Gastronomic Culture In Russian Internet: Discoursive Semantic Analysis

The aim of the article is to describe mechanism of the influence of the Internet memes’ visual components upon consciousness; to analyze functional and semantic relationships between visual and verbal components; to research role models (character types) of the internauts who are the creators of Internet memes with wolf as a visual component; emotional states created by Internet memes.
 Psycholinguistic research methods have helped to achieve this goal, namely, discourse analysis, the method of contextual and intuitive logical interpretation analysis, content analysis.
 Discussion & Results. Internet meme creators achieve communicative purpose by means of the wolf image due to the use of ramified conscious and unconscious associative links. The correspondence of the meaning originally put by the author in the Internet meme with its comprehension by the addressee occurs through the use of anchoring techniques which mechanism of impact is based on linking human states to certain patterns of behavior. “Anchors” usually work automatically therefore the emotional state of a person changes positively or negatively without the possibility of its regulation by the addressee. With the help of visual images Internet memes create a model world of emotions. The ultimate goal of such polycode messages is mental effect on consciousness through the method of psychological infection. As soon as an addressee’s emotional mood to be in a ready state to apprehend the message the meanings of the visual image which may be expressed explicitly or implicitly are developed in the verbal corpus of an Internet meme. In this study the Internet memes’ verbal components were divided into thematic groups (TG) describing the internauts’ emotional states. Based on the analysis of the TG it is possible to describe the role model of the Internet meme creator manifested in the features of communicative behavior. The analysis of the TG has proved that in the verbal component the internauts intend to position the background of their mental world with the corresponding emotional tone. It should be noted that verbal and visual components do not compete but complement each other, enrich the Internet meme with new meanings accumulating cultural and emotional-evaluative meanings, social stereotypes of consciousness.
 Conclusion. The function of the visual component is to form a special emotional tone of the information, to provide a holistic and at the same time flexible understanding of a particular message due to placing semantic accents allowing the recipient to specify the perception and interpretation of the verbal component. The link between the visual and verbal parts of Internet memes is implicit. The information presented in the visual component is based on various associative links therefore; its interpretation requires careful correlation between both components, identification of internal structural and semantic links.

The article addresses the problem of decoding creolized “small” poetic forms with the reference to Russian and English Internet literature. Thus, we focus on the phenomenon of Russian Internet poetic texts poroshki and their authorized English language versions. Comic poetic texts poroshki are popular among Russian Internet users and reflect the reality of modern life. The novelty of the work lies in the new literary paradigm of interpreting poetic texts poroshki, which originally appeared within the Russian Internet.<br> The article aims at finding the mechanisms of decoding creolized “small” poetic forms as they appear in the Russian language and their English variants. Thus, we have implemented the lexical-semantic, stylistic, cognitive-discursive, and comparative analyses as we attempted to create original literary analysis which will allow to find algorithms in interpreting poetic texts poroshki (and any other “small” poetic forms) and to explain using image transformations based on creolization of verbal and non-verbal components of the texts. The suggested strategy takes into account the linguistic and extralinguistic literary codes and their creolization with non-verbal code of poroshki and allows creating semantic unity between verbal and non-verbal components of the poems. The results of the research help to promote poetic texts poroshki in the English language social networks and thus distribute this poetic form within other linguocultures.

Purpose: The paper addresses the issue of the use of Internet memes as a marketing communication tool in social media. The effectiveness of this type of communication is an important issue due to the large role of memes in digital culture, and at the same time the small number of studies on the use of memes in marketing communication. Design/methodology/approach: To verify the research hypotheses, a survey with an experimental design was conducted among 153 respondents. For the purposes of the study, effectiveness was understood as the ability of a message to induce the passage of the recipient through all stages of perception of the persuasive message, with the last stage being the acceptance of the sender’s outlook. Findings: The results of the study allowed us to draw conclusions about greater effectiveness of marketing communication using Internet memes in comparison to marketing communication without memes. The level of consumer interest in Internet memes turned out to be a differentiating factor in the perception of the form of marketing communication. Research limitations/implications: The main limitation of the study is the non-representativeness of the research sample. The practical implications of the study include guidance on the use of memes when conducting marketing communication on the Internet, taking into account preferences of the target group. Originality/value: This paper not only contributes importantly to the limited literature on Internet memes in marketing activities, but also turns the spotlight onto the characteristics of consumers who are the potential target group of such communication.

'Hieroglyphs of Protest': Internet Memes and Protest Movement in Russia

Political Internet memes are an underresearched phenomenon situated at the intersection of digital and political communication. Regarded as a unit of cultural information transmitted online, such a meme can be considered as both a manifestation of anonymous networked creativity and a mechanism of political participation. The article presents the results of an investigation into Internet memes generated by protest discourses on Runet (Russian Internet). The examination of Internet content allows us to draw conclusions as to the thematic emphases of protest actions represented in Runet’s memosphere and the specifics of the image of Russian protest as reflected in memes.

The subject of the research is the means of creating a humorous effect in internet memes. The object of the research is Russian-language internet memes circulating in the Russian segment of the internet space. Particular attention is paid to the polycodality and multimodality of memes, which determine the interaction of various sign systems and the formation of multi-layered comic meanings. The study examines various rhetorical and stylistic means of creating a humorous effect in internet memes, such as puns, occasionalisms, metaphor, allegory, hyperbole, personification, antithesis, and the effect of violated expectations. Intertextual connections, cultural codes, and playful elements that provide variable models of humor perception are also considered. The methodology of the research is based on rhetorical-stylistic and linguo-semiotic analysis. Methods of multimodal and discourse analysis are used to identify the interaction of textual and visual components in the polycode constructions of internet memes. The scientific novelty of the research lies in the study of the internet meme as a polycode text in internet discourse, combining verbal and visual components to create a multi-layered humorous effect. It has been revealed that the key characteristic of memes is intertextuality, manifested through the use of recognizable textual and visual templates. The polycodality of internet memes determines the multimodality of rhetorical and stylistic means of creating humor, including lexico-semantic techniques, visual tropes, and expressive figures. Visual means form figurative comparisons and associative connections, enhancing comic perception, while expressive techniques organize the comic structure of the statement, emphasize semantic contrasts, and create paradoxical situations. The leading means of creating humor in internet memes is multimodal metaphor. Thus, internet memes represent a powerful tool of humorous internet communication, combining irony, satire, and absurdity.

The “complaint tablet to Ea-Naṣir” was discovered during Leonard Woolley’s excavations at Ur in the 1920s, and is currently on display in the British Museum. The tablet, with its cuneiform inscription, dated to ca. 1750 BC, is an excoriating attack on Ea-Naṣir’s fraudulent business practices, and has become known as the world’s oldest customer complaint. In 2015 the complaint tablet was the subject of popular viral social media posts on Reddit and tumblr, followed by a surge of international news coverage. Since then the complaint tablet has become a popular and unusually-long-lasting internet meme. Ea-Naṣir, his poor-quality copper ingots and other elements from the inscribed narrative have been creatively combined with images and references to popular culture, current affairs and established meme formats. In this paper I explore the emergence, development and endurance of the Ea-Naṣir meme, based on a corpus of images, texts and related commentary collected from digital media. My analysis, grounded in a framework for studying the dynamics of memetic processes, argues that the meme serves primarily as an “in-joke” for online communities, while Ea-Naṣir himself has been transformed into an archetypal “trickster” figure. While focused on a specific case study, the methods and framework offer a starting point for future research on internet memes in digital folklore, reception studies and allied fields.

Introduction. The article analyzes various approaches to studying Internet memes as key elements of modern media communication. It highlights the need for a comprehensive description of memes, considering their continuous evolution.Methodology and sources. The study is based on works in cognitive linguistics, philosophy, and media communications, focusing on the evolution and function of memes. The research employs an analytical review of literature on meme definition, typology, and roles in socio-cultural and online communication.Results and discussion. Research in memetics and media communication emphasizes the importance of distinguishing “meme” from “Internet meme”, as the latter represents a polycode text within the broader concept of memes. Internet memes play a key role in reflecting linguistic and cultural changes but remain difficult to classify due to their variability. Effective study methods include digital, visual, and discourse analysis, along with construction grammar, to account for their multimodal nature. A significant research focus is the development of meme typologies based on their functions in political, advertising, scientific, and everyday discourse, as well as their continuously evolving formation trends."Conclusion. The prospects for studying Internet memes include conceptualization of intertextuality and examining the mechanisms of meme reutilization. The rapid variability of the verbal and non-verbal components of Internet memes, the high frequency use of intertextual references and intentionally distorted lexical and grammatical structures make it relevant to study the functioning of intertext and the formation of productive models and language patterns in Internet memes.

Fig. 1: "Xiao Ming (little Ming) and xiao meng (little sprout/cutie)", satirical take on a popular Chinese textbook character. Shared online Introduction: Cuteness, Online Vernaculars, and Digital FolkloreThis short essay presents some preliminary materials for a discussion of the social circulation of contemporary Chinese vernacular terms among digital media users. In particular, I present the word meng (萌, literally "sprout", recently adopted as a slang term for "cute") as a case in point for a contextual analysis of elements of digital folklore in their transcultural flows, local appropriations, and social practices of signification. One among many other neologisms that enter Mandarin Chinese from seemingly nowhere and gain a widespread popularity in everyday online and offline linguistic practices, meng belongs to a specific genealogy of Japanese animation fansubbing communities, and owes its rapid popularisation to its adaptation to local contexts in different syntactic forms. The resulting inclusion of meng in the changing repertoire of wangluo liuxing ciyu ("words popular on the Internet")—the online vernacular common among Chinese Internet users which is often the target of semantic or structural analyses—is in fact just the last step of processes of networked production and social signification happening across digital media and online platforms.As an anthropologist of media use, I aim to advance the thesis that, in the context of widespread access to digital media, vernacular terms popularised across online platforms and making their way into everyday linguistic interactions are not necessarily the epiphenomena of subcultural formations, nor can they be simply seen as imported aesthetics, or understood through semantic analyses. Rather, “words popular on the Internet” must be understood as part of a local digital folklore, the open repertoire of vernacular content resulting from the daily interaction of users and digital technologies (Lialina & Espenschied 9) in a complex and situated media ecology (Fuller). I argue that the difference between these two approaches is the same passing between a classical structural understanding of signification proposed by Lévi-Strauss and the counter-Copernican revolution proposed by Latour’s quasi-objects proliferating in collectives of actors. Are incredibly pervasive terms like meng actually devoid of meaning, floating signifiers enabling the very possibility of signification? Or are they rather more useful when understood as both signifiers and signifieds, quasi-objects tracing networks and leading to collectives of other hybrids and practices?The materials and observations presented in this essay are part of the data collected for my PhD research on Chinese digital folklore, a study grounded on both ethnographic and archaeological methods. The ethnographic part of my project consists of in-depth interviews, small talk and participant observation of users on several Chinese online platforms such as AcFun, Baidu Tieba, Douban, Sina Weibo and WeChat (Hine). The archaeological part, on the other hand, focuses on the sampling of user-generated content from individual feeds and histories of these online platforms, an approach closer to the user-focused Internet archaeology of Nicholson than to the media archaeology of Parikka. My choice of discussing the term meng as an example is motivated by its pervasiveness in everyday interactions in China, and is supported by my informants identifying it as one of the most popular vernacular terms originating in online interaction. Moreover, as a rather new term jostling its way through the crowded semantic spectrum of cuteness, meng is a good example of the minor aesthetic concepts identified by Ngai as pivotal for judgments of taste in contemporary consumer societies (812). If, as in the words of one of my informants, meng "just means 'cute'," why did it end up on Coca-Cola bottle labels which were then featured in humorous self-portraits with perplexed cats? Fig. 2: "Meng zhu" (Cute leader, play on word on homophone “alliance leader”) special edition Coca-Cola bottle with cat, uploaded on Douban image gallery. Screenshot by the author Cuteness after JapanContemporary Japan is often portrayed as the land of cuteness. Academic explanations of the Japanese fascination with the cute, neotenic and miniaturised abound, tackling the topic from the origins of cute aesthetics in Japanese folkloric characters (Occhi) and their reappearance in commercial phenomena such as Pokémon (Allison), to the role of cuteness as gender performance and normativity (Burdelski & Mitsuhashi) and the "spectacle of kawaii" (Yano 681) as a trans-national strategy of cultural soft power (683). Although the export and localisation of Japanese cultural products across and beyond Asia has been widely documented (Iwabuchi), the discussion has often remained at the level of specific products (comics, TV series, games). Less frequently explored are the repertoires of recontextualised samples, snippets and terms that local audiences piece together after the localisation and consumption of these transnational cultural products. In light of this, is it the case that "the very aesthetic and sensibility that seems to dwell in the playful, the girlish, the infantilized, and the inevitably sexualized" are inevitably adopted after the "widespread distribution and consumption of Japanese cute goods and aesthetics to other parts of the industrial world" (Yano 683)? Or is it rather the case that language precedes aesthetics, and that terms end up reconfigured according to the local discursive contexts in ongoing dialogic and situated negotiations? In other words, what happens when the Japanese word moe (萌え), a slang term "originally referring to the fictional desire for characters of comics, anime, and games or for pop idols” (Azuma 48) is read in its Mandarin Chinese pronunciation meng by amateur translators of anime and manga, picked up by audiences of video streaming websites, and popularised on discussion boards and other online platforms? On a broader level, this is a question of how the vocabularies of specialised fan cultures mutate when they move across language barriers on the vectors of digital media and amateur translations. While in Japanese otaku culture moe indicates a very specific, physically arousing form of aesthetic appreciation that is proper to a devote fan (Azuma 57), the appropriation of the (originally Chinese) logograph by the audiences of dongman (animation and comics) products in Mainland China results in the general propagation of meng as a way of saying 'cute' slightly more fashionable and hip than the regular Mandarin word ke'ai. Does this impact on the semantics or the aesthetics of cuteness in China? These questions have not been ignored by researchers; Chinese academics in particular, who have a first-hand experience of the unpredictable moods of vernacular terms circulating from digital media user cultures to everyday life interactions, appear concerned with finding linguistic explanations or establishing predictors for these rogue terms that seem to ignore lexical rules and traditional etymologies. Liu, for example, tries to explain the popularity of this particular term through Dawkins' neo-Darwinian theorisation of memes as units of cultural transmission, identifying in meng the evolutionary advantages of shortness and memorisability. As simplistic treatments of language, this sort of explanations does not account for the persistence of various other ways of describing general and specific kinds of cuteness in Mandarin Chinese, such as ke'ai, dia or sajiao, as described by Zhang & Kramarae (767). On the other hand, most of the Chinese language research about meng at least acknowledges how the word appears under the sign of a specific media ecology: Japanese comics and animation (dongman) translated and shared online by fan communities, Japanese videogames and movies widely consumed by Chinese young audiences, and the popularisation of Internet access and media literacy across China. It is in this context that this and other neologisms "continuously end up in the latest years' charts of most popular words" (Bai 28, translation by the author), as vernacular Mandarin integrates words from digital media user cultures and online platforms. Similar comparative analyses also recognise that "words move faster than culture" (Huang 15, translation by the author), and that it is now young Chinese digital media users who negotiate their understanding of meng, regardless of the implications of the Japanese moe culture and its aesthetic canons (16). According to Huang, this process indicates on the one hand the openness and curiosity of Chinese youth for Japanese culture, and on the other "the 'borrowist' tendency of the language of Internet culture" (18). It is precisely the speed and the carefree ‘borrowist’ attitude with which these terms are adopted, negotiated and transformed across online platforms which makes it questionable to inscribe them in the classic relationship of generational resistance such as the one that Moore proposes in his treatment of ku, the Chinese word for 'cool' described as the "verbal icon of a youth rebellion that promises to transform some of the older generation's most enduring cultural values" (357). As argued in the following section, meng is definitely not the evolutionary winner in a neo-Darwinian lexical competition between Chinese words, nor occupies a clear role in the semantics of cuteness, nor is it simply deployed as an iconic and rebellious signifier against the cultural values of a previous generation. Rather, after reaching Chinese digital media audiences along the "global wink of pink globalization" (Yano 684) of Japanese animation, comics, movies and videogames, this specific subcultural term diffracts along the vectors of the local media ecology. Special

Parents of children with chronic illnesses have poorer health related quality of life (HRQoL), shorter sleep duration, and poorer sleep quality than parents of healthy children. However, night-to-night variability of sleep in parents has not previously been considered. This study compared the sleep patterns of parents of ventilator-assisted children (VENT) and healthy, typically developing children (HEALTHY), and examined the relationship between sleep variability and perceived HRQoL. Seventy-nine mothers and 33 fathers from 42 VENT families (n = 56) and 40 HEALTHY (n = 56) families completed the SF-36 and wore an actigraph for 2 weeks. Reported bedtime and wake time, along with actigraphic total sleep time (TST), wake after sleep onset (WASO), and sleep efficiency (SE) were examined using both average values and night-tonight instability (mean square successive differences). VENT parents showed significantly later bedtimes, shorter TST, longer WASO, and lower SE than HEALTHY parents. VENT parents also exhibited greater instability in their reported wake time, WASO, and SE. Adjusting for family type and gender, greater instability of wake times, WASO and SE were related to poorer SF-36 subscale scores, while averaged sleep values were not. Many parents of ventilator-assisted children experience deficient sleep and show significant instability in their sleep, which was related to HRQoL. Similar to shift workers, variable sleep schedules that may result from caregiving responsibilities or stress may impact parental caregivers' health and well-being. Additional studies are needed to determine how support and other interventions can reduce sleep disruptions in parental caregivers.

Multiple Roles of Parental Caregivers of Children with Complex Life-Threatening Conditions: A Qualitative Descriptive Analysis

Internet meme contents have been drawn a considerable amount of attention through social media in recent days. Internet memes are conceptually derived from the word ‘meme’ coined by Richard Dawkins, but there is a difference between this and the meme concept as used in academic research. Internet memes not only exist in much more complex forms, such as images, videos, and music, but also spread at an unprecedented speed compared to the concepts in the past given the use of various forms of media, such as social networking services (SNS), websites, and text messaging. In particular, it is noteworthy that a type of play culture has arisen through digital media, where users enjoy creating and sharing internet memes on their own. Therefore, this study approaches the internet meme as a type of play culture in the digital age and examines its cultural meaning and value. The subjects in this study are set as specific examples of challenging content, which provoke the voluntary participation and diffusion of many SNS users today; they will be examined for their essential meanings and play characteristics based on Fink's play ontology and a framework of analysis consisting of five play structures. Ultimately, it is expected that the cultural meaning and value of the Internet meme will be re-examined and that theoretical foundations and research methods will be prepared in relation to this.

Internet memes have emerged as a novel format for expressing ideas on the web. They have evolved from a simple form of entertainment to a sophisticated medium of communication that reflects societal sentiments, values, trends, and occasionally unethical and harmful behavior. Internet memes are multimodal, succinct, relatable, and fluid, making them challenging and inspiring for many stakeholders, including content moderators, marketing strategists, and social science researchers. Interpreting internet memes is also a challenging objective for (neuro-symbolic) AI, requiring knowledge about memes to be collected, curated, enriched, and integrated with multimodal processing models. This chapter provides background on internet memes and discusses key considerations in machines’ interpretation of memes towards developing robust and explainable methods that can estimate meme similarity, detect toxic memes at scale, and reason about the impact of cultural and personal values. We discuss challenges for meme knowledge collection and curation and describe our approach to generating the Internet Meme Knowledge Graph. We describe methods for estimating meme similarity to ground memes from the web, designed to capture content, form, identity, and stance. We review ongoing efforts to develop explainable hate speech detection methods in memes. Finally, we list open challenges and promising future directions for reliable AI reasoning over internet memes.

This article is devoted to studying the peculiarities of perceiving the phenomenon of mass lockdown represented in static polycode texts (Internet memes and demotivators). The author of the article defines the main subject areas of these texts basing his conclusions on the content and discourse analysis, considers and characterizes relevant topics and subtopics within the framework. As the research has revealed, Internet memes and demotivators devoted to lockdown are characterized by a wide range of topics. However, they are generally related to people’s usual way of life and daily routine that changed with the introduction of restrictions or during the lockdown. Eight main subject areas are defined, including “Health preservation during lockdown”, “Duration of lockdown”, “Staying at home”, “Being outside home”, “Compliance with the lockdown restrictions”, “Provision with the necessary goods and products”, “Financial well-being”, “Psychological condition”. Some of the issues and opinions associated with them appear to be interconnected. The degree of topicality and representativeness of the selected subject areas and topics are determined in accordance with the number of texts related to them.

Политический интернет-мем принадлежит к числу малоисследованных современных феноменов, находящихся на стыке цифровой культуры и политической коммуникации. Понимаемый как единица передачи культурной информации в сети, такой мем может рассматриваться, с одной стороны, как спонтанный продукт творчества масс, а с другой – как инструмент политических PR-технологий. Статья посвящена результатам исследования мемов, размещенных в социальных медиа России в период избирательной президентской кампании 2018 г. Целью работы стало изучение специфики применения политического интернет-мема в качестве инструмента предвыборной коммуникации. На основе полученных данных уточняются представления о сущности понятия “политический интернет-мем”, выявляются ведущие функции политических мемов рунета, их разновидности, семантические характеристики мемов, формирующих имидж российских политиков. Изучение больших массивов меметических конструкций в ходе исследования позволило также судить о том, какие именно тематические акценты избирательных кампаний кандидатов оказались востребованы производителями и распространителями мемов. Исследование показывает, что для российской президентской кампании 2018 г. были характерны изменения в коммуникационных технологиях, обусловленные общей трансформацией медиаландшафта и приходом на выборы новых цифровых поколений. При этом мемы, составляющие большую долю контента социальных сетей и преимущественный вектор коммуникационного обмена их пользователей, в последние годы меняют характер с развлекательного на политический и становятся важным аспектом политики Web 2.0. Как результат, следует отметить усиление зрелищности и “карнавализации” выборных процессов, а также превращение интернета в своего рода поле битвы различных акторов политики за место в новостной повестке дня. Актуальность исследованию придает то, что, в отличие от зарубежных исследователей, достаточно активно осмысляющих роль меметики в электоральных процессах, в отечественной научной традиции политический потенциал интернет-мема пока изучен лишь в первом приближении.