Constructing Political Narratives through Memes: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Pakistani Memes on Social Media

Abstract

In the digital age, memes are now a strong tool in political communication. They are a means of satire and spread of opinions. The current research attempts to bridge the research gap in the literature review on the critical discourse analysis of memes by examining the multi-layered meanings and informative functions of Pakistani political memes. This study has a qualitative research design. The current study uses Fairclough three dimensional model. The three dimensions included the textual analysis, discursive practice, and sociocultural practice of analysing the political discourses in memes. Ten meme were randomly selected from different social media platforms including Facebook, Instagram and X (Twitter). The results indicated that, Pakistani political memes are a mixture of humour, sarcasm, and allusions so that they can convey complicated messages. By simplifying political issues, they help make complex and dull topics easy to understand and follow by numerous people. The values of the memes attract the audience with familiar and timely content, text, and images. They play a very important role in the speed of information spread and stimulating critical thinking and political awareness, especially among young people. Also, memes provide an audience to communicate with the community and express their feelings, increasing civic engagement in the political discourse. Also, it was found that memes are also being applied to propagate hate speech and carry out personal attacks on political actors. Online culture has now included the meme as a vital element especially in the Pakistani politically-oriented communication online.

Keywords: Memes, CDA, Pakistani political memes, Social-media platform, Model of Fairclough.