ABSTRACT

Considering memes in general, with no specification for politics, culture, entertainment, or as a simple mechanism for humor, it is tempting to wonder about audience – in terms of who the audience is, how it is addressed. Much of the research that led to explorations of media use and its audiences emerged from the postpositivist studies, which investigated the potential effects of media, such as fears associated with the power of propaganda in the Payne Fund studies. Like internet memes specifically, Stuart Hall asserts that most media or texts are polysemic. For a text to have multiple meanings suggests that interpretation figures prominently, thus elevating the freedom or liberating aspect of meaning as situated within the individual, poised to unpack one or more of several possible meanings. The original image was uploaded by German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s team to her official Instagram account with the rather unremarkable text “spontaneous meeting between two working groups”.