Paper long abstract:

This exploratory study will investigate and conceptualize the cultural seasoning of Internet memes in online digital space of Kazakhstan. While Kazakhstani news media do cover key events of Kazakhstan's political and social life by exposing "officially" approved agendas, the Internet memes offer additional layer of public agendas. We argue that the Internet memes are powerful weapons of public agenda setting: they crystallize key phrases of political discourse, highlight historical moments, expose "unspoken truths," and ironize many other challenges of living a Kazakhstani life. Using Framing as theory (Entman, 1993) and a Grounded Theory approach as a method, we aim to investigate the following research questions:

RQ 1: What key agendas of public discourse are reflected in Kazakhstani popular memes?

RQ2: How are these key agendas framed in those memes?

RQ3: What do these frames suggest?

Biologist Richard Dawkins (1976) originally coined the term "meme" and defined memes as small cultural units of transmission, similar to genes, which are spread by copying and imitation. That definition has narrowed over the years to include online content (Shifman, 2014) Today, we live in highly competitive era of the marketplace of attention (Webster, 2014). Thus, we argue that memes are a powerful digital medium to respond to political and social events within one cultural space. While communication scholars are still defining the concept of memes from diverse perspectives, three things stay central about memes: a) they are reflection of the culture in which they were created; b) they are digital units created or generated by users by copying or imitation; c) they are spreadable and viral online (Blackmore, 1999; Aunger, 2010; Shifman, 2014).

This exploratory study will investigate the framing patterns in top 20 Kazakhstani memes. The findings of the study might be potentially interesting to scholars interested in cross-cultural investigations of memes.

Key words: Kazakhstani memes, framing, public discourse, visual media

References

Aunger, R. (2010) The Electric Meme: A new theory of how we think. New York, NY: Simon and Schuster.

Blackmore, S. (1999). The meme machine. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.

Dawkins, R. (1976). The Selfish Gene. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.

Entman, R. M. (1993). Framing: Toward clarification of a fractured paradigm. Journal of Communication, 43(4), 51-58.

Shifman, L. (2014) Memes in Digital Culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press

Webster, J. G. (2014). The marketplace of attention: How audiences take shape in a digital age. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

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