Memes, Memes, Everywhere, nor Any Meme to Trust: Examining the Credibility and Persuasiveness of COVID-19-Related Memes

Wasike, Ben

doi:10.1093/jcmc/zmab024

Cited by 19 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 83 publications

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“…Making light of a negative experience (positive reappraisal) can be an element of emotional regulation (Arkam, et al, 2021). Moreover, pro-healthy memes are found to be more credible and persuasive than anti-healthy memes (Wasike, 2022).…”

Section: ) New Situations Require New Competences -Memes As the Behav...mentioning

confidence: 93%

Memes as culture repositories - social emotions during “Stay at home” phase in Poland from public health perspective

Wójta-Kempa¹,

Wolska-Zogata²,

Jarynowski³

2022

Preprint

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Aim. The main goal of the article is to create a socio-medical picture of COVID-19 pandemic from Polish Internet memes. Memes are part of a collective memory and could help understand ongoing social processes during the pandemic.Methodology. We perform qualitative analysis of the selected memes shared on the Polish Internet. Among over 2000 gathered memes 25 examples of memes were dedicated to #stayathome phase (18.03-07.04.2020). Results. We have distinguished three main topics, areas and functions: 1) uncertainty and anxiety in everyday life; 2) managing with isolation and making sense of measures; 3) building support community and solidarity with medical staff. We found a relatively high number of supportive, prohealth memes during the stay-at-home phase in comparison to prepandemic era as well as other phases of the pandemic.Conclusions. Memes do not only have humorous functions, but also carry new information as they give context to a new situation or event. Thus, memospheres should be monitored and used in public health awareness campaigns helping people coping with uncertainty, the internalization process of measures acceptance as well as promoting help-giving attitudes. Memes could be utilized as health communication techniques to influence Internet users.

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Section: ) New Situations Require New Competences -Memes As the Behav...mentioning

confidence: 93%

Memes as culture repositories - social emotions during “Stay at home” phase in Poland from public health perspective

Wójta-Kempa¹,

Wolska-Zogata²,

Jarynowski³

2022

Preprint

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“…In contrast, Veerasamy and Labuschagne (2014) emphasized in their framework on meme effectiveness the importance of a message's visual mode to be disseminated and to attract users' attention. Other studies dedicated to the effects of political memes found that the consumption of memes has positive effects on users' political engagement (Zhang and Pinto, 2021;Johann, 2022) and that the memetic presentation of credible information results in higher levels of engagement, such as commenting and sharing political memes (Wasike, 2022). Moreover, studies inside and outside the political context have shown that memes trigger users' emotions and subtle perceptions of the presented messages (Williams et al, 2016;Akram et al, 2020;Gardner et al, 2021) and that humor plays an important role as an enabler of cognitive and affective outcomes (Gardner et al, 2021;Myrick et al, 2021;Wong and Holyoak, 2021).…”

Section: Political Internet Memes and Memeified Politicsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Effects and perception of multimodal recontextualization in political Internet memes. Evidence from two online experiments in Austria

Bülow

Johann

2023

Front. Commun.

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Internet memes are an integral part of social media communication and a popular genre for humorous engagement in online political discourses. A meme is a collective of multimodal signs that refer to each other through shared formal, content-related, and/or stance-related characteristics and can be recontextualized on different levels: (1) language, (2) mode of presentation, and (3) humor. In this paper, we examine the perceptions and effects of recontextualization in image macros—the most prominent meme subgenre. Two between-subjects online experiments from Austria offer a holistic approach to meaning-making through multimodal recontextualization in political image macros. The first experiment explored the perception of language variety and its effects on users' intentions to forward a humorous image macro. The second experiment further investigated the effects of a political message's language variety, mode of presentation, and humor on users' perceptions and behavioral intentions. The experiments' results indicate that perceptions and behavioral intentions are mainly affected by a political message's presentation as an image macro, while the recontextualization of language variety and humor plays a minor role. The study contributes to the growing body of knowledge on Internet memes as multimodal and recontextualizable political messages from the receivers' point of view.

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“…To suitably meet the study's test conditions, I created the stimuli from scratch using Photoshop, as done in previous experimental design studies on social media content (Wasike, 2022). The author created four stimuli that looked identical to real Facebook pages (see appendices A and B) in overall layout design, color, typeface, etc.…”

Section: Stimulimentioning

confidence: 99%

Memes, Memes, Everywhere, nor Any Meme to Trust: Examining the Credibility and Persuasiveness of COVID-19-Related Memes

Cited by 19 publications

References 83 publications

Memes as culture repositories - social emotions during “Stay at home” phase in Poland from public health perspective

Memes as culture repositories - social emotions during “Stay at home” phase in Poland from public health perspective

Effects and perception of multimodal recontextualization in political Internet memes. Evidence from two online experiments in Austria

When the influencer says jump! How influencer signaling affects engagement with COVID-19 misinformation

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