ABSTRACT
Memes are a curious object of study, easy to identify but harder to contextualize. Working with the growing literature on the study of memes and their communities, our paper offers a method to study the shared values or stories worked out and maintained by memes that Whitney Phillip and Ryan Milner describe as a "deep memetic frames." Our interest is less on the individual memes then how memes accumulate and help communities express their own ways of interpreting events. One of these events has been the COVID-19 pandemic. We developed our method while studying how Canadian partisan groups - or what we call scenes - reacted to the pandemic. Was the pandemic a chance for partisans to make peace or recontextualize politics over a health crisis? Through researcher journals, team meetings, and observational notes, we evaluated the use of memes across 14 Canadian partisan communities on Facebook and Instagram during the 2020 summer of the COVID-19 Pandemic. Our approach extracts three distinct partisan scenes: established partisan, negative partisan, and emergent right-wing populism. We focus on their memetic contexts to evaluate the central themes of understanding, extract the worldviews that maintain these digital spaces, and construct a deeper comprehension of memetic frames. As a term widely used but challenging to study, we recognize this research as a novel approach and conclude by discussing its utility for researchers more broadly and acknowledging its limitations while providing the various research directions this work offers.
ABSTRACT
Humor is a cognitive construct that predominantly evokes the feeling of mirth. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the situations that arouse out of the pandemic were so incongruous to the world we knew that even factual statements often had a humorous reaction. In this paper, we present a dataset of 2510 samples hand-annotated with labels such as humor style, type, theme, target and stereotypes formed or exploited while creating the humor in addition to 909 memes. Our dataset comprises Reddit posts, comments, Onion news headlines, real news headlines, and tweets. We evaluate the task of humor detection and maladaptive humor detection on state-of-the-art models namely RoBERTa and GPT-3. The finetuned models trained on our dataset show significant gains over zero-shot models including GPT-3 when detecting humor. Even though GPT-3 is good at generating meaningful explanations, we observed that it fails to detect maladaptive humor due to the absence of overt targets and profanities. We believe that the presented dataset will be helpful in designing computational methods for topical humor processing as it provides a unique sample set to study the theory of incongruity in a post-pandemic world. The data is available to research community at https://github.com/smritae01/Covid19-Humor. © 2023 ACM.
ABSTRACT
Although various internet memes (IMs) were disseminated and popularized during the COVID-19 pandemic, the degree to which people appreciate them is unclear. In this study, people's appreciation of three kinds of typical IMs, which respectively conveyed the humorous (H-IM), encouraging (E-IM), and aggressive (A-IM) feelings towards the pandemic and the consequences it brought about, along with one objective description (OD) serving as the control condition, were compared. The results showed that the E-IMs and H-IMs were significantly more appreciated and loved than the A-IMs, thus supporting the prediction of positive psychology and humor regulation of negative emotion but failing to support the theory of psychology catharsis that emphasizes the need of making aggression to release tense and angry feelings caused by the pandemic. The results also showed that creativity played a mediating role for the positivity component in E-IMs and the humor component in H-IMs when predicting their fondness ratings. For the H-IMs, creativity could even fully mediate the impact of humor for exerting regulation effects on negative emotions evoked by the pandemic-related affairs such as home quarantine. This result revealed the creative nature of the IMs and showed that IMs are a kind of insightful cognitive restructuring that people make as a creative adaption to unfavorably changed situations caused by the pandemic.
ABSTRACT
Completing a PhD is an isolating and arduous process, where doctoral students' wellbeing is impacted. The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated the pre-existing feelings of social isolation and lowered productivity resulting in further challenges due to the absence of established social support systems. Higher education is an area of particular interest, specifically in Victoria, Australia, where all students spent most of the years 2020 and 2021 in a lockdown. This chapter presents a reflective autoethnographic account of two doctoral students' experiences of writing their theses during the COVID-19 pandemic. We are two sociological researchers pursuing PhDs who experienced an extended COVID-19 lockdown while studying at Monash University's Faculty of Education in Victoria, Australia. Our chapter identifies how our socio-emotional and academic writing struggles were intertwined and how they affected the overall progress of our doctoral thesis. The emotional aspects included, but were not limited to, fear, anxiety, uncertainty, stress, and a lack of support, which will be the focus of this chapter. We use our accounts to share our coping strategies by acknowledging the effects of these emotional aspects. We achieved this through participating in collegiate virtual writing spaces via Zoom, creating a sense of accountability for writing by employing the Pomodoro technique. Furthermore, social interaction was a significant component of the Zoom sessions;we maintained our digital proximity while we were physically apart. The use of memes, presented an opportunity for us to socialise, joke, and reflect on the positives, thus creating a sense of self-efficacy during this challenging time. Ultimately, these sessions created a space to remind ourselves and each other of the passion behind our doctoral degrees and ascribe somewhat positive meaning to the thoughts and feelings related to the stressful and unexpected COVID-19 pandemic. Therefore, we offer this chapter to support our fellow doctoral peers in these times of uncertainty across the globe. © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022.
ABSTRACT
Faced with Covid-19 people are overwhelmed with information coming from governmental or health care sources but also from social media and digital communication platforms. The Internet and especially social media are often inundated with unreliable or even false information regarding COVID-19 and vaccination against it. This seriously impacts the public health, since misinformed people may be hesitant towards the health-related measures enforced by the governments and health authorities, which, in turn, contributes to their vaccine hesitancy.The aim of the paper is to investigate the Internet memes created and popularized in Poland by supporters and opponents of COVID-19 vaccinations. The data for the study include memes published between December 2020 (vaccinations become available in Poland) to May 2021 and comes from the most popular, publicly accessible social networks and meme pages with the greatest number of followers. The content analysis relays on such variables as whether the meme is pro-or antivaccine, what persuasive appeals (emotion, fear, rationality) are used, number of reactions and shares. Additionally, the analysis looks at the thematic content of the memes and tries to specify whether the pro-and anti-vaccination memes contain more gist than verbatim information. The analysis aims to define persuasion methods that pro-vaccine and anti-vaccine groups use in their memes.
ABSTRACT
This article analyses the visual rhetoric of anti-Muslim imagery in the memetic internet cultures generated by Indian users, as well as the transnational iconology of terror that the Muslim male body is made to embody. The core problem the article addresses is located at the intersection of three crucial contemporary challenges: the global pandemic, rising global anti-Muslim ideology, and the role of socially mediated popular political imagery. Here, I look at corona-jihad memes - a subset of anti-Muslim popular imagery made viral through social media. These images illustrated the fake news spread globally, connecting Indian Muslims with the pandemic. Here, I show the strategies of representation used by Hindu nationalist users to create an iconology - or a mode of recognition - for the Muslim male as the threatening and dehumanised other, through a process of mimicry, counter-influence, translation, and flow in a rich intermedial world of transnational imagery.
ABSTRACT
When faced with unexpected, traumatic events, such as crises, which can trigger fear and anxiety, people react differently. Depending on the type of crisis and on how affected they are by it, people can run in fear (flight), become numb, irresponsive (freeze), please other people (fawn), or stay put and deal with it one way or another (fight). In such cases, humour, irony and sarcasm appear to be a good strategy. As such, Internet memes are an example of a fight reaction that people have to crises, in which they resort to humorous, ironic, sarcastic texts / videos to deal with such unpredictable events that affect the world that they are familiar with, which become highly contagious (transmissible) on the Internet. By carrying out a qualitative analysis of a corpus of Internet memes from Japan and Romania retrieved from Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook, which appeared in the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, and by looking at Geert Hofstede's and Edward T. Hall's cultural dimensions, the purpose of this article is to prove that Internet memes-though they are seen as a global phenomenon-bear some local value and transmit ideas, feelings, and beliefs specific to a culture.
ABSTRACT
Amid the deluge of serious social media posts regarding the COVID-19 pandemic, humorous posts brought users much-needed respite. This article reviews studies on social media-based COVID-19 humour in 42 research articles that were selected from four databases, viz. Science Direct, Scopus, Taylor & Francis, and Web of Science. After the classification and analysis of the articles on the basis of some key features, a detailed description and discussion of the findings have been carried out. The results concerning the characteristics and functions of COVID-19 humour reveal that most studies investigated image-text memes;the most important feature found was ‘humour', in addition to others like sarcasm, irony, satire, criticism, juxtaposition, and locality. Intertextuality played a significant role in the structure of humorous posts, especially those related to specific countries. Additionally, it shows that although research on COVID-19 humour on social media is still in an early phase, several findings appear stable across various studies included in this review. Moreover, most humour studied is not only about the virus or the disease itself, but also focuses on absurd situations individuals found themselves in due to the pandemic and the lockdown that followed. © 2023,European Journal of Humour Research. All Rights Reserved.
ABSTRACT
Humour is often employed as a coping mechanism, with therapeutic effects on those producing and receiving it (Christopher 2015;Samson & Gross 2012). This buffering effect of humour might explain why, at the time of an international pandemic like Covid-19, human beings, independently of their cultural origin, have resorted to humour as a means of alleviating uncertainty and fear, and of enhancing feelings of connection and bonding with others. The proliferation of Covid-related humour has also led to a wide range of studies, with special attention to memes. However, contrastive studies are more limited, especially those comparing very different languages and cultural realities such as the Chinese, the Czech and the Spanish ones. This paper aims to redress this imbalance by analysing a corpus of 300 Covid-memes (100 memes per language). More specifically, we intend to answer the following questions: (i) what dimension(s) of humour are predominant in each language? (ii) what actors do the memes in the three countries target? and (iii) to what extent can these preferences relate to cultural differences/similarities? Applying a mixed-method approach, results show that there seems to be a global preference for affiliative humour while aggressive (and self-deprecating) humour appears to be more culturally bound, with a higher frequency in the Czech and Spanish datasets in contrast to the Chinese one. Likewise, the Czech and Spanish dataset share a significantly higher number of common frames, which might be pointing to a more European, Western type of humour in comparison to the Chinese approach (Jiang et al. 2019). © 2023,European Journal of Humour Research. All Rights Reserved.
ABSTRACT
This study is a visual semiotic analysis of Coronavirus memetic humour, aimed at ascertaining the implied meanings of selected Covid-19-related Facebook memes that stimulated virtual discourse among Nigerian netizens during the pandemic. The study adopts Visual Semiotics Theory and Encryption Theory of Humour to account for meanings derived from the presuppositional assumptions and shared sociocultural knowledge which serve as the decrypting ‘key' to meaning. The ‘key' activates the appropriate disambiguation and interpretation of the significations in the semiotic resources conveyed in the humorous memes. Nineteen Facebook Covid-19-related memes were selected as a representative sample for a descriptive and qualitative analysis. The analysis is coded into 11 discourse domains based on the related semiotic contents of the memes which include: preventive protocol, media reportage, religious beliefs, health sector, sociopolitical domain, socioeconomic domain, security, science, transportation, relationship and lifestyle to account for the differentials in perceptions by Nigerian netizens. Findings show that Nigerians created Coronavirus memetic humour to stimulate laughter in the rather consequential circumstances generated by the pandemic derived from the humorous contents of the image macros. In the Nigerian social context, the Coronavirus memes humorously instantiate the apprehension and helplessness of a people, and thrive to express protest, insecurity, corruption, religiosity, economic hardship and a poor health system. These, altogether, combine as a myriad of the challenges faced by the people who consolably devised coping strategies to trivialise the pandemic, while yearning for an inclusive government that prioritises the welfare of its citizens © 2023, European Journal of Humour Research.All Rights Reserved
ABSTRACT
A gap within the current artistic ecology in the Philippines is the lack of platforms that engage with critical discourses in dance. Run Thru Magazine, which used to publish articles on dance criticism was discontinued a few years ago. While the Cultural Center of the Philippines (CCP) Encylopedia of Philippine Art has a wide range of writings on dance in the Philippines, its essays fail to confront current discourses in dance practice and dance making. The COVID-19 pandemic and its effects on the arts has brought in waves of reflections and realizations towards the present and future of ‘production and consumption' of dancing. Zoom talks, virtual webinars, and social media have become available platforms for dance artists to engage with such discourses. An often disregarded but important component of virtual spaces are internet memes. Internet memes may take the form of images with superimposed texts, graphic interchange format (gif), videos, and soundbites. The creation of and consumption of memes requires an understanding of how meanings are layered through multiple references in images, text, and content. Often shared in anonymity, memes offer a democratized means of communication, dialogue and criticism. This manifesto is a critical and creative exercise that outlines my rationale and intentions towards making dance memes. I find this important at this time when artists question existing power structures, reflect on the economics. © Ateneo de Manila University.
ABSTRACT
Purpose: The paper aims to explore, using an analysis of the three components of memes content, form and stance – whether and how the memes offer a broad picture of a specific society during the COVID-19 pandemic crisis. Design/methodology/approach: The author collected, from the two largest Facebook groups in Israel, 25 memes with the largest number of likes in each month, beginning from the month in which awareness of COVID-19 increased significantly, between March 2020 and February 2019. A total of 597 memes were collected. The data were analyzed by a quantitative and qualitative analysis. Findings: Findings indicate that meme culture effectively reflects a society's situation and the challenges it faces. Memes also reflect local cultural icons and effects. Meme contents vary across groups. During a crisis, memes do not function as fertile groups for sharp criticism or calls to take action to resolve society's social ills. Practical implications: Memes may serve as a tool to understand and explore an unfamiliar, foreign culture, its state of mind and its history through meme culture. Social implications: Memes may constitute a platform for relieving stress through light-hearted humor, unaccompanied by a true call to action;that is, "slacktivism” which gives a sense of active participation without involvement in actual activities for change. Originality/value: The study reveals that the Israeli meme culture is not activist and rather focuses on humor to relieve stress. Memes may be used as "bread and circuses” or a means of "slacktivism” that fails to call to genuine activism. Peer review: The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/OIR-07-2022-0381. © 2023, Emerald Publishing Limited.
ABSTRACT
Previous research has found that social media may be a particularly influential means of circulating ideologies about climate justice. In this article, we analyze social media discourses of universal human responsibility for pollution and ecosystem destruction during the COVID-19 pandemic, epitomized by the viral hashtag #WeAreTheVirus. We then examine three types of counterdiscourses that oppose misinformation and false universalization of human responsibility. These counterdiscourses include: (1) metadiscourses of ecofascism and racial injustice, (2) counterslogans that ascribe responsibility to systemic injustice rather than individual humans (e.g. "Capitalism is the virus,” "The system is the virus”), and (3) memes that parody the #WeAreTheVirus discourses (as in the sarcastic phrase "Nature is healing, we are the virus”). We demonstrate that the former two nonparodic counterdiscourses emerged in part in the comments of #WeAreTheVirus Tweets, while the parodic memes emerged in separate Tweets, which were a site of shared humor rather than controversy. We further demonstrate that, while both #WeAreTheVirus discourses and counterdiscourses have occurred relatively rarely since their period of virality and have broadened to a range of domains outside of human-environment interaction, counterdiscourses have nevertheless had a wide-ranging impact, increasing metadiscourses of ecofascism and permeating material landscapes through graffiti and signage.
ABSTRACT
This article discusses the special issue of Humor: International Journal of Humor Research. This special issue reflects numerous opportunities presented by the pandemic for research spanning different cultures, outcomes, and disciplines/methodologies. The studies presented in this special issue include populations and material from the United States, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Poland, Belarus, Australia, and Israel. These articles examine humor in the form of memes, late-night comedy, and other media messages. In addition to instances of humor, the role of sense of humor was also discussed. The humor was discussed in various disciplines such as psychology, linguistics, communication studies, and folklore, and employs the many methods that accompany those disciplines. Currently, the research team is working to make this enormous data set available to interested researchers to explore the wealth of research questions, new and old, that can be addressed with this unprecedented global exchange of humor. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved)
ABSTRACT
Memes can be a useful way to spread information because they are funny, easy to share, and can spread quickly and reach further than other forms. With increased interest in COVID-19 vaccines, vaccination-related memes have grown in number and reach. Memes analysis can be difficult because they use sarcasm and often require contextual understanding. Previous research has shown promising results but could be improved by capturing global and local representations within memes to model contextual information. Further, the limited public availability of annotated vaccine critical memes datasets limit our ability to design computational methods to help design targeted interventions and boost vaccine uptake. To address these gaps, we present VaxMeme, which consists of 10,244 manually labelled memes. With VaxMeme, we propose a new multimodal framework designed to improve the memes' representation by learning the global and local representations of memes. The improved memes' representations are then fed to an attentive representation learning module to capture contextual information for classification using an optimised loss function. Experimental results show that our framework outperformed state-of-the-art methods with an F1-Score of 84.2%. We further analyse the transferability and generalisability of our framework and show that understanding both modalities is important to identify vaccine critical memes on Twitter. Finally, we discuss how understanding memes can be useful in designing shareable vaccination promotion, myth debunking memes and monitoring their uptake on social media platforms. © 2023 ACM.
ABSTRACT
The commentary examines coronavirus memes circulating around forms of generational conflict that have risen from experiences of self-isolation. Employing participant-observation methods within online spaces of meme circulation, the commentary analyzes the political, social, and affective aspects of the memes considered. The commentary offers insight into how we operationalize our social media spaces in times of deep uncertainty in order collectively bring differing experiences and perspectives into a contingent, shifting, and affectively constituted public sphere. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved)
ABSTRACT
In 2020 the coronavirus pandemic dominated global life bringing fear and death. Apart from the health crisis, a significant economic and social turmoil appeared following restrictions implemented worldwide to prevent the spread of the virus. One of the ways to cope with this stressful situation is humour giving relief and offering a chance to see reality from a distance. Therefore, numerous internet memes were created to depict everyday life in the pandemic reality in a humorous way. These memes use comism related to the situation, characters and language. The aim of the present study is to analyse Polish internet memes related to the coronavirus in order to find out what means are used to render the memes studied humorous. © 2022, University of Zielona Gora Library. All rights reserved.
ABSTRACT
The analysis undertaken in the article focuses on a group of memes selected from the database which drew on culture-specific references. Specifically, they embrace the memories of socialist times and call on references to comic films and easily recognized characters in order to bring out the re-discovered absurdity of the current COVID-19 situation. This material seems ideal to revisit Raskin's early notion of sophistication, which was broadly argued to derive from intertextuality as well complexity of references that function as sources of humor. In all the examples discussed we can observe the intertextual and metatextual elements, multiple levels and shifts in points of view and attitudes as well as the mutual relations of verbal to visual within the meme cycles. In order to identify specific mechanisms of sophisticated humor, we attempt to identify the visual or verbal triggers of overlap of the two worlds in question, and discuss comic mechanisms of sophistication, including attributions of desire, belief and intention (purpose) to characters or the narrator as commentators on events or situations. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved)