A gathering with fire: Exploring the audience reception of internet memes about Belfast riots

Abstract

This study sheds light upon how memes about rioting in present-day Belfast are read by their audiences. As such, it answers to a distinct research gap in the meme studies literature, which has mostly shied away from in-depth engagements with audiences, favouring instead the intertwined concepts ‘imagined audience’ and the ideological ‘directionality’ of memes. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with 19 respondents in Belfast, I develop four themes on how they read memes about political violence. The findings indicate that the concept ‘imagined audience’ is reductive at best, which was evident in this study as interviewees did not blindly follow the ideological ‘directionality’ when reading a meme. Moving beyond this reductive view allowed me to unpack how meme audiences place value in the pop-cultural form of the meme; their take on its ‘imagined author’; how they perceived the meme as a site for identity work, and their emotional engagements with memes.