Nuances ético-políticas dos memes de internet durante a pandemia da COVID-19 (2020-2022): uma análise centrada no riso e nos afetos

Abstract

This research aims to analyze the affects elicited by the circulation of internet memes about the COVID-19 pandemic on the social media platform Instagram. The analysis focuses on laughter and irony through the lens of Socio-Historical Psychology. Utilizing the theoretical and methodological frameworks of historical materialism and Baruch Spinoza's theory of affects, the study explores the political-affective power of memes on social networks. Lev Vygotsky's work, The Psychology of Art, provides a foundation for understanding the reception and sharing of memes by internet users, through the dialectic of form and content, which he posits as fundamental to content analysis. The methodological approach for the online research on affects involved collecting seven memes related to seven significant historical events of the pandemic, marking the three waves of the COVID-19 pandemic. These memes, along with their respective comments and word clouds, were analyzed using three different methods. Quantitative analysis examined the number of comments and instances of laughter per meme, varying according to the occurrence of historical events. Qualitative analysis of the emotional language in the memes focused on the affective-volitional basis in the subtext of the comments, mediated by the affective scale of laughter and irony present in the comments. This analysis identified two types of memes: those expressing individual uniqueness and those indicating group belonging. Irony as a linguistic style appeared in user comments, sometimes expressing fear of the virus, unemployment, the use of chloroquine as a treatment, or death, and at other times as a form of judgment towards others. The analysis of laughter helps to understand the affective-political nuances of online interactions and the actions they motivate towards autonomy or subservience