Internetimeemid EKRE poliitilises kommunikatsioonis
Internet memes in the political communication of Estonian Conservative People’s Party

Summary/Abstract: The aim of this article is to explicate the relations between political internet memes, the auditorium and other texts in the context of cultural semiotics. In the article, I observe how the three Internet memes shared on the official Facebook and Instagram account of Estonian Conservative People’s Party (ECPP) during the election campaign of 2017 constructed their auditorium and which are their socio-communicative functions. Umberto Eco’s concept of the model reader allows to conceptualize the text–auditorium relation through competences that the text sets to the reader. To identify the sociocommunicative functions of the Internet memes, I will use Juri Lotman’s framework of the five textual functions. The Internet memes shared on ECPP’s page imply two spectrums of competencies: one of being familiar with the culture of Internet memes and the other of knowing etnofuturism. The fact of the analyzed Internet memes being shared on an official page of a political party seems to act as Roland Barthes’s punctum. This together with the model reader and the auditorium not overlapping leads to interpretational confusion. The article uses the lens of semiotics to demonstrate the inner mechanisms of three political Internet memes and how they were used in political communication.

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