VISUAL METAPHORS IN COVID-19 RELATED INTERNET MEMES
VISUAL METAPHORS IN COVID-19 RELATED INTERNET MEMES

Summary/Abstract: The COVID-19 pandemic completely changed our lives and for a long time it changed the way people interacted. Socialising in real life became difficult, even impossible from time to time (during the lock downs). People turned their focus on their machines (phones,tablets, computers, etc.). The only form of socialising available was the online one, and Internet memes flooded the social networks.Our study looks at internet memes as they were both a form of stress release and communication. The Internet memes selected for our study were created with the aid of cinematography and a great number of them have captions written in English.They were carefully selected in order to belong to the first period of the pandemic (March 2020– August 2020). We consider this period of time to be the crisis period as no treatment or cure was available besides masks and lock downs. The research questions addressed are the following:(1) What does meme interpretation depend on? (2) How was COVID-19 Pandemic/the virus framed through Internet memes? In the current study we use both qualitative and quantitative methods in order to answer our research questions.

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