Urban legends form an important part of socio-cultural narratives of shared fears and anxieties, and their presence online has developed similarly. This contribution explores the online urban legend the backrooms and examines its narrative construction offering possible reasons for the popularity and participatory aspect of the backrooms. Appearing on 4chan in May 2019, the backrooms represent an endless liminality. A diegetic analysis of 16 videos produced by Kane Parsons provides a sequential deconstruction of narrative elements within the backrooms, particularly the elements that exist within the fictional world of the narrative. A concurrent semiotic analysis examines the backrooms videos seen as an interrelated narrative. Narrative construction in the backrooms necessitates liminality alongside notions like video games, nostalgia, postmodern thought, and the vaporwave art/music aesthetic to reveal the backrooms as a digital chronotope. Findings reveal a clearer understanding of liminal spaces in the backrooms and relate how games and play address the narrative construction of the backrooms.

This article presents evidence of a conspiracy theory discourse on the anonymous messaging board 4chan, specifically /pol as in politically incorrect. Previous research shows 4chan lacks a coherent political discourse. Recent research suggests that the site is at least a reliable source of white supremacism within a larger framework of conspiratorial thinking. Grounded theory guides a systematic analysis of posts from 4chan's /pol board during the dates third to ninth January 2021, before and after the attempted insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. Following Trump's call to supporters to Stop the Steal (referring to unsubstantiated claims of a fraudulent 2020 election), the search terms steal and Trump collected all posts in threads with matching posts. A critical discourse analysis investigates the presence and articulation of conspiracism in selected posts. Findings reveal confirmation with previous research about the apparent lack of ideological coherence on/pol yet also affirms the discourse of white supremacism. Additionally, a diversity of conspiracism functions as a primary form of communication on 4chan regardless of one's loyalty to a particular political ideology.

The article argues that a memetic approach, or meme's-eye view, could help bring together the strategic management view and the CCO-school. 'Memes' are understood as a second-order concept, i.e., as a reference to 'memory traces' in people's minds and anchor-point of joint or collective intentionality. This view, it is argued, permits the conceptualization of communication as a resource. To illustrate, two cases are analyzed: 1) the Montagsdemos in the former German Democratic Republic (GDR) with its core meme Wir sind das Volk (We are the people); 2) the so-called 'Satanic Panic' and the QAnon movement with its 'Save the Children'-meme'. The analysis illustrates how memes endure and resurface in new and different environments. In conclusion, the article proposes that the shift to memetic population dynamics allows strategic communication-researchers to reformulate often unanswerable questions ("What does the strategic actor want?") into more operationalizable ones ("What memes are launched? How are they constructed?").

Internet memes are remixed images, videos, GIFs, hashtags, and similar content that usually incorporates humor but also some form of political or cultural critique. Several studies have previously examined the ways in which minority groups curate Internet memes for the purpose of protest or other forms of activism. This article examines user-generated tweets including any of the following hashtags: boogaloo, boogaloo2020, and/or civilwar2. The time period of interest on Twitter concerns any and all images posted between 15 and 25 January 2020, exactly 5 days before and after a controversial gun rally held in Richmond, Virginia. Drawing on Eco’s theory of semiotics, the results from a critical discourse analysis reveal a tendency toward a preference for antagonism as a means to consolidate identity for individuals engaged in online discursive practice within hybrid structures. Findings include the presence of deeply contextualized and situated logics within an emergent boogaloo discourse. In addition, the study found that hypernarrative storytelling serves the movement in terms of identity negotiation and consolidation.

The COVID-19 pandemic uniquely represents an unprecedented health crisis that has permeated all aspects of human society. Given the technological affordances of social media to disseminate fact-based as well as purposefully misinformed and/or conspiratorial information, this paper examines the serious and strategic messaging on Instagram posts tagged with #civilwar2. Results from a critical discourse analysis show that within modern American conspiratorial thinking and given the problematic politicization of COVID-19, healthy scepticism is replaced with conspiracy absent of theory. When extreme political and socio-cultural polarization occurs, this tendency is exacerbated by the bifurcation of meaning as expressed by those who seek to promote a particular angle of a given story or event. While this may be somewhat common in so-called old media, online in discursive spaces such as Instagram, the challenge to understand the mediated message is compounded by visual referents, which are often remixed to include adjunct information, such as mashups, hashtags, inserted text, or images, etc. Results include the identification of two main categories of Instagram memes tagged with #civilwar2. These categories are analysed following three primary characteristics of discourse: genre, discourse/representation, and style.

This article presents the results of a critical discourse analysis of internet memes. This analysis considers the highly visual nature of internet memes situated in a context of meme-as-utterance prompting other remixed versions as memes-as-responses. Prior to the analysis an orientation to pragmatics as related to internet memes is presented. Following this is an overview of memes research and a necessary discussion of the role of media narratives in the construction and dissemination of internet memes. Finally, a series of memes tweeted in response to Nike’s inclusion of former National Football League player, Colin Kaepernick, in its Just Do It anniversary campaign, serves as the corpus of analysis.

According to studies conducted by Ipsos and Stanford University, individuals demonstrate a weak ability to discern so-called fake news stories from news stories based on real and/or evidence-based events. In the Stanford study, students from middle school to college were unable to judge the credibility of news stories shown to them. The initial reaction from Facebook was the development and deployment of a four-step plan to decrease the availability of fake news stories at least on its platform. The challenge posed by discussions of fake news centers not on 'what to do about it' but rather how to understand it from both 'sides'. Invariably any given news story contains a specific frame. To this I add the term media narrative within a specific and contextualized definition to address the challenge. Furthermore, I situate the term fake news historically but also with reference to the semiotic use of the term by President Donald Trump. I then suggest reasons why fake news exists today in an increasingly mediated environment where attention-as-currency is paramount to the online experience. Finally, I propose ways in which we can help our students identify and challenge fake news.

In direct response to the rise in fake news as a socio-cultural and political phenomenon, this article presents an analysis of the factors that may help to explain the reception of fake news. In addition, recent pronouncements made by the Trump White House seem to challenge the nature of an objective truth. An immersive narratology emphasizes that different universes of discourse can intermingle and overlap, with fact and fiction becoming difficult to distinguish in our increasingly mediated lives. A tenable definition of fake news is offered prior to exploring historical antecedents of fake news. Persuasion, construction, immersion, distribution, and polarization represent the core factors that demystify the reception of fake news regardless as to whether an individual believes a story. A concluding discussion offers a critical evaluation of the potential of fake news to augment the news media landscape in the coming years.

The purpose of this document is to describe the process and outcomes of an international collaboration involving student-produced podcasts as a university-course requirement. This project took place across multiple campuses in the global network of Webster University. Students and instructors participated from the following campuses: St. Louis, Missouri (the university's home campus), Leiden, The Netherlands, Geneva, Switzerland, and Cha-Am, Thailand, and Vienna, Austria. The concept of the International Podcast Project was to provide an active learning experience in which students participate in a global media project by choosing a topic related to media and society, research their topic, develop a short audio program in the form of a podcast and publish their work along with their fellow classmates from the participating international campus locations.

The purpose of this document is to share information on the process of developing an innovative new course on navigating digital cultures. The design of the course is in direct response to salient issues in new and social media. The course is aimed primarily at undergraduate students with various cultural and linguistic backgrounds. One main purpose of the course is to encourage innovation in the classroom through consultation with primary and secondary sources of literature and to apply these to the three major areas of thematic focus in the course. The first such area concerns remix culture. Often discussed in terms of remixing music to make new forms, the application of remix culture to the course specifically explores it in terms of the manner by which new, creative works are produced. Namely, by incorporating elements of pre-existing material, either in terms of styles, characters, and genres expressed in film, literature, video games, etc. new material is produced through the process of remix. A second component of the course is viral media, which is understood as online content which usually achieves a vast number of views (in the case of videos on YouTube) or similar reactions (such as shares on Facebook or retweets on Twitter). The purpose of including viral media is for students to understand the characteristics of media that go viral but also to understand what factors may or may not lead to viral spread. The final component is largely connected to viral media but differs in terms of discursive intent. Internet memes are a genre of online communication whereby text and/or image (and also video, GIFs, and more) are remixed with aspects of popular culture to begin or continue a discussion and may also be used as a form of socio-cultural or political critique or protest.

This article examines the use of both game-based learning GBL and gamification in tertiary education. This study focuses specifically on the use of games and/or simulations as well as familiarity with gamification strategies by communication faculty. Research questions concentrate on the rate, frequency, and usage of digital and non-digital games and/or simulations in communication courses, as well as instructor familiarity with gamification. A survey was constructed with questions emerging from the game-based learning and gamification literature. It was distributed to communication faculty at public institutions of higher education in a southern state. In this context, the author argues that while the term gamification is novel, the approach is not. Based on the results, current gamification strategies appear to be a repackaging of traditional instructional strategies.

The Russia–Ukraine conflict of 2014 sparked political upheaval, military action, and the emergence of Internet memes as a forum for discursive critique among netizens of the affected countries. A qualitative content analysis was conducted of Internet memes posted to the RuNet Memes Twitter account in 2014 and revealed a preponderance of memes that fell into one of two categories: directionally Russian or directionally Ukrainian . Directionality as a thematic category is a novel methodological approach in memes research. While the memes reference a given news story or event, they continued to be consumed and reproduced along similar thematic categories. This tendency to follow a narrative is at once endemic to viral media in general and unique to memes given their remix, parody, iteration, and rapid diffusion.

A tenable genre development of Internet memes is introduced in three categories to describe memetic transformation: spreadable media, emergent meme, and meme. We argue that memes are remixed, iterated messages which are rapidly spread by members of participatory digital culture for the purpose of continuing a conversation. We understand that memes develop from emergent memes, which we define as altered or remixed spreadable media. We have adapted and modified Jenkins’ term “spreadable media” to refer to original or non-parodied messages. Our analysis benefits from the inclusion of Anthony Giddens’ structuration theory to aid in understanding how memes as artifacts of participatory digital culture are created. Our genre development of memes demonstrates the generative capacity for continued memetic transformation and for participation among members of digital culture. We use structuration to position these dynamic components as the core of a duality of structure for Internet memes.

This article presents the results from a post-test only experiment conducted in 2011 with undergraduate and graduate students (N=67) from individualist and collectivist cultures. Demographic information was collected through questions appearing at the end of a post-test administered to subjects after completing the e-learning module. Each person was randomly assigned to one of three e-learning modules which all shared identical instructional content: time travel. However, the modules differed in design. Specifically, while the control module was designed according to the coherence principle, one experimental module was designed with non-essential background music and the other was designed with non-essential background images. The coherence principle of multimedia instruction stipulates that the addition of extraneous audio, images, or text impairs learning. Nevertheless, one normative standard of multimedia design does not apply to a group of culturally and linguistically diverse learners. Among the findings from this study, a flexible coherence principle is proposed and it suggests that the multimedia designer must consider one’s own cultural and linguistic composition as well as that of the intended audience. A concluding discussion suggests that cultural variation may be related to cognitive variation.