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2019, Language, Media and Technologies. Usages, Forms and Functions
This paper focuses on the Internet meme format of ‘Stock Character Macros’ (SCM), a multimodal combination of centered image with top and bottom text fields. SCM are communicative online practices in which participants employ standardized multimodal schemata to put forth statements, jokes, or micro-narratives. These schemata allow users to create highly condensed texts whose understanding strongly depends on literacies shared among online communities. Based on a corpus of 40 SCM online events and their interactional contexts the paper investigates the phenomenon in (a) its linguistic and multimodal structures, (b) in terms of its social functions of narrative framing, and (c) in consideration of the metapragmatic reflexivity within its community of practice. The paper provides a multi-layered genre analysis of one of the most popular types of textual artifact within digital popular culture.
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