Laughing across borders: Intertextuality of internet memes

Abstract

Internet humour flourishes on social network sites, special humour-dedicated sites and on web pages focusing on edutainment or infotainment. Its increasing pervasiveness has to do

Social media-based visual humour use in tourism marketing: a semiotic perspective

“…Last but not least, online communication without geographical boundary has impacted the creation and popularity of humour topics. For instance, sex, animals and genders are global-oriented humour topics, whereas ethnicity, politics and habits are local topics (Laineste & Voolaid 2016;Shifman 2007). In a nutshell, social media-based humour goes beyond and is much more complex and innovative than humour in traditional media.…”

“…Sharing as communication -responding through laughter (e.g., 'haha' or smiley emoji) and responding through humour (Ge 2017;Knight 2008)suggests that humour can be used to shape amusing interactions. To summarize, the practice of sharing through humour use creates and reinforces group identity and solidarity, and shows one's capability of identifying and using humour (Laineste & Voolaid 2016). Clearly, humour as a form of sharing provides tourism firms an opportunity to enhance their social media marketing efforts.…”

“…For instance, a destination-related image can denote a particular place (e.g., mountains) while it also carries a certain symbolic value based on personal, social or/and cultural connotations (e.g., adventure, escape). Moreover, the use of visual humour for meaning-making, such as signifying one's daily life, and social and political conflicts, is a common user practice on social media (Ge 2016;Laineste & Voolaid 2016;Marone 2016). From a theoretical perspective, semiotics identifies the content and meaning of denotative (literal) and connotative (interpretation subject to socio-cultural or personal association) sign elements in images (Moriarty 2005) and interprets them with regards to their iconic, indexical or symbolic significance (Peirce 1991).…”

“…Social media-based visual humouran essential element for fostering a participatory culture in the digital space (Laineste & Voolaid 2016;Marone 2016;Shifman 2012)lends itself well to visual social media marketing. The marketing literature consistently shows that firm-initiated amusing videos, photographs and pictures are more likely to generate consumer comments, likes and reposts (e.g., Bergh, et al 2011;Brown, Bhadury & Pope 2010).…”

“…It is well recognised that Chinese DMOs are adept at using social media-based humour for consumer engagement (Ge & Gretzel 2018). The expressive and visual affordances of social media encourage humour use as an intricate and creative way of self-expression and meaning-making, and a reflection of the sociocultural realities (Filani 2016;Laineste & Voolaid 2016;Marone 2016). In this context, humour is well recognised as a symbol of emotional nourishment (Thomson 2010)it allows for building a long-lived and authentic firm-consumer relationship.…”