Is a meme just a humorous composition made to make people laugh, or does it have potential to connote something more? This became the question that gave this article life and emerged when the official Twitter account of Ukraine posted memes mid-war. In order to examine whether a meme has potential to connote something more this article studied memes with the questions RQ1: Do memes function as a multimodal tool for intermediation of narratives and societal discourses on the official Twitter account of Ukraine? RQ2: Which semiotic choices in language and visual communication mainly appear in the memes? RQ3: How do the main semiotic choices in the memes interact with each other? RQ4: Are, for Ukraine, societal discourses and/or narratives present within the memes? Four memes were collected from the official Twitter account of Ukraine and analyzed with a multimodal critical discourse analysis. Drawing on Fisher's narrative paradigm, this article argues that the use of a meme can be seen as storytelling. In order to investigate the nature of a meme and to understand how a meme can mediate discourse, we draw on Shifman and critical discourse in our analysis. Linking our analysis to former research is done to help the reader understand the multifaceted nature of a meme. The result of this study shows that a meme in this particular case can be used as a multimodal communicative tool for storytelling and the mediating of social discourses, therefore further studies on the subject of memes are recommended.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:uu-477397 |
| Date | January 2022 |
| Creators | Lindell, Hanna, Kihlmark, Hanna |
| Publisher | Uppsala universitet, Medier och kommunikation |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | Swedish |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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