New Media, Youth, and Participatory Culture: Internet Memes During the Impeachment Process in Brazil

89 pages. Presented to the School of Journalism and Communication and the Robert D. Clark Honors College in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Bachelor of Arts June 2018This thesis examines the relationship between youth and new media practices in fostering political participation in online spaces during the impeachment proceedings against Dilma Rousseff, Brazil’s first woman president. In the midst of the political turmoil revolving around the 2016 impeachment case in Brazil, young people actively adopted Social Network Sites (SNS) as vehicles to circulate political user-generated memes. Despite the fact that Brazil is one of the largest democracies in the world, the country still has a long way to go in diversifying its media channels to allow impactful youth participation in the public opinion. However, the number of youth in online spaces continue to increase, as Brazil becomes one of the most active countries on SNS, despite the economic recession. Aside from their reoccurring reactionary, ahistorical, tautological, and superficial elements, Internet memes about the impeachment represent an emerging type of digital labor that is not driven by a particular media text as most memes. Instead, these Internet memes largely gain symbolic meaning and popular appeal through the merging of seemingly unrelated juxtaposition of visual texts, hero and anti-hero characters, and dramatic plotlines. In conjunction, these memes demonstrate to be deeply rooted in the local tradition of cultural cannibalism and popular imagination drawn from Brazilian telenovela conventions. Considering memes both as participatory culture artifacts and as a paratexts for civic engagement, this new gateway for participation suggests that Brazilian youth are not passive consumers of traditional media, but rather active, creative, and influential in online spaces and, potentially, in the public sphere