Humor 2.0: Memes Discourse and the Algerian Youth Culture
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Date
2023
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UNIVERSITY OF ABBES LAGHROUR-KHENCHELA
Abstract
Abstract
Memes have become so popular among Algerian youth nowadays as a common socio-discursive practice. Accordingly, the current research is carried out to discover memes as an online discourse and its relationship to the Algerian youth culture. More precisely, it aims at describing how humor is created through these memes and the way it reflects the Algerian Youth culture. The study relied on the multimodal semiotic approach in analyzing discourse. The corpora of the study consisted of 400 memes collected from four Algerian popular humor pages on Instagram. Results revealed that memes creation can be classified into four categories: cartoon, textual, daily activities, famous figure and animal category. Moreover, it has been found that memes are loaded with socio-cultural aspects of the Algerian culture and the discursive practices in memes function as mirrors of specific cultures. The findings of this research reflect the peculiarity of online humor, and strengthen the power of humor discourse to create and display social and cultural aspects in given societies and cultures. Thus, it can be studied as a tool to understand human behaviours and cultures in human and social sciences.