Contagion and public discourse: the representation of nature in Covid - 19 memes

Social media is a pre-eminent tool of civic engagement and political expression, and has played a significant role in shaping public discourse during the recent global pandemic. Memes are vital markers for communicating public sentiment during a period of enforced social isolation which has confined citizens around the world to their homes.Inspired by linguistic studies of media and contemporary practices of informational framing, the paper aims to probe the humorous effects of Covid memes as emblematic of a range of discursive responses to this unprecedented crisis. It asks why certain memes are felt to be funnier than others, and probes effects at the interface of humour with personal ideologies. The paper explores the representation of Nature in such memes, from an interdisciplinary perspective that comprises Media Theory and Linguistics. It identifies features of memes from a Multimodal perspective (Kress 2010) that probes their pragmatic significance (Kecskes 2013). The study identifies humorous effects, noting that these may at times conflict with readers‟ habitual assumptions, thus provoking thought and potentially affecting behavior on key social issues.