Venezuela in memes

Memes as a language that portrays and communicates the country's reality

Abstract

Internet memes are no longer simple images and videos with a funny tone intended to make fun of a situation. In recent years they have become a medium with a powerful communicative charge that aims to reconstruct a reality. This paper aims to determine whether the meme as a significant element allows portraying and communicating the political, economic and social situation of the country. To this end, we start from the concept of language defined by Habermas in his Theory of Communicative Action (1987) and study the definition of meme as an evolution of the one proposed by Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene (1976), comparing it with more recent definitions of the meme circulating on the Internet. Descriptive research was selected, which employs documentary and non-experimental field research with techniques such as interviewing meme creators, curators and users who share them in their networks and literature review to have sufficient documentation on the subject. Memes are perceived as the new language of a generation with which they can communicate and share the portrait of a reality.