From Signs to Myths: A Semiotic and Cultural Conceptual Analysis of Pakistani Memes

Abstract

This paper looks at promoting the idea of memes of a certain Pakistani digital move beyond humour and serve as semiotic and cultural narratives. However, in spite of the increasing attention to multimodal meme analysis in the world, it describes how Pakistani memes can use visual design and common cultural schemas to produce humour and ideological meaning. The analysis is done using purposive sample of thirty memes in this study, Kress and van Leeuwen visual grammar, Sharifian cultural conceptualisations and Barthes myth theory is merged to examine visual differences, cultural scripts, and symbolic patterns. The findings indicate that humour is created by a systematic incongruency like calm versus shock or ideal versus reality that arouses collective memories of political behaviour, electricity bills based on inflation and rishta anticipations. These recurring images of visual culture make more naturalised the larger myths of political cynicism, economic weight and social conventions of gender. The paper shows that memes of Pakistanis can be utilised as meaningful cultural artefacts to show how the everyday signs can develop into shared myths in online space.