Network carnival: How the protest formula was a meme and came back

Abstract

This article is devoted to an important feature of modern Internet discourse — the ability to create favorable conditions for the development of a comical beginning. The comic contradiction is picked up, replicated, and paradoxically rethought, which leads to the appearance of memes in network communication. The starting point in the study is an analysis of the mechanisms for the formation of Internet memes, but the main subject of the study is a wider and more complex phenomenon that can simultaneously generate and use other, smaller and/or less significant units of media communication — memes and hashtags. The authors introduce the concept of socio-formula and analyze it using the example of the I/WE phenomenon and determine the place of this new phenomenon in the paradigm of network communication units. The method of discourse-analysis helps to establish that the socio-formula I/WE has a serious impact on public consciousness and audience behavior, it becomes a manifestation of the media semantics of solidarity, a “friend or foe” marker, a value imperative, and it has the ability to direct the thinking and behavior of the audience. The authors of the article aim to demonstrate, by the example of the “chronicle of one carnival,” how the comical manifests itself in a new mediatized society, how paradoxical rethinking leads to the fact that the influential and popular socio-formula I/WE, from the marker of consolidation and the sign of an open society, turns into a meme in front of the audience’s eyes. But, unlike the meme, which is primarily understood as a kind of networked humor, the socio-formula illustrates the ability to return to the original function, and this key feature allows us to talk about the emergence of a new significant unit of media communication.