Browsing by Subject "memes"

Concern about global warming can lead to climate change anxiety, a form of anxiety characterized by excessive worry about the climate crisis and associated consequences on the natural world and human society. It has been suggested by previous research that humor can be used to manage feelings of anxiety. This study seeks to determine if this phenomenon can be applied specifically to climate change anxiety. The research combines a comprehensive literature review with an online survey that leveraged climate change themed internet memes as a proxy for humor to gather opinions about the intersections between these two topics. The survey data supplemented claims made by existing literature, indicating that climate change themed internet memes and humor in general can be useful coping mechanisms to mitigate feelings of climate anxiety. The survey was completed by 93 respondents; most of these participants were women, located in the US, and/or between the ages of 20 and 29. Results from the survey showed that people tend to feel best about their environmental anxiety when they are taking active steps to solve the problem. Conscious decisions such as reducing waste or participating in activist movements are easier to recognize and self-report than more passive coping skills. Reliance on humor was reported as a supplementary coping skill, but many respondents indicated that looking at humorous climate change themed memes did influence their feelings about climate change overall. The scope of this study was relatively small in scale, therefore the results presented in this thesis may not be indicative of broader social trends and likely require further research.

This qualitative study examines multimodal communication in cat memes. Cat memes, also called Lolcats, are a medium that consists of two modes: a photograph of a cat and a caption. They can be seen as signs that participate in a communicative act. To examine how these modes work, a semiotic multimodal analysis was conducted. The research consists of two datasets that both include cat memes. The first set consists of eight Lolcats, while the second set includes 17 variations of one Lolcat template. All Lolcats were collected from I Can Has Cheezburger?, a meme website. Firstly, the layout structure of the memes in the first dataset were are introduced to identify the semiotic modes. Secondly, the images and captions of each meme in the first dataset were individually analyzed, and the connections between them were discussed in detail. The second dataset was analyzed focusing on the captions to find out how the reference of a meme can be changed by manipulating the caption. The analysis revealed that the relationship between the semiotic modes of a cat meme differs depending on the reference. Both modes are needed for successful communication. When the visual connection is strong, the captions only support the communicative act. When there is weaker visual reference, the burden of delivering the message shifts to the caption. Captions can also guide the viewer to interpret the same image in different ways. Even though Lolcats are humoristic pieces of online communication that are often consumed quickly, they can reveal interesting details about the online Lolcat community.