Eleições da Zueira: Memes, humor e política nas eleições presidenciais de 2014

Abstract

The expansion of web and new communication technologies (NTIC or ICT) has favored the preservation and spread of information in an ever faster manner, as they provide users with tools to actively participate in media creation, in addition to allowing production of large amounts of amateur or professional content, including Internet memes. These can be precisely defined as a content collection that, when disseminated, acquire several versions, thus being changed in its meaning and / or reappropriated via web, still depending on a cultural repertoire extracted from social relationships, memories, historical, geographical and economic references, and specific conjunctural aspects. In this scenario, more than just an expression of web culture, memes are becoming an expressive phenomenon of popular culture, with implications even in politics. This dissertation focuses on the electoral period and proposes to analyze the use of such content as campaign tools. The work lays emphasis on political humor memes as an electoral strategy during the campaign of then-candidate Eduardo Jorge for the presidency of Brazil in 2014. The hypothesis is that memes, especially the humor, constituted a source of interaction and practice of sociability during the presidential elections