What Are You Laughing At? Former Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff’s Internet Memes across Spreadable Media Contexts

Abstract

This article analyses a delimited corpus of Internet memes showcasing former Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff. The theoretical framework is based on studies of memes and Internet memes as phenomena inserted in the online dimension of transmission and cultural production, and principles of the General Theory of Systems. The methodological approach is based on the classification tools developed by Dawkins (1976) to describe memes that spread widely across the digital space (fidelity, fecundity and longevity) and the patterns developed by Knobel and Lankshear (2007) as the main characteristics that contribute to an Internet meme’s spreadability (humour, intertextuality and juxtaposition). These classification tools are applied aiming to select and analyse Internet memes that feature the Brazilian president. The goal of the article is to extract from both classification systems relevant tools for guiding understanding about how certain specific sets of memes connected to Dilma Rousseff became memorable and spreadable within the Brazilian media landscape. The result findings show that the categories and patterns applied to the analysis are not isolated and are not mutually exclusive. On the contrary, they are frequently juxtaposed, which denotes their integrated nature and coherent disposition, corroborating to clarify and identify how certain specific sets of memes spread within the media.