Et SoMe-horrorshow

Et studie af billedmakroens multimodalitet og metaforicitet på Det Konservative Folkepartis officielle Instagramprofil

Resumé

Over the past decade, the meme has been a defining feature of internet culture, and the image macro, a sub-genre of memes, has become a staple on most social media platforms. The image macro can now also be found in political communication, and the format is used by political parties in campaigning prior to elections. This paper examines the use of image macros on the official Instagram account of the Danish Conservative People’s party up to the 2019 election. I approach the analysis with a linguistic perspective, focusing on the multimodality, metaphoricity and humor of the image macro format. I hypothesize that these three perspectives bring to light interesting affordances, and that multimodality and metaphoricity are codependent features in the genre of image macros. This paper firstly concludes that the image macro format possesses certain affordances through its multimodal and metaphoric nature that make it ideal for political communication on social media platforms. Secondly, I propose different ways the image macro as an interesting multimodal format should be investigated further from a linguistic perspective.