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- Convenors:
-
Tsafi Sebba-Elran
(Haifa University)
Liisi Laineste (Estonian Literary Museum)
Christian Ritter (Karlstad University)
Send message to Convenors
- Discussant:
-
Ana Banić Grubišić
(University of Belgrade)
- Formats:
- Panel
- Stream:
- Digital Lives
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 23 June, -
Time zone: Europe/Helsinki
Short Abstract:
COVID-19 has prompted memes and other types of online folklore. Combining theoretical and practical approaches to study the ongoing crisis and its public response, the panel and workshop deal with experimental forms of gathering and presenting the pandemic-related ethnographic data.
Long Abstract:
The COVID-19 pandemic prompted a widespread public response, which included internet memes, jokes, and other types of online folklore. The humorous reactions reflected and shaped by these narratives became an integral component of the "semantics of the epidemic" - everyday ideas and practices in dealing with it.
The panel focuses on the internet meme or image macro, and its various targets, types and roles during the pandemic in different national and regional contexts. We will discuss common content, form and meaning of meme cycles during this crisis. The data will be analysed from a comparative perspective, to the backdrop of previous waves of disaster jokes and the use of folklore in response to previous epidemics, crises, or risks. Examining the repertoires of different national and social groups will enable us to point at their universal and particular aspects, and show how they reflect the tensions of the pandemic as well as of the digital medium - between the global and the local, and between the hegemonic and the subversive.
The final session of the panel will be a workshop which invites ethnographic researchers who seek to explore the possibilities and limitations of ethnography as a form of transmedia storytelling (e.g. Walley 2015). Attendees will reflect on experimental forms of gathering and presenting ethnographic data. Transmedia storytelling carries great potential for rethinking asymmetrical power relations and ethnographic collaboration, transgressing both platform monopolies and traditional rules for authorship.
Please register for the workshop session here: https://forms.gle/Z52PdLxL9RHz6aBV7
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 23 June, 2021, -Paper short abstract:
Memes as a visual form of humor also represent a semantic trace of time. As such we will consider memes published in period of Corona in Slovenia. The paper presents the collection created at ZRC SAZU ISN, which will be semantically and semiotically analysed to show the picture of particular time.
Paper long abstract:
Memes as "(post)modern folklore” (Shifman 2013) that express and shap shared norms and values and as a visual form of humour also represent a semantic trace of time and have an important focus on insight into the public narrative. By presenting details of everyday life or perceptions of government decisions, they present themselves not only as a humorous genre, but also as important contemporary witnesses of a particular era. As such, we can consider memes about the discontent and new habits that were the consequence of the Covid 19 pandemic. The pandemic period was extremley productive in creating memes as respond on different situations.
The paper will focus on and present the collection of memes created at ZRC SAZU, Institute of Slovenian Ethnology. The collection consists of memes that were circulating in Slovenia, but were either with foreign or Slovenian origin. These memes will be semantically cathegorized and semiotically analysed in order to provide a generalised picture of certain temporal and spatial worldview and humour elements, which are contrasted with temporal facts during this period.
Paper short abstract:
The report follows the story of the media in the first months of corona quarantine, which started with a fake news, how the reduction of pollution caused by quarantine has a positive effect on the environment and nature is recovering.
Paper long abstract:
To what extent is the ability to tell a true story in a picture? What is the relationship between context and rhetoric in this case?
The question of economic prosperity versus a sustainable natural environment was already highly relevant in the world before the pandemic broke out. This is how the return of swans and dolphins to the canals of Venice, which had previously suffered from a flood of tourists, was very promising with pictures of slippery news. It immediately became viral.
The report follows the story of the media in the first months of corona quarantine, which started with a fake news, how the reduction of pollution caused by quarantine has a positive effect on the environment and nature is recovering.
Paper short abstract:
Memes are used as a part of politicized discussion on current affairs. I examine one group of meme images as a template used for both, the opposing and supporting official decision-making concerning Corona outbreak. These memes are used by both individual users and different political groups.
Paper long abstract:
New ways and technologies for communication offer politically oriented activists new possibilities for getting their message heard. Different social media platforms support different kinds of styles of communication and use of material, but typically the use of these platforms is fast paced, especially when new content (e.g. posts in Facebook) is added every moment. Social media content also relies heavily on audiovisual aspects and one vernacular use of the media is posting memes in their different formats (picture, video etc.). Effective use of memes garners responses from the more or less targeted audiences of other social media users, and a successful use of memes in communicating ideas lends authority in the discussions about current social affairs carried out on the internet. In this paper, I focus on one particular group of image macro memes, the “LOL Jesus”, in which the character of Jesus is used as the focal point of delivering a political message: in these images, Jesus can, among other things, act as a proponent or opponent to the political decisions made by government official for dealing with the pandemic outbreak. My aim is to shed light on the versatility of the single type of meme as a template for different, and even opposite political perspectives. The LOL Jesus -meme is used to comment many other events this year as well, not just the Corona. Same memes are used also by different political groups, not just individuals.
Paper short abstract:
As news of ”nature healing” began spreading in the wake of COVID-19 lockdowns during spring 2020, this was soon mocked by internet memes. I analyse these memes as absurd, posthumanist contestations of both the anthropocentric Nature-Culture divide and the antihumanist view of humankind as the virus.
Paper long abstract:
Along with the escalation of the COVID-19 pandemia in spring 2020, media began reporting on ”the return of nature” as wild animals were spotted in emptied urban areas. This was quickly followed by a genre of internet memes that made fun of the idea of ”nature beginning to heal”.
In this paper, I present a collection of these memes and analyse them in a posthumanist framework which questions the modern separation of Nature and Culture. I will look at the corpus of ”nature is healing” images as absurdist repositionings, where objects considered cultural have been transferred into the assumed nature or otherwise act in natural ways. I argue that these amusing recontextualizations mock the romantic idea – present especially in spring 2020 – of an Edenic, non-human Nature reclaiming urban space. This idealisation was at the time also linked to the antihumanist, anticultural notion of ”humankind as the real virus”. What the memes show, instead, is that human phenomena such as black metal bands can be considered something organic and part of the ecosystem as well, while some signs of non-human nature healing are the result of wistful over-interpretation.
This memetic reversal undermines the idea of a blissful premodern state of life that has been corrupted by Culture but will now return as Nature’s retribution in the form of COVID-19. ”Nature is healing” memes can thus be read as a creative synthesis where the artificial Nature/Culture-boundary blurs. In short, they defy both the old humanist and the antihumanist view.
Paper short abstract:
The subject of this paper is the content and qualitative analysis of internet memes on the Slavorum Facebook page during the global Covid-19 pandemic.
Paper long abstract:
The subject of this paper is the content and qualitative analysis of internet memes on the Slavorum Facebook page during the global Covid-19 pandemic. According to the official/about section, this page is dedicated to various kinds of information related to Slavic cultural and geographical space. In addition, members post various amateur multimedia content, most often of a humorous character, on a daily basis. Memes that are posted, shared, and commented on the page during the pandemic can be grouped into two basic types. Members post photoshopped photos of funny everyday situations dedicated to ways of coping with social isolation and quarantine, how ordinary people conceptualize coronavirus prevention and which folk remedies they use. Also, members share altered globally popular memes adapted to fit the local cultural context and concerns. The main characteristic of the visual photoshopped humor on Slavorum page is the essentialist approach to Slavic identity – Slavic culture is presented as a homogeneous entity, and memes shared on page are built on we : them dichotomy, mainly based on widespread ethnic stereotypes and balkanistic discourse. In the comment section, these digitally altered images become the trigger for the (re)creation of new memes, furthering the discussion, which is often accompanied by different personal memories of members, their life stories, and other short narratives. In this paper, we will show how this imagined laughing community, in strategically subverting negative stereotypes through self-mockery humorous practices, created a nostalgic space conducive to negotiating identities and ambivalent memories from the past communist regimes.