Multimodal Creativity on Social Networks
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| Year of publication | 2024 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | The thesis concentrates on memetic elements in an online conversation, their usage regarding poster intent and their capacity to substitute textual communication effectively. The study observes both the context of the element usage as well as the effect that the elements have on the subsequent continuation of the conversation and turn-taking. It is exploring the following research questions: 1.What is the intent of the speaker when they employ memetic elements in online discourse? 2.Is the employment of memetic elements successful in manipulating the flow of the conversation in a manner that textual expressions would? In order to investigate the research questions, I collect data from several social media platforms, primarily Facebook and Twitter, both of which allow free usage of multimodal elements in their discourse threads. The study uses both quantitative and qualitative approaches to the data. The project uses a quantitative method to reveal patterns in two categories: closing of conversation patterns and patterns in carrying conversation. The latter is divided into subsections on deflection of topic and continuation of topic – the quantitative part of the research therefore examines the numerical evidence of the capacity of these elements to continue, recontextualize or terminate the current discourse, based on patterns with the same effect observed in textual conversations. Each of these patterns will have selected samples of usage of memetic elements which will be analyzed qualitatively from a pragmatic point of view – in detail with their context, layers of meaning, speaker intent and hearer reception. Those will be subjected to analysis based on Wiggins’s elaborated dimensions of a meme (content, form and stance), and enhanced by new dimensions relevant to the study (such as the capacity of the meme to contextually progress or instigate a conversation). This methodology should reveal the methods in which memetic elements bring about new tactics for manipulating conversation and controlling its flow and context by their polysemiotic nature and socio-culturally associated extra meanings. |
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