#DONTGETMEWRONG: EXPLORING THE ICONICITY OF MEMES USED IN SOCIAL MEDIA DISCOURSE BY MALAYSIAN YOUTHS

YUMNI MUSFIRAH, KAHAR (2018) #DONTGETMEWRONG: EXPLORING THE ICONICITY OF MEMES USED IN SOCIAL MEDIA DISCOURSE BY MALAYSIAN YOUTHS. [Final Year Project Report] (Unpublished)

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Abstract

This study aims to analyse the iconicity of memes based on the understanding of the youths, identify the language features delivered through memes and also to investigate the influence of cultural background towards the perceived meaning of memes by Malaysian youth. The platform used in this research was mainly Facebook and Twitter and youths were the focus group. This research implements few methods for strengthening the methodology which includes data corpus, content analysis and semi structured interviews. The memes gathered are mainly the popular one used in social media and the interview were carried out with 50 participants. The findings show that the highly understand memes by the participants is based on certain languages features fulfilled by the memes. Furthermore, the cultural background does affect their understanding towards the memes but someone’s exposure can be one of the reason on how they perceived the meanings. Notable differences on the participant’s understanding towards the memes are the word choices, the sentence length, the punctuation, relatable slangs and the phrase or sentences relevant to pictures. However, these findings are remain uncertain if it will be the same for the future because the use of memes can change from time to time based on their purpose of creating the memes.

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