John Benjamins Publishing Company
Internet memes as multilayered re‑contextualization vehicles in lay-political online discourse
Abstract
It is well established that the internet meme has come to represent a highly creative discursive device used to “facilitate the […] communication of one’s own political beliefs, attitudes and orientations” (Ross and Rivers 2017: 1). Although internet memes and political internet memes in particular have been addressed to many communicative situations such as participatory culture (e.g., Jenkins 2006; Shifman 2014; Theocharis 2015), one aspect that has not been paid enough attention to concerns the forms in which users refer to individual political figures and events in political memes. This being said, the present paper focuses on referring strategies (see Kirner-Ludwig and Zimmermann 2015; Kirner-Ludwig 2020) as employed in political internet memes on Reddit, including direct and indirect quotes, citations and allusions. A specific focus is going to be on such political internet memes that employ pop-cultural and telecinematic reference points and recontextualize them from their original into new target contexts (see Bublitz 2015; Gruber 2019). As shall be shown, practices such as combining constructed speech elements into recontextualized elements in political internet memes create multiple intertextual references that may enhance visibility, saliency and, thus, the ‘lifetime’ of a political meme.
Abstract
It is well established that the internet meme has come to represent a highly creative discursive device used to “facilitate the […] communication of one’s own political beliefs, attitudes and orientations” (Ross and Rivers 2017: 1). Although internet memes and political internet memes in particular have been addressed to many communicative situations such as participatory culture (e.g., Jenkins 2006; Shifman 2014; Theocharis 2015), one aspect that has not been paid enough attention to concerns the forms in which users refer to individual political figures and events in political memes. This being said, the present paper focuses on referring strategies (see Kirner-Ludwig and Zimmermann 2015; Kirner-Ludwig 2020) as employed in political internet memes on Reddit, including direct and indirect quotes, citations and allusions. A specific focus is going to be on such political internet memes that employ pop-cultural and telecinematic reference points and recontextualize them from their original into new target contexts (see Bublitz 2015; Gruber 2019). As shall be shown, practices such as combining constructed speech elements into recontextualized elements in political internet memes create multiple intertextual references that may enhance visibility, saliency and, thus, the ‘lifetime’ of a political meme.
Kapitel in diesem Buch
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
- Introduction 1
- Internet memes we live by (and die by) 7
- Stylistic humor across modalities 36
- Memes and the media narrative 64
- On the interaction of core and emergent common ground in Internet memes 85
- Exploring local meaning-making resources 122
- Internet memes as multilayered re‑contextualization vehicles in lay-political online discourse 145
- Index 182
Kapitel in diesem Buch
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
- Introduction 1
- Internet memes we live by (and die by) 7
- Stylistic humor across modalities 36
- Memes and the media narrative 64
- On the interaction of core and emergent common ground in Internet memes 85
- Exploring local meaning-making resources 122
- Internet memes as multilayered re‑contextualization vehicles in lay-political online discourse 145
- Index 182
