IKO PhD Seminars: Martina Paulenová

Presenter: Martina Paulenová, visiting PhD student, Masaryk University, Department of Media Studies and Journalism, Czech Republic

Discussant: Martin Lundqvist 

Title: "The Framing Power of Political Memes: Exploring the Influence of Participatory Political Satire on Social Media Audiences"

Abstract: Over the past decade, political memes have become a social media staple. Rather than being mere entertainment, users engage with them in diverse, often surprising ways. These range from socialising with peers, communities, and even unknown users, to staying updated on and forming opinions about current events. However, existing research on memes largely focuses on their specific content and/or niche partisan communities that create and spread only a fraction of them. This leaves a large portion of their online presence underexplored, and the question of how meme content may affect society largely untackled. Paying closer attention to what audiences do with the internet’s favourite media format can tell us a great deal about how social media continues to transform what political information is, how we obtain it, and what we do with it. 

 This dissertation project attempts to investigate how non-niche audiences engage with political memes from multiple angles. In her compilation of articles, Martina Paulenová dissects the ways in which political memes trigger users’ active information-seeking behaviour and (de)motivate different types of online participation by being (un)funny or (mis)aligned with their opinions. In the seminar, she will present her arguments and methodologies for studying political meme audiences, discuss her latest survey data, and, hopefully, gain ideas on how to smoothly unite the individual studies into a cohesive cover chapter.

About the presenter

Martina Paulenová is a sixth-semester PhD candidate at Masaryk University.  Her current research interests include political memes, social media cultures, platform logics, digital audiences, and the ways in which these elements interact with and shape one another.