Article published in:
The Pragmatics of Internet Memes
Edited by Chaoqun Xie
[Internet Pragmatics 3:2] 2020
► pp. 260–282

Exploring local meaning-making resources

A case study of a popular Chinese internet meme (biaoqingbao)

| University of South Florida
| University of South Florida
This study examines various combinations of visual and textual meaning-making resources in a popular Chinese meme. The meme features an exogenous image – the grinning facial expression of a U.S. wrestler, D’Angelo Dinero – that has been recontextualized into numerous other visual texts, to create semiotic ensembles with local meanings, which are then distributed across Chinese social media platforms. We analyzed 60 of these image macros, and our findings show that local meanings are created when Dinero’s facial expression is blended with visual references to Chinese digital culture, Chinese popular culture, Chinese social class issues, Chinese politics, and Chinese institutions. The majority of textual elements in the image macros are Chinese; however, the handful of examples that also include other languages typically involve multilingual wordplay and carnivalesque themes. We argue that although the multivalency of the wrestlers’ facial expression invites interpretations of a wide range of affective meanings, an overarching rebellious or transgressive stance is consistent across individual texts.
Keywords: multimodality, humor, image macros, Chinese social media, resemiotization
Published online: 19 November 2019
https://doi.org/10.1075/ip.00042.jia
References

References

Adegoju, Adeyemi, and Oluwabunmi Oyebode
2015 “Humor as discursive practice in Nigeria’s 2015 presidential election online campaign discourse.” Discourse Studies 17(6): 643–662. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Androutsopoulos, Jannis
2010 “Localizing the global on the participatory web.” In The Handbook of Language and Globalization, ed. by Nikolas Coupland, 203–231. Malden: Wiley-Blackwell. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Bakhtin, Mikhail
1984 Rabelais and His World (trans. by Hélène Iswolsky). Bloomington: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
Blommaert, Jan, Ying Lu, and Kunming Li
2019 “From the self to the selfie.” Tilburg Papers in Culture Studies paper 222. https://​www​.tilburguniversity​.edu​/sites​/tiu​/files​/download​/TPCS​_222​_Blommaert​-Lu​-Li​.pdf (accessed 5 May 2019).
Chen, Sylvia Xiaohua, Fanny M. Cheung, Michael Harris Bond, and Jin-Pang Leung
2005 “Decomposing the construct of ambivalence over emotional expression in a Chinese cultural context.” European Journal of Personality 19(3): 185–204. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
China Internet Network Information Center
2018 Statistical Report on Internet Development in China. Beijing: CNNIC. https://​cnnic​.com​.cn​/IDR​/ReportDownloads​/201807​/P020180711391069195909​.pdf (accessed 5 May 2019).
Dancygier, Barbara, and Lieven Vandelanotte
2017 “Internet memes as multimodal constructions.” Cognitive Linguistics 28(3): 565–598. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Dawkins, Richard
1976 The Selfish Gene. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Dynel, Marta
2011 “Blending the incongruity–resolution model and the conceptual integration theory: The case of blends in pictorial advertising.” International Review of Pragmatics 3: 59–83. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
2016 “ ‘I has seen image macros!’: Advice Animal memes as visual-verbal jokes.” International Journal of Communication 10: 660–688.Google Scholar
Fetzer, Anita
2019 “Some food for thought on the theory and practice of internet pragmatics.” Internet Pragmatics 2(1): 34–40. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
He, Ziran, and Xuelin He
2003 “模因论与社会语用 [Memetics and social usage of language].” Modern Foreign Languages 26(2): 200–209.Google Scholar
Jenkins, Henry
2009 Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Jewitt, Carey
2009 “An introduction to multimodality.” In The Routledge Handbook of Multimodal Analysis, ed. by Carey Jewitt, 14–27. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
2016 “Multimodal analysis.” In The Routledge Handbook of Language and Digital Communication, ed. by Alexandra Georgakopoulou, and Tereza Spilioti, 69–84. Abingdon: Routledge.Google Scholar
Laineste, Liisi, and Piret Voolaid
2017 “Laughing across borders: Intertextuality of internet Memes.” The European Journal of Humour Research 4(4): 26–49. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Lu, Ying
2018 “Emojis as a cash cow: Biaoqingbao-hatched economic practice in online China.” Tilburg Papers in Culture Studies paper 217. https://​www​.tilburguniversity​.edu​/sites​/tiu​/files​/download​/TPCS​_217​_Lu​_2​.pdf (accessed 5 May 2019).
Ma, Xiaojuan
2016 “From internet memes to emoticon engineering: Insights from the Baozou comic phenomenon in China.” In Human-Computer Interaction: Novel User Experiences, ed. by Masaaki Kurosu, 9733: 15–27. Basel: Springer. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Milner, Ryan
2016 The World Made Meme: Public Conversations and Participatory Media. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Nichols, Briana
2016 “Mexicans be like.” Working Paper in Educational Linguistics 31(1): 69–86. https://​repository​.upenn​.edu​/wpel​/vol31​/iss1​/4 (accessed 5 May 2019).
Piata, Anna
2019 “Stylistic humor across modalities: The case of Classical Art Memes.” Internet Pragmatics, online first: 1–28. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Rea, Christoper
2013 “Spoofing (e’gao) culture on the Chinese Internet.” In Humor in Chinese Life and Culture: Resistance and Control in Modern Times, ed. by Jessica Milner Davies, and Jocelyn Chey, 149–172. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Ross, Andrew S., and Damian J. Rivers
2017 “Digital cultures of political participation: Internet memes and the discursive delegitimization of the 2016 U.S Presidential candidates.” Discourse, Context & Media 16: 1–11. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Sultana, Shaila
2019 “Linguistic and multimodal resources within the local-global interface of the virtual space: Critically aware youths in Bangladesh.” In Critical Inquiries in the Sociolinguistics of Globalization, ed. by Tyler Andrew Barrett, and Sender Dovchin, 1–19. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Shifman, Limor
2012 “An anatomy of a YouTube meme.” New Media & Society 14(2): 187–203. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
2013 “Memes in a digital world: Reconciling with a conceptual troublemaker.” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 18(3): 362–377. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
2014 Memes in Digital Culture. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.Google Scholar
Szablewicz, Marcella
2014 “The ‘losers’ of China’s Internet: Memes as ‘structures of feeling’ for disillusioned young netizens.” China Information 28(2): 259–275. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Tsakona, Villy
2018 “Online joint fictionalization.” In Topics in Humor Research, ed. by Villy Tsakona, and Jan Chovanec, 229–526. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Varis, Piia, and Jan Blommaert
2015 “Conviviality and collectives on social media: Virality, memes, and new social structures.” Multilingual Margins 2(1): 31–45.Google Scholar
Wang, Shaojung Sharon
2012 “China’s internet lexicon: The symbolic meaning and commoditization of Grass Mud Horse in the harmonious society.” First Monday 17(1–2): https://​firstmonday​.org​/article​/view​/3758​/3134#author (accessed 5 May 2019). Crossref
Wiggins, Bradley E., and G. Bret Bowers
2015 “Memes as genre: A structurational analysis of the memescape.” New Media & Society 17(11): 1886–1906. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Yang, Guobin, and Min Jiang
2015 “The networked practice of online political satire in China: Between ritual and resistance.” International Communication Gazette 77(3): 215–231. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Yus, Francisco
2019a “Multimodality in memes: A cyberpragmatic approach.” In Analyzing Digital Discourse: New Insights and Future Directions, ed. by Patrica Bou-Franch, and Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, 105–131. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
2019b “An outline of some future research issues for internet pragmatics.” Internet Pragmatics 2(1): 1–33. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Zenner, Eline, and Dirk Geeraerts
2018 “One does not simply process memes: Image macros as multimodal constructions.” In Cultures and Traditions of Wordplay and Wordplay Research, ed. by Esme Winter-Froemel, and Verena Thaler, 167–194. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Zhang, Yi
2017 “Heteroglossic Chinese online literacy practices on micro-blogging and video-sharing sites.” Unpublished PhD dissertation, University of South Florida. https://​scholarcommons​.usf​.edu​/etd​/6788 (accessed 1 June 2018).
Cited by

Cited by 5 other publications

Dynel, Marta
2021. COVID-19 memes going viral: On the multiple multimodal voices behind face masks. Discourse & Society 32:2 ► pp. 175 ff. Crossref logo
Dynel, Marta & Jan Chovanec
2021. Creating and sharing public humour across traditional and new media. Journal of Pragmatics 177 ► pp. 151 ff. Crossref logo
Dynel, Marta & Fabio Indìo Massimo Poppi
2020. Caveat emptor: boycott through digital humour on the wave of the 2019 Hong Kong protests. Information, Communication & Society ► pp. 1 ff. Crossref logo
Vásquez, Camilla & Erhan Aslan
2021. “Cats be outside, how about meow”: Multimodal humor and creativity in an internet meme. Journal of Pragmatics 171 ► pp. 101 ff. Crossref logo
Ying, Lu & Jan Blommaert
2020. Understanding memes on Chinese social media. Chinese Language and Discourse. An International and Interdisciplinary Journal 11:2 ► pp. 226 ff. Crossref logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 27 april 2021. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.