ABSTRACT
Visual meaning making is a crucial practice in social media environments, with users increasingly embedding images and other visual media into their texts (Adami & Jewitt, 2016). This chapter explores ‘image macros’, a type of Internet meme where a (typically) humorous caption is superimposed onto an image. Producing an image macro is “an act geared toward fashioning semiotic belonging”, allowing users to rally around some shared value or stance (Zappavigna, 2012:103). Using a specialized corpus of ‘And then he said…’ image macros, this chapter investigates how intersubjectivity (Zhao & Zappavigna, 2017) is co-construed through visual and verbal meanings. Developing a system network for analysing the quoted social media voice (Zappavigna, 2017, 2018), the chapter explores how these meanings combine to produce different kinds of perspectives/points of view. The aim is to expand social semiotic modeling of intermodal intersubjectivity, as well as to explore how political ideas are negotiated in highly intertextual ambient arenas.
