Download pdf
A Study on the Utilization of Protest Memes by Chinese University Students
- 1 Beijing Normal University-Hong Kong Baptist University United International College
* Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Abstract
Social media has gradually taken over the lives of young people in the Z-era. With the birth of memes, offline communication is not a necessary mode of communication. It has attracted the attention of experts in a variety of fields. They investigated the spread of memes, language and social communication, and the privacy crisis. There is, however, a gap in the causes and effects of protest memes that are popular among youth groups. Thus, the topic of this paper is the origin of protest memes in social media and their impact. According to the questionnaire on the utilization of protest memes in social media among Chinese university students, the study will collect data from the questions they filled in on the causes and effects of protest memes and psychological situations. Therefore, the percentage analysis is the basis of this study. According to the results, most young people use protest memes because of anxiety or dissatisfaction in school and life, which cannot be vented in reality. Also, there are two sides of protest memes. On the one hand, they meet the emotional catharsis needs of young people and the development of industrial chains at the economic level. On the other hand, they can mislead youth groups about their values and violate the rights of certain people’s images.
Keywords
protest memes, Chinese university students, anxiety, psychology
[1]. Shen, T. J. (2023). Cultural Criticism of “Crazy Literature”. New media studies (03) : 107-111. doi: 10.16604 / j.carol carroll nki issn2096-0360.2023.03.006.
[2]. Yang, Y. P. (2023). Memetic interpretation of “Lin Daiyu’s Crazy Literature”. Journal of Jinzhong University (03),14-20.
[3]. DeCook, J. R. (2018). Memes and symbolic violence:# proudboys and the use of memes for propaganda and the construction of collective identity. Learning, Media and Technology, 43(4), 485-504.
[4]. Kostadinovska-Stojchevska, B., & Shalevska, E. (2018). Internet memes and their socio-linguistic features. European journal of literature, language and linguistics studies, 2(4).
[5]. Webb, D. (2005). Bakhtin at the seaside: Utopia, modernity and the carnivalesque. Theory, Culture & Society, 22(3), 121-138.
[6]. Zhang, Z. H. & Zhao, J. H. (2023). A study on the dissemination of “crazy literature” among young people from the perspective of Interactive ritual chain. New media studies (03), 52-55, doi: 10.16604 / j.carol carroll nki issn2096-0360.2023.03.018.
[7]. Soh, W. Y. (2020). Digital protest in Singapore: the pragmatics of political Internet memes. Media, Culture & Society, 42(7-8), 1115-1132.
[8]. Makhortykh, M., & González Aguilar, J. M. (2020). Memory, politics and emotions: Internet memes and protests in Venezuela and Ukraine. Continuum, 34(3), 342-362.
[9]. Hakoköngäs, E., Halmesvaara, O., & Sakki, I. (2020). Persuasion through bitter humor: Multimodal discourse analysis of rhetoric in internet memes of two far-right groups in Finland. Social Media+ Society, 6(2), 2056305120921575.
[10]. Parkwell, C. (2019). Emoji as social semiotic resources for meaning-making in discourse: Mapping the functions of the toilet emoji in Cher’s tweets about Donald Trump. Discourse, Context & Media, 30, 100307.
[11]. Ling, C., AbuHilal, I., Blackburn, J., De Cristofaro, E., Zannettou, S., & Stringhini, G. (2021). Dissecting the meme magic: Understanding indicators of virality in image memes. Proceedings of the ACM on human-computer interaction, 5(CSCW1), 1-24.
Cite this article
Huang,R. (2023). A Study on the Utilization of Protest Memes by Chinese University Students. Lecture Notes in Education Psychology and Public Media,28,78-84.
Data availability
The datasets used and/or analyzed during the current study will be available from the authors upon reasonable request.
Disclaimer/Publisher's Note
The statements, opinions and data contained in all publications are solely those of the individual author(s) and contributor(s) and not of EWA Publishing and/or the editor(s). EWA Publishing and/or the editor(s) disclaim responsibility for any injury to people or property resulting from any ideas, methods, instructions or products referred to in the content.
About volume
Volume title: Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Interdisciplinary Humanities and Communication Studies
© 2024 by the author(s). Licensee EWA Publishing, Oxford, UK. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and
conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license. Authors who
publish this series agree to the following terms:
1. Authors retain copyright and grant the series right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgment of the work's authorship and initial publication in this
series.
2. Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the series's published
version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgment of its initial
publication in this series.
3. Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and
during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See
Open access policy for details).