Analysis of Elon Musk’s Memetic Post on Twitter
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| Year of publication | 2022 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Description | The introduced project is dedicated to the study of representation of the wealthy in virtual environments. The focus of the project is the use of multimodal elements by selected individuals to approximate them to their general audience in spite of their social and class differences. The project examines a tactic used by wealthy users to diminish social distance between them and their followers by the use of memetic elements. The selected environment for the study is the multimodal micro-blogging platform Twitter and the prototype to demonstrate the hypothesis is a post by Elon Musk from the thirtieth of June, which includes a multimodal element relevant to current topics of interest in the media. The study uses elements of critical discourse analysis (with focus on Van Dijk’s ideological square and the concepts of Us and Them) and extended memetic analysis (Wiggin’s elaborated model of content, form and stance) to analyze the memetic post and uncover the tactics behind it. A latter part of the study focuses on the success of the tactics and, with the use of quantitative analysis of the comments for the post, determines Musk’s effectiveness in his intent. The work uncovers the tactics and intents of self-representation on social media and determines its success rate. |
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