One genre of media prosumers on YouTube in Taiwan with a huge fan base, produce political satire videos by consuming news broadcast video clips and remixing news clips with memes as aid narrative materials, which might be images or video segments grabbed from animations or soap opera scenes. In this study, we aimed to understand the intertextuality and effects of irony from meme usage. Therefore, we designed an experiment with 3 published videos produced by Catino Crazy News, a well-known entertaining program on YouTube in Taiwan, including modifying these video contents by decoding the used memes and replacing them with semantic-similar materials as the comparison group. The result indicated either memes or semantic-similar materials make participants/audience perceive that the reporting of the political event becomes exaggerated. Even though the participants/audience sensed the ironic tones from both the experimental group and control group, the effects of irony did not show a significant difference. However, the analyzed result also showed a positive correlation between familiarity and the level of feeling funny, referred that remixing with popular memes could be a better strategy for media prosumers during production.

Authors:
Kuan-Lun Su, National Chengchi University, Taiwan

About the Presenter(s)
Mr Kuan-Lun Su is a University Doctoral Student at National Chengchi University in Taiwan

See this presentation on the full schedule – Monday Schedule

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