Ideology, privilege, and social criticism in image macros: A rhetorical analysis.

摘要

Richard Dawkins coined the term "meme" in 1976 to describe cultural replicators and patterns. Memes are adaptive to their environment and have become commonplace on the Internet. Image macros and other Internet memes continue to gain increasing popularity and are reflective and constitutive of the larger social and cultural context of their environment. The purpose of this thesis is to explore how the First World Problems and Third World Success macros convey ideological structures and beliefs that are held by Internet users about first and third world countries. This study employs ideological and visual rhetorical criticism to analyze the top three most popular image macros from each category on two different websites, memegenerator.net and quickmeme.com. Findings suggest that members of the Millennial generation and other Internet users are using these image macros to entertain themselves and others, while also engaging in social criticism of "first world" privileges and awareness-raising about problems that plague "third world" countries.