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The article examines the generation and deployment of visual narratives in Ukrainian and Russian digital participatory cultures, with a specific focus on internet memes in the context of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. It analyzes the form, content, and functions of these memes and highlights their similarity in mobilizing and conveying political messages despite variations in their visual components. The study indicates that Ukrainian memes are used not only to promote political agendas but also serve as trauma coping and collective identity construction mechanisms in times of crisis, helping to promote new war narratives that are engaged in the construction of the self and the other.

The article analyses the peculiarities of memes as a communicative technique for mitigating fears during the war. Our focus is on memes about the Russian-Ukrainian war that were spread on the Ukrainian segment of the Facebook social network between March 2022 and September 2022. It is revealed that in the Internet space, these communicative units have been used to form a popular online discourse on the emotional resilience of Ukrainians. Reflecting the current events taking place in Ukraine during Russia’s large-scale invasion, memes have contributed significantly to overcoming fears of war. In particular, this was demonstrated through their ability: - to develop effective communication with ‘our own’ (after all, memes “speak” in an understandable language about the individuals and are created by the individuals themselves); - to cultivate a humorous attitude to challenging life situations, which contributes to the emotional release of negative emotions and the establishment of emotional balance; - to spread discrediting information about enemies, which destroys their reputation and leads to the consolidation of messages about enemy pseudo-power in the mass consciousness; - by revealing the image of Ukrainians through the philosophy of cordocentrism to actualise the sense of their belonging to a civilised European country; - to promote narratives aimed at building cohesion, the resilience of the Ukrainian people, a sense of group identity, “us against them”, and strength and faith in victory.

Kamala Harris made political history in 2020 when she was elected vice president of the United States. Our study employs intersectionality to shed light on how people framed Harris in Facebook memes during the 2020 U.S. Presidential Campaign and 2021 Inauguration. While gender and racial pride were strong in many of the memes, our analysis identified both racist and sexist characterizations that built on historical stereotypes of Black women. Harris was the subject of a variety of sexist and racist attacks with Facebook posts/memes framing her using tropes, such as "Jezebel" and "Tragic Mulatto." Our intersectional analysis of the framing of political candidates provides a rationale for the continued assessment of memes for their ability to promote and spread historical stereotypes and racist narratives. The continued framing of Black women based on both gender and race is an indication society has made little progress in its representations of the group. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I examine the emergence of "meme-feminism" on Iranian social media, which adopts innovative tactics to combat gendered hate online. I propose the concept of "memeing back" at misogyny and numerous gendered inequalities as not only a unique feminist tactic but also a political and satirical world-building practice. With a detailed analysis of theorizations of (digital) feminist activism and mediated visual humor, I demonstrate how the adoption of memes can, through anonymity and visual community-building, extend beyond dominant forms of popular feminism to combat the pervasion of anti-feminism on Iranian social media. I further unpack how this tactic mobilizes feminist memes by utilizing shared aesthetic visualization, a feminist politics of exposure, and visual nagging as embodied and mediated interventions to critique socioeconomic inequalities impacting women-identifying individuals in Iran. On this basis, I argue for the significance of online memes and the "memeing back" tactic in advancing feminist demands under suppressive, violent, and capitalist states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With social media technologies, feminist perspectives have reached parts of society traditionally uninterested in or fundamentally opposed to them. While feminist activists and allies have employed technological affordances for support, belonging, and justice, the same tools are used by actors of the alt-right to gag feminist voices. As it circulates, anti-feminist content sustains heteropatriarchy and damages women beyond the symbolic by means of trolling, doxxing, and meme wars. We address this through a review of feminist visual methods applied to the analysis of imaginaries of digital gendered hate in four case studies: (1) Greta Thunberg memes in the DENY Facebook group; (2) "Fanquan Girls" meme wars in the Hong Kong Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill Movement; (3) visual artefacts shared under the Twitter hashtag #SisterIDoBelieveYou; and (4) cartoons of Grace Mugabe relating to presidential succession produced in seven African countries. By reflecting on the ethos behind these four cases, we identify specific benefits to be gained from working with feminist visual methods, and contour a novel phenomenon: platformed visual misogyny. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The terrorist attacks in Norway in 2011 and New Zealand in 2019 have revealed that the far-right worldwide uses the memory of the Yugoslav wars for online mobilization. Scholars working on memory activism usually deal with the liberal, self-critical memory emerging from the bottom-up activism of human rights groups while neglecting the activism of the far-right. This article fills the gap by addressing the global circulation of two memes, Remove Kebab and Pepe the Frog, as examples of far-right memory activism. In order to address the transnational circulation of memes as memory activism, this article employs the concept of 'traveling memory' while relying on multimodal discourse analysis to unveil the processes of memetic transformation, imitation, iconization and narrativization. The analysis reveals an alternative memory of Yugoslav wars that depicts Serbia as the first case of 'white genocide' in Europe, reversing the roles of war criminals and victims while propagating violence and celebrating genocide. The article argues that memory studies can no longer ignore memory production of far-right communities and, at the same time, outlines the method for examining far-right digital memory activism, revealing a whole set of mnemonic practices developed among the anonymous fringe communities of the far-right. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The adultification of Black children is a form of anti-Blackness that brings Black children into adult situations. The adultification of Black children can be rooted in early 20th-century children's books with minstrel imagery showing Black children in perilous situations for adult entertainment and for white children's learning. This essay puts "digital blackface"—the online cross-racial memes using Black children's reactions, emotions, and stereotypes as cross-racial humor—in conversation with historical children's books featuring Black children. Linking digital representations and misrepresentations to children's picture books demonstrates how Black children in both formats and social spheres are thrust into adult politics at their expense. Adultifying Black children across time in children's books with minstrel imagery and digital blackface shows how Black children have never been exempt from the anti-Blackness and systemic white supremacy erroneously believed to be an adult issue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Memes offer responsive acute commentary on controversial societal matters, providing non-violent and democratic spaces of discussion for conflicts. The paper studies memes on the war in Ukraine that spread in Eastern (Russia, Estonia, Belarus) and Western Europe (Spain). We analyze who are the main actors/characters that personify the war in the memes in these countries, how these characters are represented in memes, and what are the global and local aspects of their portrayal. Personification is seen as a marker for psychological distance of the meme-makers and sharers to the conflict. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Copyright of Apotheke is the property of Universidade do Estado de Santa Catarina and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

From the 'Dancing baby', 'All your base are belong to us' and the 'Hampster dance' in the second half of the 1990s to Bernie's mittens at the US presidential inauguration, through to 'Disaster girl' and 'Distracted boyfriend', among others, memes have become an important part of our (visual) digital culture over the last 20 years. This article demonstrates why memes should be considered a critical part of our born-digital heritage, by examining their connections to digital histories and trajectories, as well as their role in pop, visual and digital culture. The authors then map the diversity of stakeholders who contribute to this heritagization and the many challenges involved in meme preservation and archiving, including curation, agency, meaning and value. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hateful memes are malicious and biased sentiment information widely spread on the internet. Detecting hateful memes differs from traditional multimodal tasks because, in conventional tasks, visual and textual information align semantically. However, the challenge in detecting hateful memes lies in their unique multimodal nature, where images and text in memes may be weak or unrelated, requiring models to understand the content and perform multimodal reasoning. To address this issue, we introduce a multimodal fine-grained hateful memes detection model named "TCAM". The model leverages advanced encoding techniques from TweetEval and CLIP and introduces enhanced Cross-Attention and Cross-Mask Mechanisms (CAM) in the feature fusion stage to improve multimodal correlations. It effectively embeds fine-grained features of data and image descriptions into the model through transfer learning. This paper uses the Area Under the Receiver Operating Characteristic Curve (AUROC) as the primary metric to evaluate the model's discriminatory ability. This approach achieved an AUROC score of 0.8362 and an accuracy score of 0.764 on the Facebook Hateful Memes Challenge (FHMC) dataset, confirming its high discriminatory capability. The TCAM model demonstrates relatively superior performance compared to ensemble machine learning methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As the automotive industry undergoes a phase of rapid transformation driven by technological advancements, the integration of driving simulators stands out as an important tool for research and development. The usage of such simulators offers a controlled environment for studying driver behavior; the alignment of data, however, remains a complex aspect that warrants a thorough investigation. This research investigates driver state classification using a dataset obtained from real-road and simulated conditions, recorded through JINS MEME ES_R smart glasses. The dataset encompasses electrooculography signals, with a focus on standardizing and processing the data for subsequent analysis. For this purpose, we used a recurrent neural network model, which yielded a high accuracy on the testing dataset (86.5%). The findings of this study indicate that the proposed methodology could be used in real scenarios and that it could be used for the development of intelligent transportation systems and driver monitoring technology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using memes on two political issues, an online experiment was conducted among a convenience sample of American adults to explore people's reactions to political internet memes and the memes' impacts on political opinions while considering the moderating role of political party identification. It found that memes on immigration had a significant main effect on opinions but those on gun control did not. Nonetheless, the memes on both issues produced more meme-consistent thoughts among partisans whose party shares the memes' views than among those whose party opposes the memes' views. Moreover, the memes supporting one's party's views had significant positive impacts on political opinions; but those challenging one's party's views had little impact. The political implications of these findings are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction: Internet memes are a ubiquitous part of internet culture and a common communication tool among students. Because they are a good medium for expressing ideas and concepts in a concise and fun manner, memes are a potentially valuable tool for teaching and engaging students. Statement of the Problem: Instructors may not know how to use memes in classroom assignments or activities to support learning objectives. Literature Review: Students finding or creating their own class-related content is an empirically supported way to enhance learning. Instructors can enhance learning by using multimedia approaches (pictures/videos in addition to words), which is a good fit for the use of memes. We include examples of ways that memes have already been used in psychology classrooms. Teaching Implications: Incorporating meme assignments or activities in the classroom could be beneficial. Conclusion: We describe how students can explain or generate memes that illustrate concepts related to course material. Instructions and supporting information and resources, as well as calls for research into the effectiveness of the use of memes in the classroom, are included. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: Our purpose is to reconnect memetics to information, a persistent and unclear association. Information can contribute across a span of memetic research. Its obscurity restricts conversations about "information flow," the connections between "form" and "content," as well as many other topics. As information is involved in cultural activity, its clarification could focus memetic theories and applications. Design/methodology/approach: Our design captures theoretical nuance in memetics by considering a long standing conceptual issue in memetics: information. A systematic review of memetics is provided by making use of the term information across literature. We additionally provide a citation analysis and close readings of what "information" means within the corpus. Findings: Our initial corpus is narrowed to 128 pivotal memetic publications. From these publications, we provide a citation analysis of memetic studies. Theoretical directions of memetics in the informational context are outlined and developed. We outline two main discussion spaces, survey theoretical interests and describe where and when information is important to memetic discussion. We also find that there are continuities in goals which connect Dawkins's meme with internet meme studies. Originality/value: To our knowledge, this is the broadest, most inclusive review of memetics conducted, making use of a unique approach to studying information-oriented discourse across a corpus. In doing so, we provide information researchers areas in which they might contribute theoretical clarity in diverse memetic approaches. Additionally, we borrow the notion of "conceptual troublemakers" to contribute a corpus collection strategy which might be valuable for future literature reviews with conceptual difficulties arising from interdisciplinary study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Basic medical sciences education is characterized by the provision of large amounts of theoretical information that leaves little opportunity for promoting student creativity or motivation. In response, the authors investigated meme-related project-based learning (PBL). Memes are humorous media that are widely exchanged online. 1477 students were requested to create memes on the scientific material they were studying in a pathology course. The project was implemented in two learning contexts (face-to-face and distance learning during the COVID-19 pandemic) over two batches of first-year medical students. The students created memes in greater numbers than requested by a mean of 5.8 per group. Students' satisfaction and narrative perceptions were analyzed, with 66.9% reponse rate: 91.4% of students were satisfied with the PBL; 93.3% rated the learning benefit gained from creating memes as excellent and/or good, and 85.9% rated the learning benefit from their colleagues' memes at the same level. Five themes were extracted: positive students' attitude toward the meme PBL, better development of students' skills, the feasibility of creating and sharing the project results, additional advantages and Challenges reported by students enrolled in meme PBL. The authors concluded that adopting meme PBL promotes students' creativity and boosts their motivation to learn. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Building on my recent argument that an all-good, all-powerful God is logically incompatible with all the evil in the world, I explore what grounding ethics can have without the God of traditional theism. While theists have argued that ethics is grounded either in God's commands and/or in his nature, I show that no such adequate grounding exists, even if my argument—showing that the God of traditional theism is logically incompatible with all the evil in the world—were shown to be unsuccessful, and I further show that such a grounding is impossible, given that my argument is successful. I then go on to provide an account of the norms on which an ethics without God can be appropriately grounded and show how an ethics, so grounded, can be appropriately related to our biological and cultural past, present, and future, as understood through Darwinian evolutionary theory. In this way, I hope to undercut a recent attempt to use Darwinian evolutionary theory to debunk ethics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In late 2017 and throughout 2018, surveillance discourse collided with meme culture through the popular "FBI agent" meme. The meme had various iterations but usually depicted ordinary individuals who are aware that they are constantly being surveilled on their personal devices by an assigned government agent. However, far from threatening Orwellian depictions of surveillance, in which a dangerous government is constantly watching, the FBI agent meme characterized the surveillant relationship as positive and caring, where the government agent is answering questions or helping with homework, providing a sympathetic ear for relationship troubles, crying over movies together, and even dropping by to deliver milk. The joke is predicated on the assumption that the government agent is always watching, knows the individual intimately, communicates with them regularly, and sometimes even intervenes through their devices, but only with the individual's best interests in mind. The FBI agent meme depicts the relationship between the individual and the surveillant apparatus as one of surveillant companionship. Surveillant companionship suggests that surveillance fulfills a social role: partly care and control, and partly a response to widespread alienation. The FBI agent meme's depiction of surveillant companionship satirizes the normalization of mass surveillance by highlighting the absurdity of sharing every intimate moment with the surveillant gaze. Memes also function as collective interventions in political discourse, in this case mass surveillance. Although the meme depicts the surveillant apparatus as a form of ambivalent companionship, the collective and collaborative nature of memes and the participation in communal humor and critique offers a different kind of companionship, one organized around a recognition of shared grievances and surveillant intrusions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to demonstrate the existence of processes of constructing discursive authority in the social (or participative) web. To accomplish this, we will first provide a theoretical overview of the concept of authority, which will enable us to distinguish between its defining elements and its situational manifestations. Then, we will examine three non-exhaustive but prototypical examples of communication on collaborative web platforms to show how certain linguistic-discursive and technological characteristics of these environments facilitate the creation of a discourse marked by trust and, as a result, authoritative for different user communities. Our analyses will start from an examination of internet memes, where both certain dissemination logics and technoenunciative characteristics reveal the persistence of discourse authorization mechanisms that lie somewhere between technological parameters and enunciative postures. Then, we will illustrate the strategies used by users, who can be regarded as scientific "influencers" on Twitter, to establish their legitimacy and online credibility. Finally, we will look at a collaborative creative writing project on Twitter ("Bowary") to explore the relationships between the notion of authority and this new form of shared authorship online. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper focuses on some aspects of quotations and pseudo-quotations appearing in memes. The intersection between memes and quotations or snowclones represents an interesting linguistic element, especially from the point of view of the diffusion of phraseology or of single syntagmas in Italian. It is also a fundamental element to understand some cultural dynamics of cultural communication through the social media and the web. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mogol and Battisti's lyrics belong to the collective heritage of our country. They have a multigenerational scope as they are known by their peer generation and by younger people, including the so-called Generation Z. This paper analyzes the popularity of a number of song titles and lines written by Mogol and Battisti that have entered common usage, not only in newspapers but also in everyday digital communication. Some of their common sayings are used in memes that can be defined as new communicative replicators. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"The Pragmatics of Humour in Interactive Contexts" is a collective work edited by Esther Linares Bernabéu, focusing on the analysis of interactional humour in various contexts. The book comprises 10 chapters divided into sections covering digital settings, everyday interactions, and fictional settings. The articles within the book explore topics such as COVID-19 memes, political-electoral memes on Twitter, and humour in stand-up comedy, providing insights into the role of humour in communication. The volume incorporates diverse theoretical frameworks and methodological approaches, offering a comprehensive examination of humour in different interactive contexts." [Extracted from the article]

This study aims to investigate how the Brazilian far-right networks utilising humour appropriate transnational user-generated content and produce internet memes. Such memes undergo an adapted translation to local realities or become a message of a generalist and universal nature, sharing common rhetorical elements or values to contexts as far as Italy, Spain, Ukraine and the Middle East. Based on the analysis of the quiddities of these memes, the article is focused not on identifying the humorous mechanisms of such jokes, but on the ways they alternate between local and universal grammars. There is a wide literature that criticises the interpretation of the superiority theory for laughter. For such literature, the comparative analysis of jokes in different nations highlights how humour follows a transcultural logic (Davies, 1998, 2011). These studies often show that the same motto is found in different contexts, changing only the butt of the joke. This argument would demonstrate a certain universality of humour, against which an also vast body of texts advocates, including some critical humour studies dedicated to investigating humour and hatred, and focusing on neo-Nazis and supremacist jokes (Billig, 2001; Weaver, 2011). Despite these two major trends having widely referenced studies, the transnational character of far-right humour has been relatively neglected. This article proposes to combine these approaches and reconcile these literatures by discussing humorous memes from supporters of the former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro, which circulated in WhatsApp groups between 2018 and 2022. The article undertakes an interpretive analysis of such contents and draws attention to the connection between far-right humour and social media populism (Gerbaudo, 2018). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the forms and functions of Internet memes relating to the fuel subsidy removal policy of Nigeria´s President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, with a view to identifying the conceptual metaphors that underlie the creation of the memes. The data, which consist of fifty memes shared in the Nigerian WhatsApp space, are analysed qualitatively using aspects of Kress and van Leeuwen´s (2001) multimodal discourse analysis and Forceville´s (2015) multimodal metaphor theory. The findings reveal that the discourse, design and production of the multimodal resources enhance the conceptualization of the metaphorical representations in the memes. The study also shows the prevalence of the metaphors: fuel subsidy removal is a fraud, fuel subsidy removal is poverty and fuel subsidy removal is inequality among other conceptual metaphors to explain the people´s negative disposition towards the fuel subsidy removal policy. The study concludes that the forms and functions of the subsidy removal-related memes assist in revealing the multimodal conceptual metaphors underlying the memes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By examining a collection of health-related memes, I propose ways to categorize the illocutionary force of memes functioning as the speech act of advice. 200 English-language memes were gathered in the period 2018–2023 through Google image searches. I found the affiliative and disaffiliative strategies that Placencia (2012) described within Yahoo! Respuestas advice exchanges; meme multimodality, however, offered additional versions of these strategies: characters generated affiliation or disaffiliation and more humor appeared in affiliative and disaffiliative moves. I highlight four characteristics of advising in memes: the speech act is performed indirectly; both characters and wordplay can create humor; peer advisors must signal what authorizes them to give advice; and advice deploys mythbusting. Thus, memes align interlocutors within vernacular online conversations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ever-evolving social media discourse has witnessed an overwhelming use of memes to express opinions or dissent. Besides being misused for spreading malcontent, they are mined by corporations and political parties to glean the public's opinion. Therefore, memes predominantly offer affect-enriched insights towards ascertaining the societal psyche. However, the current approaches are yet to model the affective dimensions expressed in memes effectively. They rely extensively on large multimodal datasets for pre-training and do not generalize well due to constrained visual-linguistic grounding. In this paper, we introduce MOOD (Meme emOtiOns Dataset), which embodies six basic emotions. We then present ALFRED (emotion-Aware muLtimodal Fusion foR Emotion Detection), a novel multimodal neural framework that (i) explicitly models emotion-enriched visual cues, and (ii) employs an efficient cross-modal fusion via a gating mechanism. Our investigation establishes ALFRED's superiority over existing baselines by 4.94% F1. Additionally, ALFRED competes strongly with previous best approaches on the challenging Memotion task. We then discuss ALFRED's domain-agnostic generalizability by demonstrating its dominance on two recently-released datasets – HarMeme and Dank Memes, over other baselines. Further, we analyze ALFRED's interpretability using attention maps. Finally, we highlight the inherent challenges posed by the complex interplay of disparate modality-specific cues toward meme analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Amid the Russian invasion of Ukraine, TikTok has emerged as a pivotal platform, where creators utilize its compressed video formats to mediate the harsh realities of war zones. In this article, we examine 97 videos produced by 12 Ukrainian and Russian TikTok creators in response to the 2022 war in Ukraine. We focus on the playful embodiment of trauma using digital ethnography, analyzing creators' practices and their interconnected memetic communication on TikTok. We identified the use of play through three dynamic practices where platforms, bodies, and trauma converge: (1) the utilization of POV (point-of-view) aesthetic in shareable templates to convey the realities of war from engaging first-person perspectives; (2) the incorporation of dance as a means of embodied creative expression and amplification of trauma; and (3) the harnessing of platform features to facilitate whimsical dialogues with followers about life under war. We argue that playfulness is entrenched in and enacted through platform vernacular modes, driving creators to forge communal ties during adversities and shape the ongoing representation of trauma and its accelerated visibility in digital spaces. We present the concept of playful trauma as a framework for understanding the structural dissonance that arises when creators utilize their bodies alongside platform-specific humorous, ironic, or subversive dialects to perform and amplify the gravity of trauma. This tension provides a unique space for creators to convert their shared experiences of grief and resilience into participatory coping mechanisms. In doing so, they subject and harness their playful platformed body as both the medium and the message, documenting injustices, bearing witness, and galvanizing crowds into action during times of war. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study sheds light on interconnected topic dynamics across traditional news sources and social media platforms, emphasizing the influential role of topicality in shaping content popularity in social media. Using the Latent Dirichlet Allocation and BERTopic models, we define sets of 120 New York Times (NYT) topics to compare with 899,766 image-with-text memes from Reddit, showing that social media content aligns with many of the same topical patterns observed in news outlets. Topicality is formalized based on the temporal distributions of topics over the past 5 years. Using these topicality features, the investigation reveals significant correlations between the rising popularity of NYT topics and increased average upvotes on Reddit, particularly evident in "innovator" memes posted during the early stages of a topic's prevalence in the NYT. Furthermore, topicality features show significant predictive power over other content-based control features in a CatBoost classifier prediction of viral Reddit memes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Point of care testing (POCT) of nucleic acids holds significant importance in the realm of infectious disease prevention and control, as well as the advancement of personalized precision medicine. Nevertheless, conventional nucleic acid testing methods continue to face challenges such as prolonged detection times and dependence on extensive specialized equipment and personnel, rendering them unsuitable for point of care applications. Here, we proposed an innovative active centrifugal microfluidic system (ACMS) for automatic nucleic acid extraction, encompassing modules for active valve control and magnetic control. An on-chip centrifugal puncture valve (PV) was devised based on the elastic tolerance differences between silicone membranes and tinfoils to release pre-embedded liquid reagents on demand. Furthermore, we have utilized the returnable valve (RV) technology to accurately control the retention and release of liquids, leveraging the high elastic tolerance of the silicone membrane. By incorporating an online controllable magnetic valve, we have achieved controlled and rapid aggregation and dispersion of magnetic beads. The final chip encapsulates multiple reagents and magnetic beads necessary for nucleic acid extraction. Upon sample addition and loading into the instrument, automated on-chip sample loading and nucleic acid extraction, purification, and collection can be accomplished within 30 minutes, halving the overall operation time and even increasing the efficiency of pseudovirus extraction by three orders of magnitude. Consequently, real-time fluorescence quantitative PCR amplification has successfully detected multiple targets of the SARS-CoV-2 virus (with an impressive detection limit as low as 10 copies per µL), along with targeted sequencing analysis yielding a conformity rate of 99%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Visual political communication in the social media sphere is increasingly valuable for its ability to more effectively persuade viewers in this increasingly cluttered media landscape. Using multi-model discourse analysis and following the theoretical framework of Everyday Politics, this study focuses on a random sample (N = 200) of user-generated Internet memes from Chinese national youth propaganda campaign Youth Study. In addition, the author observed the sharing and dissemination of these memes in online public discussions. The findings reveal that young participants maintain a varying distance from politics. They employ strategies such as dark humor, hyperbole, contrast, and appropriation of pop culture to portray two key roles – the charming, brilliant followers and the abandoned, hunted breakers, and to construct four main scenarios-cute threat, humble beg, funny politics, and veiled resistance. This politicized propaganda campaign is being transformed from state aspirations to the creative daily cultural consumption of young netizens. This analysis contributes to the scholarly literature on youth subcultures, political mobilization, and visual propaganda in post-socialist China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A catapult into the world of social media, the title of our paper may be incoherent to some readers. What on earth does POV: me, an empath, sensing the linguistic urge (...) mean, and when and why would speakers say it? The title contains a jumble of three so-called text-memes – (1) POV , (2) me, an empath , VERB -ing X, and (3) the X urge to Y – all of which will be encountered in this paper. What we are calling 'text-memes' are memes that, in fairly neutral terms, have a purely textual form, as opposed to a pictorial one. Similar phenomena, which differ regarding their forms and functions, however, have been labelled 'snowclones' or 'phrasal templates' (cf. Pullum & Whitman, 2004; Know Your Meme, 2007–). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previously, it has been shown that transmissible and harmful misinformation can be viewed as pathogenic, potentially contributing to collective social epidemics. In this study, a biological analogy is developed to allow investigative methods that are applied to biological epidemics to be considered for adaptation to digital and social ones including those associated with misinformation. The model's components include infopathogens, tropes, cognition, memes, and phenotypes. The model can be used for diagnostic, pathologic, and synoptic/taxonomic study of the spread of misinformation. A thought experiment based on a hypothetical riot is used to understand how disinformation spreads. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Crave TV's niche hit Letterkenny is packed with exercises in wordplay and examinations of semantics that serve various functions in its presentation of life in small‐town Canada. This article examines how the progymnasmata of classical rhetorical education and the linguistic comedy bits in Letterkenny serve a similar role in preparing their users (and viewers) to both engage in a specific type of dialogue and establish and enforce moral boundaries as are accepted in the society in which they live and participate, and how fan circulation of these language memes reflects the transference of those morals to the culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With increasing integration of culture and politics in the digital age, memes tend to be politicized in academic research. Moving beyond the perspective of politicization, this study examines the depoliticizing potential of meme usage. Drawing on sassy socialist memes on the Chinese internet repackaging propaganda posters and slogans for online conversations, we conducted discourse analysis of these memes and interviews with meme users. We find that memes reappropriating political discourse are not necessarily used for political implications. Rather, their meanings vary in usage contexts that are mostly non-political daily conversations—political discourse in China has been gradually resignified to incorporate diverse non-political meanings in the memetic process of cultural reappropriation. Furthermore, the depoliticizing potential of memes is precisely built upon the politicization of propaganda discourse for mass persuasion. The discursive construction of propaganda and its indoctrination in Chinese society are potentially leading to its own deconstruction in the digital age. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the different use of internet memes between political party organisations and partisan spaces. We analyse the relationship between organisational logics and memes as a genre characterised by participation. We conduct a mixed-methods analysis of the internet memes posted by five Australian political parties, their youth branches, and partisan meme spaces during the 2022 Australian federal election. We identify three styles of memetic content created by political parties and partisans: professional, generic, and participatory. We argue that these different kinds of meme each relate to particular organisational logics, with the hierarchical structures of professional election campaigns largely hollowing out the participatory potential of internet memes in both production and form. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper tackles the critical challenge of detecting and mitigating unintended political bias in offensive meme detection. Political memes are a powerful tool that can be used to influence public opinion and disrupt voters' mindsets. However, current visual-linguistic models for offensive meme detection exhibit unintended bias and struggle to accurately classify non-offensive and offensive memes. This can harm the fairness of the democratic process either by targeting minority groups or promoting harmful political ideologies. With Hindi being the fifth most spoken language globally and having a significant number of native speakers, it is essential to detect and remove Hindi-based offensive memes to foster a fair and equitable democratic process. To address these concerns, we propose three debiasing techniques to mitigate the overrepresentation of majority group perspectives while addressing the suppression of minority opinions in political discourse. To support our approach, we curate a comprehensive dataset called Pol_Off_Meme, designed especially for the Hindi language. Empirical analysis of this dataset demonstrates the efficacy of our proposed debiasing techniques in reducing political bias in internet memes, promoting a fair and equitable democratic environment. Our debiased model, named D R T I M Att Adv , exhibited superior performance compared to the CLIP-based baseline model. It achieved a significant improvement of +9.72% in the F1-score while reducing the False Positive Rate Difference (FPRD) by -16% and the False Negative Rate Difference (FNRD) by -14.01%. Our efforts strive to cultivate a more informed and inclusive political discourse, ensuring that all opinions, irrespective of their majority or minority status, receive adequate attention and representation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Documentary is an art form based on real life that integrates various social semiotic resources. A Bite of China has been wellreceived for its perfect combination of local Chinese cuisines with related stories. This research selects this documentary as the research object and the attitude system of Systemic Functional Linguistics as the theoretical framework, and from the perspective of interpersonal meaning, it investigates the meme construction in A Bite of China through the analysis of semiotic resources of affect, judgement, and appreciation, the three subsystems of the attitude system. The study adopts a combined qualitative and quantitative approach, focusing on the semiotic and meme construction of the documentary series. The theoretical framework provided by the attitude system theory, coupled with the utilization of the analysis tool UAM 6.2 for data annotation and statistics, facilitates a detailed exploration of the configuration of semiotic resources. Results show: Firstly, in the affect subsystem, the un/happiness resources are the highest among the four types of affect resources. Through the selection of affect resources, the documentary producer portrays the complex emotions of ease and unease that people experience because of food. Secondly, in the judgement subsystem, the quantity of social sanction resources is much less than that of social esteem resources. From the choice of judgment resources, the documentary presents the qualities of Chinese people in the context of food culture, such as wisdom, resourcefulness, cleverness, diligence, resilience, honesty, generosity, and responsibility. Thirdly, in the appreciation subsystem, reaction resources account for more percentage than composition and social-valuation resources. With the retrieval of appreciation resources, the producer depicts the characteristics of Chinese food culture and outlines the intimate and harmonious relationship between people, food, life, and nature. Research indicates that this documentary reveals the three core memes: the culture of Chinese food, the emotion of home, and the cultural heritage. Theoretically, this study supports Systemic Functional Linguistics as an applicable linguistics. Practically, it offers a new perspective for interpreting cultural memes depicted in documentaries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This short article aims to strengthen Hume's case against the rationality of believing in religious miracles by incorporating certain lessons borrowed from the growing literature on the history and psychology of magic tricks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research investigates the possibility of using mathematical memes as a feedback strategy to address recurring mathematical errors of middle- and secondary-level students. To examine this possibility, we administered a questionnaire to 820 students, who stated their views on the potential use of mathematical memes as a feedback tool to address their assessment mistakes and prevent the repetition of errors. Results of the research revealed that students were receptive to mathematical memes and often shared them. They also acknowledged that the use of memes as assessment feedback had the potential to reduce their tendency to repeat mathematical errors significantly. The research highlights the possibility of using memes as a feedback strategy in assessments, which could dramatically impact student learning compared with traditional methods. The next phase of the research will be an experimental study about the effect of using mathematical memes as assessment feedback. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The proliferation of political memes in recent years allows us to assume that they are a new tool of political communication and that social networks increase the possibilities for civil society to express opinions and intervene in the debate on matters of public interest. This article aims to examine the memes that have been disseminated on Twitter since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in South Africa in the wake of the president's speeches to the nation to discover whether one can speak of a political rhetoric in memes and their argumentation. To this end, the research uses a qualitative-quantitative approach to classify the taxonomy of memes according to their content, combining the thematic classification of memes and the typology of images in digital discourse to discover the existence of the use of popular political rhetoric. The final sample comprises 351 memes, and the analysis shows that they used humour as a means of escape rather than as an effective way of sending political messages. Thus, the results reflect the existence of a resignification of popular culture that transcends memes as persuasive elements based on the inertia of popular rhetoric in contemporary political communication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The use of directives in communicating the nature of the pandemic and reference to social experiences were promoted using images on social media platforms. The images or memes are used to create awareness and reinforce the criteria for safety during the pandemic. Previous studies on internet memes have concentrated on humor generation, speaker-hearer shared knowledge, neologism, and multimodality among others, with insufficient attention paid to the use of directives and references in such coronavirus-motivated memes. This paper, therefore, examines how directives and references are employed in conveying expected social responsibilities through coronavirus-motivated internet memes in Nigeria and other socio-cultural contexts. For data, one hundred coronavirus-motivated memes were purposively selected from Facebook, and eight representative memes were subjected to pragmatic analysis using aspects of Jacob Mey's (2001. Pragmatics: An introduction, 2nd edn. USA: Blackwell Publishing) pragmatic acts theory to unearth insights from them. The paper observes that the various spheres of life that are relatable to an online audience help to express what the pandemic is about and enhance the meaning of the pandemic with the context of the use of the memes, giving clearer perspectives on the pandemic. Directives and references are useful tools for conveying social responsibilities to online audience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study aims to explore the moderator role of popular and iconic coolness dimensions on the relationship between hedonic versus utilitarian beauty product brands and high-status perceptions, using internet memes as stimuli. An experimental study was conducted to analyse whether two dimensions of brand coolness (popular and iconic) moderate the relationship between type of internet meme (utilitarian versus hedonic) and high-status. After conducting a pre-test, two internet memes were created for each condition, utilitarian and hedonic. In total, 428 completely answers were collected from an online MTurk panel, and the hypotheses were tested using moderation analysis. The results indicate that (i) hedonic brands are perceived as being high-status in the presence of both moderators (iconic and popular); (ii) utilitarian brands can be associated with high-status perceptions, if moderated by the popular dimension. Findings demonstrate that the popularity of the brand plays an important role in consumers perceptions. This study contributes to the marketing literature by analysing the relationship between three core dimensions of brand coolness, namely, iconic, popular, and high-status, regarding brands associated with hedonics and utilitarian products. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the intersection of meme theory, taboo humor, and political discourse, using the “Let’s Go Brandon!” meme and meme cycle as a case study for examining humor in contemporary political discourse and tribalism in the United States. It shows how memes – in the expanded sense – distill complex political ideas into easily shareable content, influencing public opinion and political engagement. The analysis considers the use of taboo language and humor, such as the use of “fuck,” as a form of rebellious use of profanity that challenges societal norms of civility in public engagement. By analyzing the role of memes and the cultural artefacts generated from them in political communication, this study provides insights into the evolution of political discourse and the sociocultural impact of memetic humor in the digital age.

Durante o período da pandemia de Covid-19, a educação enfrentou múltiplas dificuldades, mas também surgiu a oportunidade de explorar novas formas de ensino, especialmente por meio de recursos digitais. Nesse contexto, um produto educacional oriundo de uma pesquisa de mestrado, intitulado “Literacia na Educação Financeira Escolar: vídeo digital como recurso para uma Educação Matemática Crítica”, emergiu com o propósito de oferecer abordagens pedagógicas centradas na Educação Financeira (EF), utilizando vídeos e memes como ferramentas facilitadoras. Baseada em preocupações sociais, políticas, éticas e ambientais, a concepção da EF foi enriquecida pela perspectiva da Educação Matemática Crítica, conforme defendida por Ole Skovsmose. Através de um curso virtual na plataforma Sympla.com.br, professores e estudantes compartilharam experiências e compreensões sobre a EF, produzindo vídeos e memes. As práticas pedagógicas adotadas exploraram as diversas linguagens das mídias digitais, beneficiando tanto a aprendizagem matemática quanto não-matemática. A integração de recursos digitais, como vídeos e memes, mostrou-se promissora para tornar o ensino da Educação Financeira mais atrativa e acessível, promovendo uma compreensão crítica e oportunidades de desenvolvimento de habilidades previstas na Base Nacional Comum Curricular (BNCC).

La idea de “marxismo cultural” tan extendida entre los colectivos de derecha alternativa adopta la forma de un mito oscuro y confuso que funciona como una teoría de la conspiración. El artículo ofrece, en su primera parte, un recorrido por la génesis, estructura y sentido del mito, colocando el foco de atención en el engañoso vínculo entre marxismo y filosofías posmodernas, esencial para que la teoría de la conspiración resulte operativa. La segunda parte investiga el recorrido y alcance del fenómeno a través de los social media: apropiacionismo visual, memes y propaganda antimarxista componen el ideario simbólico de la ultraderecha populista.

The paper discusses the changes in humor that have occurred since the advent of the internet, in the past quarter of a century. The cognitive mechanisms that produce humor have not changed. However, since 2000, roughly when the Internet 2.0 (social web) is said to have started, there have been some minor changes at the level of slang, and especially the introduction of emojis, emoticons, and emotes. At the discursive level, the introduction of large group conversations (polylogues) is a major difference. Internet humor tends to be short. Probably the most significant innovation of humor since 2000 is the introduction of memes (“image macros” i.e., images plus text) and meme cycles (i.e., groups of memes that are thematically or formally related). Another interesting phenomenon is the blurring of the distinction between online satirical texts and fake media, to the point that it is sometimes hard to distinguish between parodies, actual news stories, and constructed stories (fake news). This has contributed in part to the widespread use of humor as a cover to spread white suprematist or neonazi propaganda. Another significant change is the advent of the participatory culture of social media, where the users (the audience of traditional media) become prod- users (i.e., they produce the media themselves), taking advantage of the affordances of the media. Yet another change is the blending of mirth and embarrassment, two emotions that were considered incompatible until “cringe humor” became popular in internet humor. In particular, the paper focuses on transmedial humor. Humor is found to be a transmedial constant, however the inter semiotic translation process required to transfer the text from one modality to another is found to affect in small but not indifferent ways the humor itself. _________________________________________________ Resumen Questo articolo discute i cambiamenti dall’avvento della rete (internet), a partire dal 2000. I meccanismi cognitivi dell’umorismo non sono cambiati, ma ci sono stati alcuni cambiamenti nello slang, e l’introduzione di emoji, emotes, ed emoticons. Al livello de discorso, si nota l’avvento di conversazioni tra gruppi larghi. I testi comici tendono alla brevità. La maggiore novità è stata l’avvento dei memes (“image macros”) che consistono di immagini spesso con testo sovrapposto e dei cicli di meme, cioè gruppi di meme connessi tematicamente o formalmente. Altro fenomeno interessante è la perdita di distinzioni tra le notizie fasulle (fake news) e la satira, al punto che a volte è difficile distinguere tra di loro. Questo ha contribuito parzialmente all’uso di materiale comico da parte di gruppi neonazisti e di estremisti della destra per celare e diffondere la loro propaganda. Un altro cambiamento è l’avvento della cultura participatoria su internet (social media) in cui i consumatori di media ne diventano produttori, utilizzando appieno le “affordance” dei media. Un altro cambiamento ancora è la commistione dell’allegria e dell’imbarazzo, due emozioni che erano considerate incompatibili, prima dell’avvento del “cringe humor.” L’articolo riconcentra particolarmente sulla transmedialità. Il comico è una constante transmediale, tuttavia la traduzione intersemiotica necessaria a trasferire il testo da un medium a un altro influenza in maniera minore ma non indifferente il comico stesso. Parole chiave: Transmedia ; Umorismo ; Traduzione intersemiotica ; Internet; Memes