Visual Elements and Memes in Social Media in the Era of Crisis and War Communications
Language: English and French
The journalistic mediation of traditional media has also been overturned by secure messaging platforms, whose distribution channels bring together large user bases. As a result, communities have a space in which members can read, interact or participate using messages composed of text, still and moving images and audio files. In this way, crises and wars are constructed into a narrative that the individual relates and communicates in real time, participating in a disintermediated communication space by exploiting self-representation and direct expression.
Faced with the emergence of a new visual communication of war, we need to consider the issues they represent, particularly in the collective imagination and in the construction of national narratives and identity. We propose to study the evolution of new visual elements on digital platforms of social media during social crises and wars, in particular, humorous war memes, photos and videos followed by short texts. Mainly conceived with a humorous and/or ironic, affective or tragic purpose, these new visual elements are not simply objects of representation; on the contrary, they function as formidable political components, as a means of propaganda, as well as elements of a collective unconscious, new national myths or constituents of a new identity.
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