Internet memes have become a popular format for expressing individual political opinions in social media. Based on a quantitative online survey of political Internet meme users from fringe web communities and sharing platforms (n = 482), this study examines the factors related to political expression in Internet memes. The analysis reveals that political Internet meme usage depends on users’ political interest and the intensity of social media prosumption. Political Internet meme usage is also positively related to users’ motivations for political engagement and internal political efficacy. Moreover, the use of Internet memes for the expression of political opinions is related to users’ online and offline political participation. This study represents the first empirical exploration of users who create and share political Internet memes. The results contribute to the body of knowledge on changing and elusive participatory practices in social media and shift the focus from general social media usage to a specific type of content.
The adaptation of Internet memes is an important practice in social media that is an excellent subject of investigation to explain (the instantiation of) multimodal constructions with regard to social-cognitive processes. In this article, we would like to plead for paying more attention to Internet memes as linguistic research object. By using a qualitative-quantitative corpus-pragmatic approach, we worked out the multimodal character of selected constructions being instantiated within adaptations of the so called Merkel-Meme (n=632). We discuss two constructions, which can only be thought of through the interplay of a pictorial component that shows a gesture and varying linguistic elements. This is on the one hand the construction [[so* adjektiv]AdjP + Ausprägungsgrad anzeigende Armgeste] and on the other the construction [[so* artikel (adjektiv) nomen]NP + Umfang anzeigende Armgeste]. Therefore, it becomes evident that the pictorial component influences the linguistic part of the Internet meme.
Im Kontext des G7-Gipfels im Juni 2015 entstand ein Foto von Angela Merkel und Barack Obama, das Twitter eroberte. Der vorliegende Beitrag beleuchtet die Netzwerkstrukturen, unter denen die Verbreitung des sogenannten Merkel-Memes auf Twitter stattfand. Twitter mit seiner vernetzten Nutzerschaft soll dabei als soziales System verstanden werden, in dem durch memetische Funktionen (u. a. Retweets, Hashtags) Diffusionsprozesse begünstigt werden. Im Rückgriff auf die Annahmen der Diffusionsforschung wurde eine quantitative Inhaltsanalyse der Tweets zum Merkel-Meme (n = 3253) durchgeführt. Die Ergebnisse zeigen, dass die Diffusion des Memes maßgeblich von der Beteiligung früher Übernehmergruppen (Rogers 2003) abhängt. Diese zeichnen sich vor allem durch ihre dichte Vernetzung innerhalb des sozialen Systems Twitter aus.
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