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In social networks, communication is dynamic due to the different semiotic codes used. This research analyses the multimodal discourse on X when images (photos, videos, GIFs, memes, emojis, etc.) and texts are combined to create an attractive visual narrative for followers. The main objective is to identify common semiotic structures or formats in this network. The methodology is exploratory in nature and is based on the selection of a strategic non-probabilistic sample of accounts from the educational ecosystem. These accounts were randomly selected and aimed at the educational community in X. The results of the analysis support the communicative tendency to use these multimodal texts that combine visual and verbal narrative in X publications. Therefore, further study of this strategy is warranted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Memes are considered a communication tool that allows groups of individuals to form a community and express themselves through three semiotic resources: visuals, text and humour. They provide new references that contribute to the construction of identities. This is especially true within university student communities. In this study, we use two students' meme pages in South Africa, UCT Just Kidding (@uctjustkidding) and Wits Just Kidding (@witsjustkidding), as case studies to investigate how students use memes to highlight their everyday experiences and the values attached to these memes. We also explore how memes portray significant issues affecting students' development and progression within the broader South African higher education institutions. Using semi-structured interviews conducted with 7 meme creators and administrators, textual and visual analysis of 14 memes from both pages and Marx's labour theory of value as a theoretical framework, we argue that students use memes to communicate and raise awareness on salient issues affecting them. We, therefore, underscore memes as a powerful tool for constructing social, political, economic and cultural realities among university students in particular and communities in general. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates international users' reception of a dark-humour meme tweeted by Ukraine's governmental Twitter (X) account on 7 December 2021 as part of its exceptional cultural practice of posting humorous memes. Tweeters' responses to the 'headaches meme' are examined through a discourse-analytic lens. An emphasis is placed on the appreciation of the humour (emanating from the meme or its contextual embedding) and other forms of humour support demonstrated by its online indicators. The overarching aim is to distil and compare user reactions to the meme in two sociopolitical contexts—before and after the invasion of Ukraine that Russia mounted on 24 February 2022—based on two equal quote tweet samples. While the findings reveal a relative decrease in humour appreciation after the invasion, the same diversified reactions encompassing humour support or its lack and politically polarised discourses making for participatory digital warfare are detected in both parts of the dataset. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We did an exploratory investigation of the transmission of language memes using the meme concept. Using 62 Chinese language memes as an example, we mined the emotions of netizens' posts containing these languages on Weibo, a Chinese social platform and successfully demonstrated language memes' potential for eliciting both positive and negative emotions. By comparing the features of emotional changes with the features of the four different language meme transmission processes (bursty, continuous expansion, continuous decline and steady) classified in this study, the results of correlation analysis objectively illustrate the existed connection between emotion and language meme transmission. Specifically, we discovered that the positive emotion 'good' and the negative emotion 'disgust' are the most obvious emotions elicited by language memes. Additionally, 79% of language memes' transmission processes were correlated with emotions (positive or negative). And most language memes' transmission process belongs to the bursty type, especially the latency → burst mode. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Political memes represent an important medium through which people engage with politics. Using content analysis of 3,879 memes from partisan Facebook Pages with significant reach across the 2016–2022 U.S. national election cycles, we analyze political meme composition and amplification. Memes were consistent with the actors, issues, and strategies mentioned across elections. Results indicate that stably owned or newly emergent issues received more shares on Facebook as did uncivil memes. The findings are normatively troubling, as the political memes likely to be amplified are those featuring new issues, stably owned partisan issues, and elements of uncivil discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article addresses Internet memes’ usage in Russian far-right discourse, seeking to evaluate how it corresponds with the basic roles of memes in political communication and the extent to which the Russian far-right memetic vernacular is universally translatable. The article uses qualitative content analysis and multimodal discourse analysis of the “Right-Wing Memes” community on the Russian social networking site Vkontakte. The Russian far-right builds its social identity by filling the floating signifiers of the “left-wing,” “migrants,” and “Russian national state” with relevant meanings through the memetic means of visual humor, bitter irony, and parallel comparison. These construct the in- and out-groups, convey the ideological message, and give voice to the groups excluded from the mainstream. However, although the Russian far-right employs globalized memetic tropes, the content is mainly country-specific, which, together with the language barrier, hinders the formation of a universal far-right memetic discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social media afford the proliferation of doctoral memes across numerous, generally anonymous, accounts spread over multiple platforms – the timeline where the PhD candidate starts off gleaming with health and beaming in delight and ends up an overweight, dishevelled wreck. Or the exhausted cat who has managed to write one line of their thesis in an entire day. But should these memes be a cause for concern? After all, it’s just humour, albeit somewhat dark. My exploratory thematic analysis of a corpus of 292 doctoral memes and a theorisation of memes as public pedagogy, point to strong resonances between the memes and research on the doctoral experience. This enhances their credibility as a source of information. Based on the analysis, I suggest we might seriously examine doctoral meme-based learning, focusing on the potential of their gallows humour to support identity formation, community building, coping and wellbeing. Memes may be small but could potentially do useful work for both doctoral researchers and their supervisors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study tries to ascertain the attitudes of tertiary learners’ internet meme consumption and its potential for pedagogical implications. Internet memes, as multifaceted cultural artefacts, have become pervasive in contemporary digital communication, influencing societal discourse and online interactions. Despite their prevalence, research on learners’ everyday experiences and attitudes towards memes in educational settings is a rarity. This research therefore aims to examine the affective and cognitive attitudes of undergraduate students towards internet meme culture. Utilising a cross-sectional survey design, data was collected from 119 second-year undergraduate students at St. Joseph's College (Autonomous), Tiruchirappalli, India. The questionnaire focused on measuring both affective and cognitive appeal towards meme consumption. The analysis revealed that memes as an educational tool have a positive impact on the affective and cognitive domains in a classroom setting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on how political humor, particularly through memes, engages with cultural representations of capitalist extraction and colonialism. Topics include the role of memes in critiquing the mining industry, the intersection of digital culture and extractivism, and the decolonial perspectives on resource extraction and its global impacts.

The article focuses on the role of memes in shaping historical understanding and engagement with the past in the digital era. Topics include the intersection of presentism and historical scholarship, the comparison between memes and Renaissance emblems as cultural expressions, and how memes offer a different relationship to history, beyond trauma and linear time.

The article focuses on the political and ideological dimensions of internet memes and their cultural significance. Topics include the evolution of memes from simple image macros to tools of political expression, the tension between memes as sameness-machines and difference-machines, and the rise of exploitable memes as templates for user engagement and social commentary.

The article focuses on the depiction of internet speech in Patricia Lockwood's "No One Is Talking About This". Topics include the use of free indirect discourse to blur personal and collective voices, the fragmentation and homogenization of language online, and the relationship between memes and the voice of the internet. The article examines how Lockwood's novel represents the fluidity of identity and voice within digital spaces.

The article focuses on the relationship between memes, particularly vaporwave, and the experience of depression. Topics include the aesthetic qualities of vaporwave and its connection to depression, how memes contribute to the collapse of meaning, and the impact of internet culture on how depression is expressed and understood.

The article focuses on the aesthetic properties of internet memes and their relation to cultural and technological contexts. Topics include the distinction between analog and digital forms, the collective nature of meme circulation, and the association of memes with concepts of authenticity and sociality.

The article focuses on the "Sleepy Asian" meme, exploring its rise in popular culture and its racialized implications in the context of digital media and capitalism. Topics include the commodification of sleep in the attention economy, the relationship between Asian racialization and labor dynamics, and how public portrayals of Asian sleep reinforce stereotypes about industriousness and social ineptness.

The article focuses on the similarities between early modern emblem books and contemporary internet memes. Topics include the use of images and text in both emblems and memes, the repetitive and opaque nature of Sce`ve's De´lie, and the way both emblems and memes reflect the cyclical, often absurd, nature of love and self-recognition.

The article focuses on the disembodied nature of chatbots and their connection to the human body. Topics include the role of bots and chatbots in online interactions, the evolution of chatbots as both memes and cultural symbols, and the impact of the body's presence or absence in virtual spaces, especially in terms of gender and race.

The article focuses on the emergence and significance of the "Dark Brandon" meme in the context of contemporary political memes. Topics include the evolution of memes as political tools, the cultural impact of online irony and "meme magic," and the contrast between right-wing and left-wing meme strategies in shaping political discourse.

The article focuses on the meme "This is Fine" and its unique, unchanging nature in contrast to the typical adaptability of memes. Topics include the role of memes in expressing acquiescence and vulnerability, the cultural significance of meme circulation in the context of blackness, and the concept of domitability in contrast to individual sovereignty.

The article focuses on the cultural significance and aesthetics of memes in contemporary society. Topics include the meme as both a form of social commentary and a viral cultural artifact, the tension between surface-level humor and deeper implications in memes, and the role of memes in shaping political discourse and identity.

Memes have emerged as a prevalent and influential aspect of contemporary culture and their use is a significant feature of social and relational communications. Yet scant research exists within Higher Education on the use of memes to assist in the research of reactions, emotions, and perceptions. The use of meme-making as a qualitative research tool is grounded in visual research methods. This paper explores a framework for using meme-making as a research tool within Higher Education and considers two case studies that demonstrate how meme-making can been used to capture and communicate the experiences of students. Through these case studies, meme-making was revealed to introduce an element of levity and humour whilst being versatile, flexible, and easily dovetailed to other qualitative approaches. Familiarity with the medium and construction process drew upon an instilled sense of ownership revealing the method to be accessible across a diverse participant base. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Internet memes, a bourgeoning form of communication, resemble accessory elements of language. However, internet memes are conceptually complex. Their collective re-creative process relies heavily on copying underlying works, usually without asking for prior-permission from their rightsholders. Internet memes challenge core copyright assumptions on reasons of re-creation and modes of exploitation. Without a fundamental rethink of this mismatch, internet meme culture may be threatened. Going forward, copyright reforms should be holistic and distinguish between traditional and newer forms of re-creative processes. This article proposes that existing copyright can be flexibly interpreted to limit private property rights of underlying works and meme variations when they are used as internet memes, so as to facilitate their adaptation and support socio-cultural discourse. This article proposes a two-step holistic interpretation: copyright can conceptualise and confer limited rights for underlying works and meme variations when they are copied and re-used as internet memes. Copyright can also conceptualise a narrower scope of property rights by flexibly interpreting a combination of fundamental notions, including joint authorship, fair dealing, idea-expression, or user rights. This holistic approach sits comfortably with user-creators and their blurry cultural production-consumption patterns, alongside their nuanced (non)economic use of internet memes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay provides an analysis of texts and images (memes) that have been widely distributed and discussed within the contemporary fascist/national socialist spectrum, and that articulate a pointed antagonism toward modernity. The meaning of the term 'modernity' is seldom clearly defined, but it can be generally understood, in this context, as referring to liberal or progressive stances on current hot-button topics concerning race, gender or sexuality as well as broader post-Enlightenment conceptions of democracy, equality or human rights. It is often contrasted with a mythologized past and an idealized future. Fascists thus style themselves as an elite-yet-beleaguered minority with the courage to contradict modern consensus values, despite all social or material costs. In particular, this essay takes a closer look at the online genre known as 'fashwave'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores acts of humour that enact citizens as political subjects in the face of state violence and practices of controlled incorporation of racialised Afro-Brazilian others. To do this I analyse hitherto unstudied material from the online memes that followed the forced disappearance of Mr Amarildo de Souza by the ‘pacifying’ police in Rio de Janeiro. Doing this I show how multi-modal online memes that take an ironic stance towards state-violence can be understood as enacting a radical equality which subverts the state-sanctioned racialised and gendered distribution of unequal functions and places that serves to ‘pacify’ threatening racialised others. Thus, I argue that the act of joking is an act of citizenship because it presupposes equality while enacting an incongruity between this equality and the reality of racist state violence, and its ostensible purpose of ‘saving’ racialised victims. In this way ironic memes can provide an important contribution to theory of citizenship, which hitherto has not involved the study of humour as a political act. Thus, if the political nature of humour involves incongruity between conceptualisation and experience, abstract and sensory/objective, sanctity and profanity, dignity and baseness, acts that ironically enact these incongruities as existing in and between state-discourse and practice are deeply political acts and need to be studied as such. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Humor in the classroom has been the subject of analysis and research for decades, and there is hardly an educator who would deny that well-presented and thematically related humorous elements create a positive and intriguing atmosphere in the class and contribute to reducing the students' tension and increasing their initiative in the learning process. It is also well known that good humor is the one which relates to the interests and attitudes of the audience. What type of humor will be understood and well accepted by a generation that does not know a world without meme culture in its various manifestations? When R. Dawkins introduced the term "meme" in 1976, he hardly imagined that he was giving a name to a phenomenon that would grow to such an extent that, almost half a century later, the director of the Center for Digital Culture at Kings College London would say: "memes are one of the clearest manifestations of the fact there is such a thing as digital culture." Is there a place for meme culture in the digitized learning process and does it have the potential to improve the communication between the lecturer and the students? The presented below material will look for the answers to these questions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article "Source of All Healing" delves into the concept of God's body being created in the image of man by various individuals across different nations and centuries. It explores the complexities of understanding God's physical form and the challenges of using traditional terminology. The text reflects on the interconnectedness of all living beings and the universe within the body of God, emphasizing the importance of desire and awakening to access this divine presence. [Extracted from the article]

This is a brief overview of the worldline and memes of Yurii Reshetnyak (1929–1921), the Russian leader of geometric analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on WhatsApp political memes is still scarce. Nevertheless, since the 2018 Brazilian elections, the platform has attracted the attention of the media in general, after complaints of its use to spread misinformation and extremist messages by supporters of the Bolsonaro Government. Despite this, the effects of the WhatsApp platform on the user practices of sharing memes are still poorly understood. This article proposes a cross-platform comparative approach, between the digital memes on Twitter and those on WhatsApp, to better understand how user practices are affected by some of the structural singularities of these platforms. Based on a sample of 1,794 memes collected on both platforms, this study finds that there is a higher than expected frequency of ideological memes on WhatsApp in relation toTwitter. The findings suggest that WhatsApp's environmental opacity favors the emergence of an extremist memesphere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Internet memes are a special type of digital content that is shared through social media. They have recently emerged as a popular new format of media communication. They are often multimodal, combining text with images and aim to express humor, irony, sarcasm, or sometimes convey hatred and misinformation. Automatically detecting memes is important since it enables tracking of social and cultural trends and issues related to the spread of harmful content. While memes can take various forms and belong to different categories, such as image macros, memes with labeled objects, screenshots, memes with text out of the image, and funny images, existing datasets do not account for the diversity of meme formats, styles and content. To bridge this gap, we present the PolyMeme dataset, which comprises approximately 27 K memes from four categories. This was collected from Reddit and a part of it was manually labelled into these categories. Using the manual labels, deep learning networks were trained to classify the unlabelled images with an estimated error rate of 7.35%. The introduced meme dataset in combination with existing datasets of regular images were used to train deep learning networks (ResNet, ViT) on meme detection, exhibiting very high accuracy levels (98% on the test set). In addition, no significant gains were identified from the use of regular images containing text. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

TikTok has emerged as a powerful platform for the dissemination of mis- and disinformation about the war in Ukraine. During the initial three months after the Russian invasion in February 2022, videos under the hashtag #Ukraine garnered 36.9 billion views, with individual videos scaling up to 88 million views. Beyond the traditional methods of spreading misleading information through images and text, the medium of sound has emerged as a novel, platform-specific audiovisual technique. Our analysis distinguishes various war-related sounds utilized by both Ukraine and Russia and classifies them into a mis- and disinformation typology. We use computational propaganda features—automation, scalability, and anonymity—to explore how TikTok's auditory practices are exploited to exacerbate information disorders in the context of ongoing war events. These practices include reusing sounds for coordinated campaigns, creating audio meme templates for rapid amplification and distribution, and deleting the original sounds to conceal the orchestrators' identities. We conclude that TikTok's recommendation system (the "for you" page) acts as a sound space where exposure is strategically navigated through users' intervention, enabling semi-automated "soft" propaganda to thrive by leveraging its audio features. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the complementary role of Cultural Linguistics in making up for the inadequacies of linguistics‐oriented theories of humour in unpacking culturally embedded meanings in humorous discourse. On the basis of purposively sampled internet memes, it analyses different types of cultural presuppositions in some food metaphors that netizens in Nigerian online interaction appropriate to negotiate gender and class identities, which reflect inherent beliefs, shared values and communicative practices in the Nigerian world. It applies Sharifian's categorisation of the analytical tools of Cultural Linguistics―cultural schemas, cultural categories and cultural metaphors. The article concludes that mental spaces and conceptual blending are instrumental in forging a holistic conceptual approach, which can account for not only the linguistic but also cultural and discursive meanings of humour as an essentially social and interactional phenomenon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the 2016 Diba Expedition to Facebook, a mass collective organized campaign directed at independence-leaning Taiwanese individuals and institutions, as an example of cyber nationalism through a highly organized meme war between anti- and pro-Taiwan independence users on Facebook. Drawing upon a social semiotic multimodal discourse analysis of the nationalist campaign, this study examines the ways Diba members deployed multimodal elements of political propaganda and popular culture in the preparation and mobilization of the campaign as well as the playful memetic interaction between the two camps on the battlefield. The analysis and discussion underscore the playful and carnivalesque ecology of Chinese social media that users deployed in the 2016 expedition while also demonstrating the dilemma of undertaking a Chinese nationalism campaign beyond the Great Firewall, where those based in the Mainland needed to overcome the state's regulations of online security to defend the motherland. This study contributes to the growing research on cyber nationalism in China and adds a further dimension to the study of Chinese social media. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Covid-19 pandemic and the intensified digitalization of life-worlds has especially affected younger generations, also in Austria. In this paper, we approach digital practices of 43 young adults between 16 and 18 years in a frame-analytical perspective to understand forms of politicization during the Covid-19 pandemic. We analyze memes in order to make sense of youth's life-worlds during the pandemic. The memes were created by youth as a result of a workshop series with the researchers. Our research shows that memes have provided a means for engaging and dealing digitally and emotionally with Covid-19-related problems. We show that the respective youth address educational, social and democratic issues by problematizing 'homeschooling as overburdening', a 'lack of planning' and 'social divisions'. Moreover, meme-creation offers a perspective on how youth express and create a 'sense of community' through digital practices. During the pandemic youth have increasingly come to understand and represent themselves as a group with shared experiences in digital space, going along with a positioning as 'younger generation' vis-à-vis older generations. We argue that the fact that the pandemic has affected youth heavily and the fact that they do not see their issues and needs represented by political representatives or media shows the potential and limits of digital spaces for younger generations to connect (politically). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This article makes a critical contribution to the study of digital reactionary movements by tracing the resonant circulation of "the cuck" memes across various levels of racialized and gendered subjectivity. It argues that the cuck meme resonates through composing an affective narrative of deferred and stolen enjoyment at the intersection of personal, social, and international politics. It follows the meme's digital movements across pornographic anxieties around the sexual prowess of the Black other (the personal), the Gamergate events of 2014 and its politics of geek masculine injury (the social), and the perceived threat of immigration to the enjoyment-space designated as the nation (the international). Throughout, the paper makes three contributions. First, it theorizes the structuring role played by enjoyment as a political factor in historically shaping political subjectivity. Second, it shows how this political factor animates the transnational politics of contemporary reactionary movements and how they affectively and discursively perceive their various political resentments through narratives of enjoyment. Third, it demonstrates how memes as specific technical-aesthetic products allow the common resonance and articulation of these various resentments to shape a site of rectification for an enjoyment that is felt to be lost. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the deployment of metaphors in the BBC Yoruba-medium football results of the English Premier League, examining how cultural metaphorical choices shape meaning in online sport discourse. Through a discourse analysis of Yoruba-medium football results, the study reveals how metaphors drawn from Yoruba cultural milieu and everyday life are used to create vivid descriptions of game events, players, and teams. The study relies on Lakoff's conceptual metaphor theory, complemented by Kress and van Leeuwen's social semiotic approach to multimodality. Findings reveal that metaphors describe game events, teams, and players, thus, framing the contest in unique and evocative manners, drawing on cultural and shared knowledge to shape the understanding of the game in an adversarial sense. This study, therefore, argues that metaphors are deployed to convey deeper cultural meanings and values, and add creativity to match results. The findings point to the role of language and culture in shaping the experiences of football fandom in sports and media. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As mobile messengers gain popularity, visual images affect digital communication, leading to new interaction patterns. This review sums up scientific experience in describing digital communication facilitated by emoji and memes. The review covered scientific articles that reported empirical research on visual communication in digital environment in such open research databases as CyberLeninka, PubMed, Google Scholar, eLibrary, and ResearchGate in 2019–2024. The current rise in visual communication tools seems to reflect the general visual shift in modern culture, associated with the changes in human psychology brought about by total digitalization. Visual communication tools have a high information capacity, which hinders their interpretation, thus modifying the complex of individual and socio-psychological characteristics of interlocutors in an attempt to ensure mutual understanding. The review can be used to improve digital communication that employs alternative communication tools.

This article highlights the use of memes as a tool for creating and conveying meaning through multiple modes of communication in language classrooms. Memes have emerged as a popular form of communication in the digital age, utilizing a combination of images, texts, and cultural references to convey messages and create shared understandings. The Story Memes project in language learning can harness students’ digital literacy skills and leverage the engaging and relatable nature of memes to enhance language-learning experiences. This article explores the interplay among memes, multimodality, and meaning-making, demonstrating how memes can foster intercultural understanding, interpersonal connections, and critical thinking skills in alignment with the 5Cs standards. Additionally, it provides practical guidelines for designing lesson activities that incorporate story memes and cater to learners at different proficiency levels, ranging from beginners to advanced.

Scholars have long recognized the power of traditional storytelling for engaging students and enhancing the learning experience. This study explores how integrating memes into storytelling, creating "memetized stories", can be an innovative strategy to teach geography concepts. Utilizing constructivism as a theoretical lens, in-depth interviews were conducted with 10 geography teachers who integrate memetized stories into their teaching. The findings reveal that memetized stories can be utilized in student projects, presentations, and to teach environmental issues, cultural sensitivity, and critical thinking skills. Integrating memetized stories into these pedagogical activities promotes active student participation, collaborative learning, and increased engagement and interest in the subject matter. However, teachers must ensure that memetized stories are used appropriately and sensitively. When done well, memetized stories provide a visual and humorous means for students to learn geography concepts through interaction with visual media, aligning with multimodal learning approaches. This study provides valuable insights into the potential benefits and drawbacks of incorporating memetized stories into the geography curriculum. Overall, the findings suggest that memetized stories can be an innovative and engaging strategy for teaching geography to millennial students in the digital age.

Meme marketing taps into the potential of digital culture. Despite considerable practitioner interest, meme marketing is under-researched. The present study aims to fulfil two purposes. First, to conceptualise meme marketing, we draw on speech act theory and the theory of consumption values to define meme marketing. On this basis, we differentiate meme marketing from relevant digital marketing constructs, including e-WOM, digital content marketing, and viral marketing. Second, to validate the proposed definition, we empirically perform a qualitative content analysis to taxonomize meme marketing speech acts. Based on the content analysis of 699 meme marketing posts, we found that meme marketing serves as a rich communication source, sending intentions of the brand through single (i.e. assertive, directive, expressive) as well as combined (i.e. assertive entailing expressive, assertive entailing directive) speech acts that provide customers with epistemic, emotional, and social values. Important theoretical and managerial implications for academic researchers and marketers are also discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]