University Students’ Humour in Digital Environment: Internet Memes as a Folklore Genre
University Students’ Humour in Digital Environment: Internet Memes as a Folklore Genre

Summary/Abstract: Internet memes, created by present-day students, are in the focus of this study. Internet memes are multimodal messages, and most often they appear as images complemented with short sentences, which in a humorous way reflect some actual ideas, concepts, situations, events or emotions. Memes are usually presented as a picture, a gif, a video, or a collage. On the Internet, memes are distributed mostly via social networks and/or via email, and one can find them on specially designed websites or blogs. In the framework of this study, Internet memes are analysed as a genre of contemporary folklore, as digitally distributed witty multimodal reports which can be compared to traditional jokes and anecdotes. Analysing Latvian student memes, their thematic continuity has been revealed in comparison with student folklore, namely, jokes, and the basic source of these jokes has been the academic collection of Latvian anecdotes, published in 1929–1930 by Pēteris Birkerts; jokes from various modern websites with humorous content have been used as well. [...]

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