A Critical Discourse Analysis: Social Propaganda in English Joke Memes

Abstrak

Discourse analysis as the study of language is based on a pragmatic approach. Meme is one of new inventions of mediated strategy by utilizing electronic media. People on social media continuously make meme as a strategy to deliver their special messages. This phenomenon makes netizens and readers tend to get influenced or persuaded called propaganda. The objectives of the research are describing ideological assumption in English Joke Memes, message content in English Joke Memes, social cognition and social analysis of English Joke Memes. This study used a qualitative approach with both knife discourse analysis by Teun A. van Dijk and visual semiotic analysis by van Leeuwen. The meme makers used the perspective of society and government. The memes bring the paradigm of society through government as segmentation. By image and sentence that are easy to understand, they try to let society open their minds and give opinions about leadership of government. The makers introduced themselves to the public through advertising their creations, made memes with interesting images and text to bring the viewers to a new ideology. By the access of influencing discourse, society can take over social media, also netizens’ mindsets.