Abstract

CASTIBLANCO ROLDAN, Andrés Fernando  and  WILCHES TINJACA, Jaime Andrés. The meme as a digital agora of contemporary political language. The case of the 21N and 11S movement in Colombia. Bitácora Urbano Territorial [online]. 2022, vol.32, n.3, pp.123-136.  Epub Dec 02, 2022. ISSN 0124-7913.  https://doi.org/10.15446/bitacora.v32n3.102368.

On November 21st, 2019 (21N), Colombia experienced one of the most shocking social mobilizations in history. The effervescence of the mobilization was neutralized by the social isolation generated by COVID-19 and challenged on September 11th, 2020 (9S), after the murder of a citizen due to excessive use of force by law enforcement. However, civil society resisted the coercive measures of the pandemic and the state violence with viral memes as a synthetic, hyperbolic, and ironic expression of reality. In this regard, the objective of the article is to analyze how memes, from iconic, semantic, and humorous perspectives, catalyze the understanding of social protests and mobilize a global trend to reinforce criticism of political and economic power, from digital activism. The methodology of multimodal analysis is worked with a corpus of 201 memes. The results show how the meme transforms an instant message, into discursive practices that criticize the action or inertia of state and private institutions. In conclusion, it is proposed that although memes are not a guarantee of a transformation of reality, they do revitalize traditional social mobilizations that seek social empathy from the public sphere.

Keywords : memes; social protest; information society; social networks; political communication.

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