Murru, M.F. and Vicari, S. orcid.org/0000-0002-4506-2358 (2021) Bringing the pandemic home: memes as local politics at times of global crisis. In: AoIR Selected Papers of Internet Research. 22nd annual conference of the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR2021), 13-16 Oct 2021, Online. University of Illinois Libraries
Abstract
It was late February 2020 when part of Northern Italy entered the first Covid-19 lockdown of the West. While stories of people fleeing quarantined areas soon made national headlines, the international news was suddenly reporting of coronavirus patients connected to Italy all around the world. Against this background, Italian social media started thriving with Covid-19 humour. On 9 March the lockdown turned nationwide and became one of the strictest in Europe. By focusing on Covid-19 memes of quarantined Italy, this article explores the local - and mundane - appropriation of memetic practices, in both its cultural and political dimensions. We combined digital methods and netnographic techniques to generate and analyse a dataset of Covid-19 Twitter memes produced by Italian publics during the first national lockdown. This allowed us to follow the circulation - and evolution - of memetic practices, explore how cultural fabric contributed to different dimensions of meme production and categorise the emergence of political expression. Our findings show that Italian pandemic memes had a primarily affective function fed by past and present pop culture, local or sub-local stereotypes and popular public debates. Where political expression did emerge, it was never particularly innovative or new because it was there to mark previously established communal belonging driven by populist narratives more than to initiate contentious practices. Ultimately, this work suggests that memetic practices can highly intertwine with the geographically or linguistically local and point to the need for contextual approaches able to enhance our understanding of digital practices as shaped by local publics.
Metadata
Item Type: | Proceedings Paper |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © The Authors. |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Sheffield |
Academic Units: | The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Social Sciences (Sheffield) > Department of Sociological Studies (Sheffield) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Sheffield |
Date Deposited: | 02 Mar 2023 14:52 |
Last Modified: | 02 Mar 2023 14:52 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | University of Illinois Libraries |
Refereed: | Yes |
Identification Number: | 10.5210/spir.v2021i0.12215 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:196955 |