Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Research in Social Sciences
Year: 2024
DOI:
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Surviving A Crisis One Meme at A Time
Cighir Anca Irina
ABSTRACT:
The pandemic isolated people, forced them to shelter and lose daily physical connection with other people. Covid-19 pandemic constrained all of us to find alternatives and substitutes to our habits in order to cope with the new lifestyle. The only method to stay in touch with loved ones was via the internet or the phone, but the internet was favoured by the majority of people due to its accessibility, affordability and speed. A new genre of communication came to life in 1982 with the first meme, and it strived during the pandemic. Preferred by younger generations, it was adopted by all of us during those strenuous times as the type of humour that arose alleviated pain and suffering. Our study looks at three Covid-related internet memes with the aim of showing how a collectively lived experience was processed and perceived by people using social media. To this end we have made use of our collection of Covid-related internet memes which consists of 560 tokens. In our current study we employ both quantitative and qualitative methods which will help us interpret people’s perception of the metaphorical usage ingrained in the internet memes used in our research. Both visual and verbal modes are being analysed in order to find out which mode has a greater impact on the receivers.
keywords: Covid-19, internet memes, metaphor, multimodality, humour