Open AccessExploring Visual Culture of COVID-19 Memes: Russian and Chinese Perspectives
Author(s) -
Olga A. Smirnova
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
central european journal of communication
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.125
H-Index - 2
ISSN - 1899-5101
DOI - 10.51480/1899-5101.14.2(29).4
Subject(s) - sociology , psychology , the internet , scope (computer science) , ethnic group , the arts , social psychology , political science , anthropology , computer science , world wide web , law , programming language
The article explores COVID-19 related Internet memes and treats them as samples of creolized text in a study of the way ethnic and cultural peculiarities of memes are perceived by representatives of two radically different cultural paradigms: the Russians and Chinese. A survey is used as a method of the investigation. Russian and Chinese students, and visual arts experts evaluated Russian and Chinese COVID-19 memes according to several criteria concerning their content, verbal constituent element and visual characteristics. The study concluded that the social and culture-specific components mostly contribute to forming the opinion of the meme and its appreciation. Awareness of both the cultural background and the current social and nation-specific situation is required to decode a full amount of information contained in a meme. Equally important is the visual component in understanding the meme. Thus, the study contributes not only to studying event-specific memes but also broadens the scope of research on memes as a sample of visual culture.