosemiotic dimension of EWT sites in enabling neo-phatic communication: communication based on the relatable nature of EWT content and user-friendly medium, affording communicative acts without the requirement for in-depth discussion. Rather than fostering serious exchange, neo-phatic communication aims to establish a form of contact less brief than a greeting but akin to its purport, developing from banal but shared experiences. Analysis of the signification process involved in EWT sites, through a sociosemiotic framework based on Peirce’s second trichotomy of signs (icon, index, symbol) and the frame analysis of Goffman, shows that the sites’ semiotic structure belongs to a neo-phatic kind of communication unique to computer-mediated communication. This study illustrates how content with minimal substance might be under-valued as a means of understanding modern communication behaviour.

E-relevant web text sites (EWT sites) are a relatively new phenomenon featuring banal yet remarkable user-generated texts on dedicated websites. This thesis analyses the sociosemiotic dimension of EWT sites in enabling neo-phatic communication: communication based on the relatable nature of EWT content and user-friendly medium, affording communicative acts without the requirement for in-depth discussion. Rather than fostering serious exchange, neo-phatic communication aims to establish a form of contact less brief than a greeting but akin to its purport, developing from banal but shared experiences. Analysis of the signification process involved in EWT sites, through a sociosemiotic framework based on Peirce’s second trichotomy of signs (icon, index, symbol) and the frame analysis of Goffman, shows that the sites’ semiotic structure belongs to a neo-phatic kind of communication unique to computer-mediated communication. This study illustrates how content with minimal substance might be under-valued as a means of understanding modern communication behaviour.

Internet memes are exemplary forms of user-generated content in the age of social networking and user participation. This study draws attention to the work of an intersectional feminist community on Instagram who make use of this platform to discuss their personal politics via image macro memes. The community is made up of femmes who typically blend politics, pop culture, and a personal perspective into their content. This practice is identified as a contemporary feminist use of new media and is explored in relation to a theoretical reading of the current Third Wave of feminism as “embodied politics”. The theory of “disciplinary power” by Michel Foucault, and connections between disciplinary power with systems of oppression and social media are also employed to construct an understanding of feminist memes as a means of embodied resistance to disciplinary norms. This study seeks to explore how Internet memes are harnessed as a feminist mode of discourse, and why feminist meme creators (or “memers”) are motivated to use memes in this way. Therefore this research locates an intersection between digital culture and feminist use of new media. The research explores the possibility that Internet memes can serve as a creative and effective mode of feminist discourse in resistance to various forms of marginalisation - which occur both online and offline.

EMS personnel tend to face higher burnout rates than those in similar professions, which makes them more likely to make mistakes, engage in safety-compromising behaviors, and get injured. This project examines humor used in the form of Internet memes as a coping mechanism. Internet memes are modifiable, replicable units of cultural transmission that are passed and gain influence through the Internet. I applied the Maslach Burnout Inventory to EMS related memes on the website Reddit. I found that memes that dealt with burnout typically referenced non-traumatic factors as being the source of burnout, and that these memes would often lead to conversations that allowed EMS personnel to share their experiences with one another. I concluded that internet memes can provide a way for EMS personnel to express their feelings anonymously and through a façade of humor, and can also let other people who may be going through similar experiences know that they are not alone.

Abstract:Social Media has become a powerful tool in several aspects. It can mobilize movements, rallying for social or political causes, and it can bring people together to share experiences or interest on a global platform. Social media platforms have facilitated more dynamic ways of presenting and performing identity positions such as race, gender, class and sexuality. Though many scholars have agreed that the internet and social media offer interesting new aspects in relation to identity exploration and self-expression, the performance of identity online can also contribute to problematic discourses that reinforce old social stereotypes online affecting what happens offline.This thesis explores racial performance on social media by examining the phenomenon of ‘Digital Blackface’, which is a virtual continuation of a historical phenomenon that operates, in particular, through Internet memes. The thesis studies different versions of an American meme, which represent an altered representation of a real person, known as Sweet Brown. Sweet Brown is an African American woman who after she was interviewed on television became a viral celebrity. Due to her expressive personality, her image has been remixed into several popular Internet memes.The theoretical framework consists of a theorization of racial performance and media representation theory. This theoretical lens is used in the analysis that sets out to answer the questions, how is the Sweet Brown meme used as a form of racial performance online? What is Digital Blackface and how does it operate online? And In what way can racial performance reinforce stereotypic representations? The methodological approach the thesis employs to conduct the analysis and exemplify the problematics are visual analysis, critical discourse analysis, and critical theory. Further, the implication of racial performances in Internet memes is linked to other recent cases or incidents that relate to issues of racial performance in the media. Keywords: Racial Performance, Internet memes, Minstrelsy, Digital Blackface, Internet Culture, Representation, Race, Racism.

No description available.

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/

Internet memes are an integral part of social media communication and a popular genre for humorous engagement in online political discourses. A meme is a collective of multimodal signs that refer to each other through shared formal, content-related, and/or stance-related characteristics and can be recontextualized on different levels: (1) language, (2) mode of presentation, and (3) humor. In this paper, we examine the perceptions and effects of recontextualization in image macros—the most prominent meme subgenre. Two between-subjects online experiments from Austria offer a holistic approach to meaning-making through multimodal recontextualization in political image macros. The first experiment explored the perception of language variety and its effects on users' intentions to forward a humorous image macro. The second experiment further investigated the effects of a political message's language variety, mode of presentation, and humor on users' perceptions and behavioral intentions. The experiments' results indicate that perceptions and behavioral intentions are mainly affected by a political message's presentation as an image macro, while the recontextualization of language variety and humor plays a minor role. The study contributes to the growing body of knowledge on Internet memes as multimodal and recontextualizable political messages from the receivers' point of view.

Submitted by Renata Lopes (renatasil82@gmail.com) on 2015-12-17T14:13:49Z No. of bitstreams: 1 kriciahelenabarreto.pdf: 3497141 bytes, checksum: 31704e8e9549f637c3c5ef61daf9437b (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Adriana Oliveira (adriana.oliveira@ufjf.edu.br) on 2015-12-17T18:01:56Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 1 kriciahelenabarreto.pdf: 3497141 bytes, checksum: 31704e8e9549f637c3c5ef61daf9437b (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2015-12-17T18:01:56Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 kriciahelenabarreto.pdf: 3497141 bytes, checksum: 31704e8e9549f637c3c5ef61daf9437b (MD5) Previous issue date: 2015-10-06 / Este estudo tem como objeto o fenômeno conhecido como “memes de Internet”, produzidos no ambiente virtual do website denominado <9gag>, tendo sido focalizada a seção de comentários realizados sobre os memes postados por seus participantes. A partir de uma perspectiva interacional dos estudos do discurso, investigamos a maneira como a replicação dos memes de Internet sinaliza as práticas rituais constitutivas desse grupo e afeta a forma como as faces dos participantes são co-construídas e negociadas no curso da interação. Os rituais e as faces reivindicadas são vistos, então, como práticas que emergem e são sensíveis ao aqui e agora do uso da linguagem nesse contexto. As práticas de reprodução memética, compreendidas como unidades de transmissão cultural e de difusão da informação, fundamentadas na imitação, quando analisadas sob a perspectiva dos rituais relacionais (Kádár, 2013), vão muito além do simples entretenimento dentro de um grupo como o <9gag>. Elas auxiliam na formação e na manutenção do ethos dessa comunidade virtual, fornecendo o status de membros legítimos àqueles que acatam as regras interacionais estabelecidas através dessas práticas. A participação e o alinhamento às práticas rituais do grupo gerou o sentimento de pertencimento e identificação entre os participantes, legitimando-os como membros dessa comunidade, unidos pelo compartilhamento dos valores disseminados pelos memes, do conhecimento das práticas do grupo, e das representações simbólicas construídas pelo grupo. Além disso, através dos processos de elaboração das faces, pudemos verificar como os interagentes modelam as interações da comunidade ao se (des-)alinharem com os tipos de face que emergem nesse website. / The object of this study is the phenomenon known as ‘Internet memes’, produced within a virtual environment, in a website called <9gag>. The comments section was the main focus of analysis. From an interactional perspective on discourse, it has been investigated the way Internet meme replication signals ritual practices constitutive of this group and how it affects the way participants’ faces are co-constructed and negotiated in the course of interaction. Thus, rituals and faces claimed are seen as emergent practices that are sensitive to the interactional here-and-now of language use in this context. Meme-replication practices (understood as units of cultural transmission and dissemination of information, based on imitation), when analysed from the perspective of relational rituals (Kádár, 2013), have interactional effects that go beyond simply entertaining a group such as <9gag>. They help build and maintain the ethos of this virtual community, by giving membership status to those participants who abide by the interactional rules established through these practices. Participation and alignment with the group’s ritual practices have generated the feeling of belonging through identification among participants, legitimating them as members of this community, connected by the sharing of values disseminated by memes, the knowledge of the group’s practices and the symbolic representations constructed by the group. Moreover, it has been verified that through facework processes interactants model interactions within this community by (dis-)affiliating themselves with the types of face that emerge in this website.

As social media has emerged to become a key site for contemporary communications and cultural production, the internet meme has penetrated every level of social networking online. Albeit being a global phenomenon with pervasive discursive power in a number of fields ranging from humour to international politics and cyber warfare, comparatively little research has been made into how internet memes work on the discursive level of identity formation and their influence on the formation of internet-based social movements. Using Reddit stock market anarchists r/WallStreetBets as case study, this thesis will use Critical Discourse Analysis to analyze how internet memes work on the level of socio-political formations and how their function can be understood in relation to entropic social environments online. This thesis investigates how internet memes are used as a tool for creation of motifs for action, identity markers, connective action, and social narrativization within an ambivalent social movement online. Introducing the novel term ”memetic discourse” as a way to understand memes as transferable units of memetically programmed content, this study shows the potential of memes to act as effective yet unstable modes of communication within networked environments.