Search Results (17)

Internet memes increasingly move from social media into physical product packaging, yet little is known about how consumers respond when online cultural symbols become package design cues. Drawing on the Stimulus–Organism–Response framework, this study examines how meme-based packaging shapes purchase intention and sharing intention through perceived value, brand warmth, and cultural resonance. A between-subjects survey experiment was conducted with 305 Chinese adult consumers, who evaluated either a meme-based packaging stimulus or a no-explicit-meme conventional packaging control stimulus. Partial least squares structural equation modeling showed that purchase intention and sharing intention followed different dominant mechanisms. Perceived value was the strongest predictor of purchase intention, whereas cultural resonance was the strongest predictor of sharing intention. Visual attractiveness most strongly enhanced perceived value, while playfulness and expression–product fit contributed more clearly to brand warmth and cultural resonance. Mediation results further showed that brand warmth and cultural resonance consistently transmitted the effects of meme-packaging cues, whereas the value route was more selective. These findings show how online cultural symbols can continue to shape consumer evaluation and social transmission after entering physical product interfaces. Full article

This article examines Romanian internet memes as cultural micro-narratives that encode social critique, identity negotiation, and emotional response through compressed, multimodal storytelling. Using a mixed-method approach, the study integrates qualitative narrative analysis with quantitative sentiment data drawn from the RoMEMESv2 corpus, comprising 983 Romanian-language memes. The analysis identifies recurrent narrative roles and plot structures adapted from Propp’s morphology and applied to digital contexts, revealing archetypal roles, such as the slacker hero, the bureaucratic villain, the domestic guardian, and the trickster. From a quantitative point of view, the corpus exhibits a dominant negative sentiment, particularly within political memes, which combine systemic critique with affective ambivalence. These findings distinguish Romanian memes from datasets in other languages, suggesting that negativity functions not as deviance, but as a culturally specific narrative and emotional resource. Multimodal analysis demonstrates how visual and textual elements operate through anchorage, intertextuality, and symbolic compression, so as to construct narrative messages within single frames. The study argues that Romanian memes function as digital folklore: they narrate social frustration and institutional distrust through irony, repetition, and archetypal condensation, offering insights into the emotional and narrative logic of post-communist digital culture. Full article

Israel’s military response in Gaza to Hamas’s terrorist attack and hostage taking of 7 October 2023 has led to fears of growing antisemitism. Indications of heightened antisemitism include massive spikes in antisemitic incidents and hate crimes around the world and the US, demonstrations and campus unrest, and antisemitic memes on the internet and social media platforms. Questions remain, however, whether public opinion has become increasingly hostile to Jews. The ADL Global 100 reports nearly a doubling in antisemitic sentiment from 2014 to 2024. This paper explores trends in antisemitism using country-level ADL Global 100 data. Results show some countries exhibiting large increases in antisemitism, but not all. For the 2023–2024 comparisons, European nations display relatively stable antisemitic distributions, but Russia shows a large increase. The study also uses American National Election study (ANES) data, both pooled from 1964–2024 and the 2020–2024 panel. The ANES data show a slight drop in warmth to Jews using the feeling thermometer. Demographics do not account for the slight drop, but analysis of the panel data suggests that attitudes toward Israel may account for the decline in warmth. Full article

Non-EU international students encounter considerable challenges in social integration, cultural adaptation, and emotional well-being within UK higher education. Despite this, the role of internet memes as a form of participatory digital media in mediating these experiences has not been extensively studied. This paper examines how non-EU students at a British university utilise memes to manage cross-cultural identity and daily stressors. Employing an Experience-Centred Design (ECD) approach, our qualitative research involved 20 participants through digital cultural probes, semi-structured interviews, and co-design workshop. We discovered that memes serve a dual role: they provide emotional bridges that foster a sense of belonging through shared humour, yet they also risk exclusion due to cultural opacity. We introduce the concept of “negotiated humour”, which requires cross-cultural explanation and reduces comedic spontaneity but enhances intercultural understanding. Furthermore, we identify a continuum of meme usage that reflects different phases of acculturation, ranging from expressing frustrations to creating hybrid cultural expressions. This study contributes to cross-cultural adaptation theory by highlighting memes as boundary objects in identity negotiation. We suggest design implications for culturally sensitive platforms, such as contextual footnotes, and institutional interventions like meme-based orientation activities to exploit humour’s potential for fostering inclusive dialogue. Our research highlights how transient digital humour can provide deep insights into identity, community, and the complex dynamics of cross-cultural adaptation. Full article

While speakers of German have adopted many loanwords from other languages throughout history, recent diversification of language use in Germany is mainly driven by the global mobility of English. Previous research has therefore focused on various domains in which English linguistic resources are used, particularly in traditional media and social media communication. Furthermore, many studies on social media communication have also examined English language internet memes more broadly. Despite this plethora of research, little attention has been paid to how English is used in internet memes and reels produced by professional journalists in Germany. Playing a significant role in communication amongst young people, internet memes and reels are used by many German youth media organisations. In particular for youth radio stations in Germany, which have become multimedia outlets, online communication via Instagram is vital for their audience interaction. This paper examines the use of English linguistic resources in a professionally produced Instagram corpus of internet meme and reel captions produced by journalists working for one of the largest youth radio stations in Germany. Data for the analysis of Instagram content were collected as part of the larger ethnographic research project CIDoRA (funded by the European Union). For this project, a mixed methods approach was applied. Methods of data collection and analysis include linguistic ethnography both at the youth radio station and on the station’s Instagram profile page, informal interviews and 20 semi-structured interviews with journalists, and a quantitative and qualitative analysis of 980 meme and reel captions produced for the station’s Instagram profile. Since the youth radio station’s Instagram profile functions as a means of the station’s online self-advertisement, the analysis of this article also draws on a previous study by the researcher. This study analysed possible facilitating factors for the use of catachrestic and non-catachrestic anglicisms in radio station imaging (radio self-advertisement) of six German adult contemporary radio stations. The article therefore includes an analysis of the possible facilitating factors lexical field, brevity of expression, diachronic development of the pragmatic value of lexical items and semantic reasons for the use of English in Instagram content. It thereby explores the differences in anglicism use between these two media formats (radio broadcasting and social media communication) and whether possible facilitating factors for the use of English in adult contemporary radio station imaging are also facilitating factors for the use of English in meme and reel captions produced by the youth radio station. Full article

Internet memes are a special type of digital content that is shared through social media. They have recently emerged as a popular new format of media communication. They are often multimodal, combining text with images and aim to express humor, irony, sarcasm, or sometimes convey hatred and misinformation. Automatically detecting memes is important since it enables tracking of social and cultural trends and issues related to the spread of harmful content. While memes can take various forms and belong to different categories, such as image macros, memes with labeled objects, screenshots, memes with text out of the image, and funny images, existing datasets do not account for the diversity of meme formats, styles and content. To bridge this gap, we present the PolyMeme dataset, which comprises approximately 27 K memes from four categories. This was collected from Reddit and a part of it was manually labelled into these categories. Using the manual labels, deep learning networks were trained to classify the unlabelled images with an estimated error rate of 7.35%. The introduced meme dataset in combination with existing datasets of regular images were used to train deep learning networks (ResNet, ViT) on meme detection, exhibiting very high accuracy levels (98% on the test set). In addition, no significant gains were identified from the use of regular images containing text. Full article

Hateful memes are malicious and biased sentiment information widely spread on the internet. Detecting hateful memes differs from traditional multimodal tasks because, in conventional tasks, visual and textual information align semantically. However, the challenge in detecting hateful memes lies in their unique multimodal nature, where images and text in memes may be weak or unrelated, requiring models to understand the content and perform multimodal reasoning. To address this issue, we introduce a multimodal fine-grained hateful memes detection model named “TCAM”. The model leverages advanced encoding techniques from TweetEval and CLIP and introduces enhanced Cross-Attention and Cross-Mask Mechanisms (CAM) in the feature fusion stage to improve multimodal correlations. It effectively embeds fine-grained features of data and image descriptions into the model through transfer learning. This paper uses the Area Under the Receiver Operating Characteristic Curve (AUROC) as the primary metric to evaluate the model’s discriminatory ability. This approach achieved an AUROC score of 0.8362 and an accuracy score of 0.764 on the Facebook Hateful Memes Challenge (FHMC) dataset, confirming its high discriminatory capability. The TCAM model demonstrates relatively superior performance compared to ensemble machine learning methods. Full article

Humour and antisocial behaviour on the internet are under-researched. Online spaces have opened a gateway for new ways to express unrestrained humour (e.g., dark humour) and ways to behave antisocially (e.g., online trolling). The tendencies and motivations of those engaging with such humour and behaviour are yet to be clearly established and understood. The present study aimed to fill this gap by exploring the interplay between dark humour, online trolling, and dark personality traits. Participants (N = 160) completed an online survey consisting of trait scales to assess the Dark Tetrad, dark humour, and online trolling, as well as two online trolling tasks (enjoyment and ability) and two dark humour meme tasks (enjoyment and ability). The results confirmed relationships between the Dark Tetrad and the dark humour trait, and several Dark Tetrad traits were related to the enjoyment of and ability to produce dark humour. Furthermore, dark humour and online trolling were closely related. The findings also revealed that online trolls did not enjoy being trolled but did enjoy trolling, and this ability to troll is underpinned by sadism. These findings illustrate the potential dark psychological motivations for using dark humour, demonstrate that online trolling is infused with darker forms of humour, and provide deeper insights into online trolls. Full article

Waterbird plays a vital role in maintaining ecosystem services and serves as a bioindicator of ecological conditions. However, people are not fully aware of the benefits waterbirds bring to ecosystem and how biodiversity conservation contributes to sustainability. This study aims to promote waterbird conservation behavior by using participatory internet memes. The internet memes feature humor and participatory culture, and they have been used to promote environmental campaigns. This study explores how co-creation engagement interacts with different types of memes regarding the online civic engagement in an animal conservation campaign and the underlying mechanisms in that process. A 3 (meme types: high humor meme without text vs. low humor meme without text vs. typical high humor meme with text) X 2 (engagement: co-creation engagement vs. non-co-creation engagement) between subject online experiment was used in this study. The results showed three causal routes—absorption, perceived humor, and perceived cuteness—that mediated the effect between high humor memes and online civic engagement. Furthermore, this study revealed under what circumstance low humor memes are effective in promoting civic engagement in environmental communication. Full article

This project investigates English–Spanish codeswitching in internet memes posted to the Facebook page, We are mitú (mitú), and analyzes how lexical insertions and quotatives contribute to the enregisterment of linguistic patterns and the construction of collective identity among U.S. Latinx millennials in virtual social spaces. Data include instances of lexical insertion (n = 280) and quotative mixed codes (n = 114) drawn from a collected corpus of 765 image–text memes. The most frequent lexical insertions included food items (e.g., elote and pozole), kinship terms (e.g., abuelita and tía), and culturally specific artifacts or practices (e.g., quinceañera and lotería), which reflect biculturalism and rely on a shared set of references for the construction of a group identity. Additionally, the quotatives in the data construct Spanish-speaking characterological figures that enregister a particular brand of U.S. Latinx millennial identity that includes being bilingual, having Spanish-speaking parents, and having strong ties to Latinx culture. Overall, this work highlights not only internet memes as a vehicle for enregisterment, but also, and more importantly, how the language resources employed within them work to enregister linguistic and cultural norms of U.S. Latinx millennials, and thereby, play a role in identity construction in virtual social spaces. Full article

The intense contact between Guarani and Spanish in the Argentine province of Corrientes has produced a wide array of mutual contact effects, the most visible being widespread borrowing in both directions. This article examines a previously unreported feature of Argentine Guarani loans in Correntino Spanish: the social value they have acquired. Building on the growing body of work in sociolinguistics on internet memes, which are sites of phenomena rich in sociolinguistic value, an analysis is provided of Argentine Guarani loans in Correntino Spanish using an original corpus of memes collected from Correntino Instagram pages. Such memes, whose intended audience is monolingual, are a valuable source of Correntino Spanish features, which are used for humorous, ironic, or nostalgic effect. Via analysis of the relationship between these loans and the kinds of memes they appear in, I show that these loans have undergone enregisterment, i.e., they have taken on additional social meaning that allows them to index a complex variety of ideological stances toward Correntino social phenomena and character types. The results of this process evidence the fact that language contact, as an engine of variation, creates fertile ground for the emergence of social meaning and that memes are a productive and promising window into the (re)creation and evolution of such meaning. Full article

COVID-19 expanded rapidly throughout the world, with enormous health, social, and economic consequences. Mental health is the most affected by extreme negative emotions and stress, but it has been an underestimated part of human life during the pandemic. We hypothesized that people may have responded to the pandemic spontaneously with increased interest in and creation of funny internet memes. Using Google and Google Trends, we revealed that the number of and interest in funny internet memes related to COVID-19 exploded during the spring 2020 lockdown. The interest in coronavirus memes was positively correlated with interest in mortality due to COVID-19 on a global scale, and positively associated with the real number of deaths and cases reported in different countries. We compared content of a random sample of 200 coronavirus memes with a random sample of 200 non-coronavirus memes found on the Internet. The sentiment analysis showed that coronavirus memes had a similar proportion of positive and negative words compared to non-coronavirus memes. However, an internet questionnaire revealed that coronavirus memes gained higher funniness scores than a random sample of non-coronavirus memes. Our results confirm that societies may have turned to humor to cope with the threat of SARS-CoV-2. Full article

Users of web or chat social networks typically use emojis (e.g., smilies, memes, hearts) to convey in their textual interactions the emotions underlying the context of the communication, aiming for better interpretability, especially for short polysemous phrases. Semantic-based context recognition tools, employed in any chat or social network, can directly comprehend text-based emoticons (i.e., emojis created from a combination of symbols and characters) and translate them into audio information (e.g., text-to-speech readers for individuals with vision impairment). On the other hand, for a comprehensive understanding of the semantic context, image-based emojis require image-recognition algorithms. This study aims to explore and compare different classification methods for pictograms, applied to emojis collected from Internet sources. Each emoji is labeled according to the basic Ekman model of six emotional states. The first step involves extraction of emoji features through convolutional neural networks, which are then used to train conventional supervised machine learning classifiers for purposes of comparison. The second experimental step broadens the comparison to deep learning networks. The results reveal that both the conventional and deep learning classification approaches accomplish the goal effectively, with deep transfer learning exhibiting a highly satisfactory performance, as expected. Full article

This article examines the emotive narratives surrounding the “new normal” of social distancing practices during the first six months of the COVID-19 pandemic, as revealed by religion-focused Internet memes. In March 2020, many people were introduced to the concept of “social distancing” for the first time via news reports and media coverage of the spreading COVID-19 pandemic which led to the first lockdown. As the year progressed, social distancing discourse was combined with discussion of the practices of masking and quarantining, all of which became part of many countries’ normal routines as a public health management strategy. Over time, social distancing has become a widely used public health strategy impacting many social groups, including religious adherents and their places of worship. Memes became a discursive space where practices of social distancing and religious attitudes towards these practices were expressed and debated. By examining memes centered on American Christianity, this study reveals that memetic narratives in the early months of the pandemic indicate a positive framing of behaviors intended to help reduce the spread of COVID-19, and a negative framing of the attitudes of religious individuals and organizations who seem to privilege the cultural practices of their belief over the core values of the Christian faith. Full article

The proliferation of Internet has accelerated the dissemination of information, which has given birth to the term “Internet meme”. Social network is one of the pivotal media in spreading an Internet meme. Marketers utilize Internet memes to carry out marketing activities to significantly improve their Internet exposure. We thus verify whether consumers generate purchase intention after being attracted to an Internet meme, as no such research prevails. We employ the value–attitude–behavior model as its theoretical core and discuss how the values formed by consumers under the impact of an Internet meme influence their purchasing behaviors through their attitudes. The participants of the study are Internet users who are habitual to checking Facebook. We adopted convenience sampling and developed 380 valid questionnaires. Structural equation modeling is applied to verify the study’s hypotheses. The research results reveal that utilitarian and hedonic values influence the Purchase Intention through utilitarian and hedonic attitudes. In light of the aforementioned findings, it is suggested that marketers and relevant participants focus on the hedonic value brought by an Internet meme and design fun and witty Internet memes to attract consumers. Full article