Article published in:
The Pragmatics of Internet Memes
Edited by Chaoqun Xie
[Internet Pragmatics 3:2] 2020
► pp. 283–320

Internet memes as multilayered re-contextualization vehicles in lay-political online discourse

| University of Innsbruck | Tomsk State University
It is well established that the internet meme has come to represent a highly creative discursive device used to “facilitate the […] communication of one’s own political beliefs, attitudes and orientations” (Ross and Rivers 2017: 1). Although internet memes and political internet memes in particular have been addressed to many communicative situations such as participatory culture (e.g., Jenkins 2006; Shifman 2014; Theocharis 2015), one aspect that has not been paid enough attention to concerns the forms in which users refer to individual political figures and events in political memes. This being said, the present paper focuses on referring strategies (see Kirner-Ludwig and Zimmermann 2015; Kirner-Ludwig 2020) as employed in political internet memes on Reddit, including direct and indirect quotes, citations and allusions. A specific focus is going to be on such political internet memes that employ pop cultural and telecinematic reference points and recontextualize them from their original into new target contexts (see Bublitz 2015; Gruber 2019). As shall be shown, practices such as combining constructed speech elements into recontextualized elements in political internet memes create multiple intertextual references that may enhance visibility, saliency and, thus, the ‘lifetime’ of a political meme.
Keywords: political internet memes, constructed speech, intertextuality, recontextualization, lay-political discourse, participatory culture, Reddit, Google images
Published online: 25 May 2020
https://doi.org/10.1075/ip.00055.kir
References

References

Anderson, Karrin V., and Kristina Horn Sheeler
2014 “Texts (and tweets) from Hillary: Meta-meming and postfeminist political culture.” Presidential Studies Quarterly 44(2): 224–243. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Arendholz, Jenny
2015 “Quoting in online message boards: An interpersonal perspective.” In The Pragmatics of Quoting Now and Then, ed. by Jenny Arendholz, Wolfram Bublitz, and Monika Kirner-Ludwig, 53–70. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Bakhtin, Mikhail
1986 Speech Genres and Other Late Essays (trans. by Vern W. McGee). Austin: University of Texas Press.Google Scholar
Baldwin-Philippi, Jessica
2015 Using Technology, Building Democracy: Digital Campaigning and the Construction of Citizenship. Oxford: Oxford University Press. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Baym, Nancy K.
2015 Personal Connections in the Digital Age. Cambridge: Polity Press.Google Scholar
Baym, Nancy K., and danah boyd
2012 “Socially mediated publicness: An introduction.” Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media 56(3): 320–329. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Beaugrande, Robert de, and Wolfgang U. Dressler
1981 Einführung in die Textlinguistik [Introduction to Text Linguistics]. Tübingen: Niemeyer. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Bebić, Domagoj, and Marija Volarevic
2018 “Do not mess with a meme: The use of viral content in communicating politics.” Communication and Society 31(3): 43–56.Google Scholar
Bennett, W. Lance, and Alexandra Segerberg
2012 “The logic of connective action.” Information, Communication & Society 15(5): 739–768. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
2013 The Logic of Connective Action: Digital Media and the Personalization of Contentious Politics. New York: Cambridge University Press. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Beran, Dale
2019 It Came from Something Awful: How a Toxic Troll Army Accidentally Memed Donald Trump into Office. New York: All Points Books.Google Scholar
Bimber, Bruce, Andrew Flanagin, and Cynthia Stohl
2012 Collective Action in Organizations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Boone, Gloria M., Jane Secci, and Linda M. Gallant
2018 “Resistance: Active and creative political protest strategies.” American Behavioral Scientist 62(3): 353–374. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Briggs, Charles L., and Richard Bauman
1992 “Genre, intertextuality, and social power.” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 2(2): 131–172. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Bruns, Axel
2008 “The future is user-led: The path towards widespread produsage.” Journal of Fibreculture 11. http://​eleven​.fibreculturejournal​.org​/fcj​-066​-the​-future​-is​-user​-led​-the​-path​-towards​-widespread​-produsage/ (accessed 8 April 2020).
Bublitz, Wolfram
2015 “Introducing quoting as a ubiquitous meta-communicative act.” In The Pragmatics of Quoting Now and Then, ed. by Jenny Arendholz, Wolfram Bublitz, and Monika Kirner-Ludwig, 1–16. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Bülow, Lars, and Michael Johann
2019 Politische Internet-Memes – Theoretische Herausforderungen und empirische Befunde [Political Internet Memes – Theoretical Challenges and Empirical Findings]. Berlin: Frank & Timme.Google Scholar
Burroughs, Ben
2013 “Obama trolling: Memes, salutes and an agonistic politics in the 2012 presidential election.” Fibre Culture Journal 22: 258–277.Google Scholar
Dawkins, Richard
2006 [1976] The Selfish Gene. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Dean, Jonathan
2019 “Sorted for memes and gifs: Visual media and everyday digital politics.” Political Studies Review 17(3): 255–266. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Dekker, Henk
1991 “Political socialization theory and research.” In Politics and the European Younger Generation: Political Socialization in Eastern, Central and Western Europe, ed. by Henk Dekker, and Rüdiger Meyenberg, 16–58. Oldenburg: BIS.Google Scholar
Denisova, Anastasia
2016 “Political memes as tools of dissent and alternative digital activism in the Russian-language Twitter.” PhD dissertation, University of Westminster. https://​westminsterresearch​.westminster​.ac​.uk​/item​/9zx1y​/political​-memes​-as​-tools​-of​-dissent​-and​-alternative​-digital​-activism​-in​-the​-russian​-language​-twitter (accessed 8 April 2020).
2019 Internet Memes and Society: Social, Cultural, and Political Contexts. New York: Routledge. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Dynel, Marta
2016 “ ‘I has seen image macros!’: Advice Animal memes as visual-verbal jokes.” International Journal of Communication 10: 660–688.Google Scholar
Fetzer, Anita, and Elda Weizman
2018 “ ‘What I would say to John and everyone like John is …’: The construction of ordinariness through quotations in mediated political discourse.” Discourse & Society 29(5): 495–513. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Frazer, Ryan, and Bronwyn Carlson
2017 “Indigenous memes and the invention of a people.” Social Media + Society 3(4): 1–12. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Gal, Noam, Limor Shifman, and Zohar Kampf
2016 “ ‘It gets better’: Internet memes and the construction of collective identity.” New Media & Society 18(8): 1698–1714. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Galan, Lucas Jordan Osserman, Tim Parker, and Matt Taylor
2019 “How young people consume news and the implications for mainstream media: A report commissioned by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, Oxford University.” Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. https://​reutersinstitute​.politics​.ox​.ac​.uk​/sites​/default​/files​/2019​-08​/FlamingoxREUTERS​-Report​-Full​-KG​-V28​.pdf (accessed 8 April 2020).
Garrett, Kelly R.
2006 “Protest in an Information Society: a review of literature on social movements and new ICTs.” Information, Communication & Society 9(2): 202–224. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Gibson, Rachel K.
2015 “Party change, social media and the rise of ‘citizen-initiated’ campaigning.” Party Politics 21(2): 183–197. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Groshek, Jacob, and Ahmed Al-Rawi
2013 “Public sentiment and critical framing in social media content during the 2012 U.S. presidential campaign.” Social Science Computer Review 31(5): 563–576. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Gruber, Helmut
2019 “Genres, media, and recontextualization practices: Re-considering basic concepts of genre theory in the age of social media.” Internet Pragmatics 2(1): 54–82. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Jenkins, Henry
2006 Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press.Google Scholar
Johann, Michael, and Lars Bülow
2018 “Die Verbreitung von Internet-Memes. Empirische Befunde zur Diffusion von Bild-Sprache-Texten in den sozialen Medien. [The dissemination of internet memes: Empirical findings on the diffusion of image-language texts in social media].” kommunikation at gesellschaft 19: 1–24. https://​nbn​-resolving​.org​/urn:nbn:de:0168​-ssoar​-56037​-8 (accessed 8 April 2020).
Jones, Rodney H.
2015 “Generic intertextuality in online social activism: The case of the It Gets Better project.” Language in Society 44(3): 317–339. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Karatzogianni, Athina
2012 “Epilogue: The politics of the affective digital.” In Digital Cultures and the Politics of Emotion: Feelings, Affect and Technological Change, ed. by Athina Karatzogianni, and Adi Kuntsman, 245–249. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Kirner-Ludwig, Monika
2020 “Creation, dissemination and uptake of fake-quotes in lay political discourse on Facebook and Twitter.” Journal of Pragmatics 157: 101–118. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Kirner-Ludwig, Monika, and Iris Zimmermann
2015 “Quoting and plagiarising – Concepts of both now and then?” In The Pragmatics of Quoting Now and Then, ed. by Jenny Arendholz, Wolfram Bublitz, and Monika Kirner-Ludwig, 291–318. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Klein, Ofra
2019 “The evolution of political internet memes.” Kennedy School Review. https://​ksr​.hkspublications​.org​/2019​/03​/11​/the​-evolution​-of​-political​-internet​-memes/ (accessed 7 March 2020).
Knobel, Michele, and Colin Lankshear
(eds.) 2007 A New Literacies Sampler. New York: Peter Lang.Google Scholar
Koester, Almut, and Michael Handford
2018 “ ‘It’s not good saying “Well it it might do that or it might not”’: Hypothetical reported speech in business meetings.” Journal of Pragmatics 130: 67–80. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Kouloumpis, Efthymios, Theresa Wilson, and Johanna Moore
2011 “Twitter sentiment analysis: The good the bad and the OMG!.” In Proceedings of the Fifth International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media: 17 – 21 July 2011, Barcelona, Spain, 538–541. Menlo Park: AAAI Press.Google Scholar
Kray, Christine A., Tamar W. Carroll, and Hinda Mandell
(eds.) 2018 Nasty Women and Bad Hombres: Gender and Race in the 2016 US Presidential Election. Rochester: University of Rochester Press.Google Scholar
Kreiss, Daniel
2012 Taking Our Country Back: The Crafting of Networked Politics from Howard Dean to Barack Obama. New York: Oxford University Press. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Kuiper, Giselinde
2005 “ ‘Where was King Kong when we needed him?’: Public discourse, digital disaster jokes, and the functions of laughter after 9/11.” The Journal of American Culture 28(1): 70–84. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Lewandowsky, Stephan, Ullrich K.H. Ecker, and John Cook
2017 “Beyond misinformation: Understanding and coping with the ‘post-truth’ era.” Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition 6(4): 353–369. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Lincoln, Taylor
2019 “A(meme)rican politics: Gender representation in political memes of the 2016 election.” Rochester Institute of Technology. https://​scholarworks​.rit​.edu​/cgi​/viewcontent​.cgi​?article​=11269​&context​=theses (accessed 8 April 2020).
Loader, Brian D., Ariadne Vromen, and Michael A. Xenos
2014 “The networked young citizen: Social media, political participation and civic engagement.” Information, Communication & Society 17(2): 143–150. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Lu, Yuehua
2020 “A study of internet Chinglish under the framework of memetics and its development.” Theory and Practice in Language Studies 10(2): 243–247. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Marcus, Olivia R., and Merrill Singer
2017 “Loving Ebola-chan: Internet memes in an epidemic.” Media, Culture & Society 39(3): 341–356. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Mayes, Patricia
1990 “Quotation in spoken English.” Studies in Language 14(2): 325–363. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Menczer, Filippo
2012 “The diffusion of political memes in social media.” In Proceedings of the First Edition Workshop on Politics, Elections and Data – PLEAD ’12 (the First Edition Workshop), Maui, Hawaii, USA, 11/2/2012 – 11/2/2012, ed. by Ingmar Weber, Ana-Maria Popescu, and Marco Pennacchiotti. 1–2. New York: ACM Press. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Meraz, Sharon, and Zizi Papacharissi
2013 “Networked gatekeeping and networked framing on #Egypt.” The International Journal of Press/Politics 18(2): 138–166. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Meso-Ayerdi, Koldobika, Terese Mendiguren-Galdospín, and Jesús Pérez-Dasilva
2017 “Memes políticos difundidos por usuarios de Twitter. Análisis de la jornada electoral del 26J de 2016.” [Political memes spread by Twitter users. Analysis of the electoral day of 26 June 2016]. El Profesional de la Información 26(4): 672–682. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Milner, Ryan M.
2013a “Pop polyvocality: Internet memes, public participation, and the Occupy Wall Street Movement.” International Journal of Communication 7: 2357–2390. http://​ijoc​.org​/index​.php​/ijoc​/article​/view​/1949 (accessed 8 April 2020).
2013b “Hacking the social: Internet memes, identity antagonism, and the logic of lulz.” The Fibreculture Journal 22: 62–92. http://​twentytwo​.fibreculturejournal​.org​/fcj​-156​-hacking​-the​-social​-internet​-memes​-identity​-antagonism​-and​-the​-logic​-of​-lulz/ (accessed 8 April 2020).
2017 The World Made Meme: Public Conversations and Participatory Media. Cambridge: The MIT Press.Google Scholar
Moody-Ramirez, Mia, and Andrew B. Church
2019 “Analysis of Facebook meme groups used during the 2016 US presidential election.” Social Media + Society 5(1): 1–11. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Myers, Greg
1999 “Unspoken speech: Hypothetical reported discourse and the rhetoric of everyday talk.” Text 19(4): 571–590. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Nooney, Laine, and Laura Portwood-Stacer
2014 “One does not simply: An introduction to the special issue on internet memes.” Journal of Visual Culture 13(3): 248–252. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
O’Meara, Jennifer
2018 “Meme girls versus Trump: Digitally recycled screen dialogue as political discourse.” The Velvet Light Trap 82: 28–42. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Ott, Brian L.
2017 “The age of Twitter: Donald J. Trump and the politics of debasement.” Critical Studies in Media Communication 34(1): 59–68. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Papacharissi, Zizi
2015 “We have always been social.” Social Media + Society 1(1): 1–2. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Pascual, Esther, and Todd Oakley
2017 “Fictive interaction.” In The Cambridge Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics, ed. by Barbara Dancygier, 347–360. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Penney, Joel
2017a The Citizen Marketer: Promoting Political Opinion in the Social Media Age. New York: Oxford University Press. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
2017b “Social media and citizen participation in ‘official’ and ‘unofficial’ electoral promotion: A structural analysis of the 2016 Bernie Sanders digital campaign.” Journal of Communication 67(3): 402–423. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
2016 “Motivations for participating in ‘viral politics’.” Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 22(7): 1–87.Google Scholar
Piata, Anna
2016 “When metaphor becomes a joke: Metaphor journeys from political ads to internet memes.” Journal of Pragmatics 106: 39–56. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Roelvink, Gerda
2010 “Collective action and the politics of affect.” Emotion, Space and Society 3(2): 111–118. 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
2018 “Internet memes as polyvocal political participation.” In The Presidency and Social Media: Discourse, Disruption, and Digital Democracy, ed. by Daniel Schill, and John A. Hendricks, 285–308. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Russell, Daniel M.
1990 Political Organizing in Grassroots Politics. Lanham: University Press of America.Google Scholar
Rusu, Alexandra-Andreea
2013 “The life of memes. Traditional technologies and the transmission of knowledge.” Procedia – Social and Behavioral Sciences 92: 820–825. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Schill, Daniel J., and John A. Hendricks
(eds.) 2018 The Presidency and Social Media: Discourse, Disruption, and Digital Democracy in the 2016 Presidential Election. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Scholz, Trebor
2008 “Market ideology and the myths of Web 2.0.” First Monday 13(3). CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Shami, Savera, Sana N. Khan, and Ayesha Ashfaq
2019 “Crafting political images on Twitter: Analysis of public relations strategy of politicians of Pakistan.” Journal of the Research Society of Pakistan 56(2): 105–115.Google Scholar
Shifman, Limor
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: The MIT Press.Google Scholar
Shifman, Limor, Stephen Coleman, and Stephen Ward
2007 “Only joking? Online humour in the 2005 UK general election.” Information, Communication and Society 10(4): 465–487. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Sobieraj, Sarah, and Jeffrey M. Berry
2011 “From incivility to outrage: Political discourse in blogs, talk radio, and cable news.” Political Communication 28(1): 19–41. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Taecharungroj, Viriya, and Pitchanut Nueangjamnong
2015 “Humour 2.0: Styles and types of humour and virality of memes on Facebook.” Journal of Creative Communications 10(3): 288–302. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Tannen, Deborah
1986 “Introducing constructed dialogue in Greek and American conversational and literary narratives.” In Direct and Indirect Speech, ed. by Florian Coulmas, 311–322. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Tay, Geniesa
2012 “Embracing LOLitics: Popular culture, online political humor, and play.” MA thesis, University of Canterbury. https://​ir​.canterbury​.ac​.nz​/handle​/10092​/7091 (accessed 7 April 2020).
Terkourafi, Marina, Lydia Catedral, Iftikhar Haider, Farzad Karimzad, Jeriel Melgares, Cristina Mostacero-Pinilla, Julie Nelson, and Benjamin Weissman
2018 “Uncivil Twitter.” Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict 6(1): 26–57. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Theisen, William, Joel Brogan, Pamela B. Thomas, Daniel Moreira, Pascal Phoa, Tim Weninger, and Walter Scheirer
2020 “Automatic discovery of political meme genres with diverse appearances.” arXiv:2001.06122v1 [cs.CV]. https://​arxiv​.org​/pdf​/2001​.06122​.pdf (accessed 7 April 2020).
Theocharis, Yannis
2015 “The conceptualization of digitally networked participation.” Social Media + Society 1(2): 1–14. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
van Dijck, José
2011 “Flickr and the culture of connectivity: Sharing views, experiences, memories.” Memory Studies 4(4): 401–415. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
van Laer, Jeroen
2010 “Activists online and offline: The internet as an information channel for protest demonstrations.” Mobilization: An International Journal 15(3): 405–420.Google Scholar
Wiggins, Bradley E.
2017 “Digital dispatches from the 2016 US election: Popular culture intertextuality and media power.” International Journal of Media and Cultural Politics 13(1): 197–205. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Woch, Agnieszka, and Andrzej Napieralski
2016 “La ‘norme’ et les échanges en ligne: une étude des mèmes politiques des internautes polonais. [The ‘norm’ and online exchanges: A study of the political memes of Polish internet users].” La Linguistique 52(1): 151–172. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Woods, Heather S., and Leslie A. Hahner
2019 Make America Meme Again: The Rhetoric of the Alt-Right. New York: Peter Lang.Google Scholar
Zuckerman, Ethan
2013 “Cute cats to the rescue? Participatory media and political expression.” In Youth, New Media and Political Participation, ed. by Danielle Allen, and Jennifer Light, 131–154. Cambridge: The MIT Press.Google Scholar