University of Twente Student Theses
Memes… More to it than what meets the eye? The use of memes in the alt-right community
Halfwerk, Sammy (2024) Memes… More to it than what meets the eye? The use of memes in the alt-right community.
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| Abstract: | Purpose: Memes are extremely popular in modern society, most people interact with memes in some way. Research has found that memes have a lot of communicative power; memes are involved in advertisements and political discourse. The alt-right, a far-right extremists, often create and post memes on the Politically Incorrect image board on 4chan. This paper aims to understand the affordances of memes and how the alt-right community makes use of the communicative power of memes. Method: A qualitative content analysis was conducted on a corpus of memes collected from the Politically Incorrect board on 4chan. A framework was created from existing literature, including the functionalities of memes and the techniques they use. The content analysis aimed to test the initial framework, complement the categories that were developed with new ones, provide practical examples of the functionalities and techniques, and explore the relationship between them Results: Memes proved to be very intricate, sometimes serving more than one function. The relationship between the functions and techniques is also complex, the same technique would serve different purposes depending on the function. Techniques were used to increase the efficacy of other techniques. The convincing function was utilised the most and the techniques within the antagonism category were the most prevalent. Conclusion: The framework provides insight into the affordances of memes and the techniques that can be used. The framework is the first of its kind, to the best of the author's knowledge, and fills the gap in the research into the affordances of memes. Memes are powerful communicative tools that make use of many techniques to achieve their functions. |
| Item Type: | Essay (Bachelor) |
| Faculty: | BMS: Behavioural, Management and Social Sciences |
| Subject: | 05 communication studies |
| Programme: | Communication Studies BSc (56615) |
| Link to this item: | https://purl.utwente.nl/essays/100721 |
| Export this item as: | BibTeX EndNote HTML Citation Reference Manager |
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