Chronotopic representations as an effect of individuation: The case of the European migrant crisis

Abstract

This article discusses internet memes in their capacity to prompt affective responses on social media in the aftermath of the migrant crisis. The focus is on Facebook pages devoted to geopolitical satire meme-comics known as countryballs and their uptake with regard to the proposed migrant relocation mechanisms. Engagement with internet memes reveals a multilayered complexity behind what is often simplistically portrayed as pro- or anti-migrant sentiment. In order to account for this complexity, the paper combines Gilbert Simondon's theory of individuation with Mikhail Bakhtin's notion of the chronotope currently developed in interactional sociolinguistics along the lines of symbolic interactionism. Finally, this article shows that memes are not a mere product of participatory culture, but rather a powerful instigator of technosocial and often heteroglossic practices that co-organize social life in the new polycentric collectivities appearing on social media. (Chronotope, individuation, internet memes, countryballs, Facebook, identity)*

Correntino Spanish Memes and the Enregisterment of Argentine Guarani Loanwords

“…Drawing on the notion of "citizen sociolinguistics" (Rymes and Leone 2014), an approach that focalizes the participation of non-linguists in sociolinguistic exploration, they analyze metalinguistic commentary on YouTube videos to show how race, region, education, and class converge in the interpretation and reproduction of this meme, noting "that these categories overlap in complex, and not always predictable, configurations" (Aslan and Vásquez 2018, p. 406). Similarly, Procházka (2019) demonstrates how memes index a complicated mixture of ideologies via analysis of the "countryball" meme comics, which soared in popularity during the European migrant crisis. Countryball memes involve simplistic drawings of ball-shaped characters whose color patterns resemble the flags of different countries and whose linguistic and behavioral characteristics are satirized representations of sociocultural stereotypes associated with the countries they represent.…”

Chapter 4. Modeling regional variation in voice onset time of Jutlandic varieties of Danish

“…The term ethnonational discourse is used here to talk about how an essentialist category of "German" is constructed which includes descent as a primary focus (Fuller 2018a, Metzger and Özvatan 2020, Özvatan 2020Römhild 1999). The Germanness of those seen as descendants of a homogeneous folk linked to Germany is not questioned within this discourse, and those who have other backgrounds do not belong to this category.…”