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Source publication
While Internet memes are often treated as artifacts which play with broad cultural elements, they can also take on distinctive meanings within narrow communities of practice or organizational membership. This article demonstrates how interrogating a certain interpretation of a meme, and a sort of humor found within it, can reveal elements of viewer...
Contexts in source publication
Context 1
... years after the 2001 destruction of the World Trade Center, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA), which runs New York City's subway (and provides about one third of all masstransit trips in the entire U.S.), began to plaster the subway system with posters of a lonely blue plastic bag sitting under a subway platform bench, captioned with the now-familiar admonition, "If You See Something, Say Something" (Figure 1). Signs bearing the phrase soon became practically a decorating motif in the subway system, painted even on subway station steps, printed on the backs of fare cards, and omnipresent in the agency's printed materials and on its Web site. ...
Context 2
... case study reveals just how the meanings of a cultural object (Figure 1) deteriorated in a setting vital to that object's ostensible purpose, which we can witness in the reception of an Internet meme (Figure 2). To the eyes of general observers, the meme plays somewhere between a sense of vulnerability and a critique of security alarmism. ...
