Colonizing Pepe: Internet Memes as Cyberplaces

Pelletier-Gagnon, Jérémie; Trujillo, Axel Pérez

doi:10.1177/1206331218776188

Cited by 23 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 13 publications

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“…However, in Spain, memes from the right wing and left wing are similar in terms of criticism, polarization, and sometimes use the same icons or meme characters to expose their ideas (similar to the Italian case, where political satire and polarization were distinctive aspects during the beginning of the pandemic; Vicari & Murru, 2020). This stands in contrast to the United States, where the (arguably more radical) alt-right using specific meme characters such as Pepe the Frog (Nagle, 2017), whose image (almost always linked to this ideology) has never recovered its original meaning (Pelletier-Gagnon et al, 2021).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

From Polarization to Hate: Portrait of the Spanish Political Meme

Paz

Soria

González-Aguilar

2021

Social Media + Society

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Political polarization in Spain has been aggravated by a left-wing coalition government and the rise of the extreme right in the context of health and economic crisis created by COVID-19. This article delves into the collective story that memes offer of this context and aims to establish a categorization that can be used for comparison with other countries. We carried out a content analysis of 636 Spanish political memes published on Twitter throughout 2020. Current affairs were taken into account, as well as the frame, and rhetorical elements, references to popular culture, and symbols. We also took into consideration the objectives of the message and the presence of offensive content. We demonstrate that these memes do not play a subversive role, but rather contribute to the polarization and fragmentation of the digital public, echoing the existing ideological confrontation. They do not deliver new ideas, but only reproduce expressions and disqualifications already existing in the society, although the disinhibition of anonymity magnifies the intensity. Current affairs are an excuse to convey ideological position, and political communication becomes more emotional. There are no significant differences in terms of political polarization between left and right, and criticism toward politicians is mainly of personal and moral nature. Hate speech on other social media appears in these cultural creations, highlighting the misogyny toward women politicians regardless of their political party. The rhetorical and expressive resources are adapted to this confrontation, and there is little innovation because it is subject to the understanding of the message.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

From Polarization to Hate: Portrait of the Spanish Political Meme

Paz

Soria

González-Aguilar

2021

Social Media + Society

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“…The ‘Sad Toad’ meme is adapted from ‘Pepe the Frog’ created by American cartoonist Matt Furie in 2015. While ‘Pepe the Frog’ was used to convey various feelings of sadness, sympathy and political hate within the American context (Pelletier-Gagnon & Pérez Trujillo Diniz, 2018), the meme is generally used to express disconsolation in Sang culture and bears a resemblance to Jiang Zemin whose doctrine of ‘Three Represents’ is widely satirised in e’gao . With its sickly green colour and exaggerated curved mouth, the ‘Sad Toad’ represents youth as being disconsolate in response to the official discourses of harmony, positivity and dreams.…”

Section: ‘Sad Toad’: Sang As Disconsolationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Sangsubculture in post-reform China

Tan

Cheng

2020

Global Media and China

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This article examines Sang (丧) subculture within the context of positive energy (正能量) in post-reform China, and how as an emergent subculture it is characterised by feelings of defeatism and loss. Chinese youths share Sang memes via social media as a form of affective identification to communicate their sense of disenchantment with the ‘main melody’ of official discourse in post-reform China, and in this sense it is similar to other Internet cultures such as e’gao and diaosi. However, unlike subcultures in the West, Sang subculture does not constitute a form of political resistance, but expresses instead an inchoate feeling of loss among Chinese youths. This article asks two research questions: how does Sang subculture parody normative subject positions of youth constructed by official state discourse, and what does it reveal about the subjectivity of its participants? This article employs Raymond Williams’ concept of ‘structures of feeling’ within a semiotic framework to analyse three sets of Sang memes to understand the processes of subjectivity formation and the affective significance to its participants. Through semiotic analysis of Sang memes and semi-structured interviews with 20 participants aged between 18 and 26, we find that Sang subculture is a current of thought-feeling due to a perceived incapacity by Chinese youths to live up to the ideological re-positioning within official consciousness.

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“…One meme may thus bring about different social effects (e.g., acceptance, dismissal, etc.) in each site while being relevant and constitutive of the effects generated in other sites to which memes or their audiences in question pertain (Pelletier-Gagnon and Diniz 2018). Seeing that memes inflect the sociality around them in terms of setting preferences and expectations with regard to communicative and behavioral conduct (Nissenbaum and Shifman 2015;Procházka 2018), we need to sensitize the notion of competence to the sociohistorical trajectories of the infrastructural, artifactual, and environmental entities that participants orient themselves to and make sense of in interactions.…”

Section: Posthumanist Perspective On Internet Memes and Algorithmsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Making Sense of Facebook’s Content Moderation: A Posthumanist Perspective on Communicative Competence and Internet Memes

Prochazka

2019

Signs and Society

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This article focuses on how Facebook users understand and adapt to or resist recently increasing intensity in Facebook content-curating practices in pages organized around geopolitical satire memes generally known as "Countryball comics." Participants attach a ludic, nonserious discursive and communal ethos to potentially offensive memes, by which they create a type of sociality that faces punitive actions from Facebook (content deletion and publishing suspensions). Following meta-level discussions about correctness, appropriateness, and acceptability, participants feel compelled to adjust their communicative behavior in ways ranging from self-censorship to altering communicative practices native to such meme pages. Moreover, participants construe Facebook as a composite human (Facebook users and content moderators) and algorithm-driven nonhuman (automated content recognition tools and filters) entity actively involved and embedded in everyday communication. Drawing on posthumanist sociolinguistics and applied linguistics (Pennycook 2016(Pennycook , 2018, the article revisits the traditional notion of "communicative competence" to account for the dynamic interplay between dispersed, disembodied, and (non-)human interactants, environment, and artifacts.

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Colonizing Pepe: Internet Memes as Cyberplaces

Cited by 23 publications

References 13 publications

From Polarization to Hate: Portrait of the Spanish Political Meme

From Polarization to Hate: Portrait of the Spanish Political Meme

Sangsubculture in post-reform China

Making Sense of Facebook’s Content Moderation: A Posthumanist Perspective on Communicative Competence and Internet Memes

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