A Pragmatic Perspective of Social Media Memes: Case Study Kenya

The world over today, social media plays a critical role in people’s lives by keeping them connected with regard to sharing information, entertaining and exchanging views in relation to politics, social-economic and environmental issues affecting them. In Kenya, social media, especially Facebook, is awash with memes which are humorous in nature, but a critical observation divulges the various issues affecting the Kenyan populace. Various studies on social media addressing political activities have been done, but there exists a dearth of research on memes that address humour along with social and economic challenges that affect Kenyans. This study deals specifically with Facebook memes used for entertainment through their humorous effects on the addressee and addressing social and economic issues. Although memes on humour entertain addressees, they also carry moral lessons on the way members of the general public are supposed to behave. Through social media memes, communication is done freely via jokes, thoughts, ideas and anecdotes. Memes on social media via Facebook are kind of jokes or ideas spread through the internet using phrases, pictures or videos. They can be funny phrases or images that people share by posting on their social media platforms such as Facebook pages, Instagram and WhatsApp. The memes shared are used to make fun, express opinions and emotions. This paper will focus on memes that combine a written text with a certain image from a linguistic perspective. The study adopts a qualitative research design in analysing memes on humour, social and economic issues in Kenya. Relevance theory was used to analyse the memes. Sixty memes were collected from 289 English/Literature students of Koitaleel Samoei University College, aged between 18-24 years, from first year to fourth year. The researcher then settled on 26 memes which were the most suitable for the research and subjected them to evaluation through relevance theory. According to this study, memes produce humour to relieve stress, address corruption, infidelity and immorality in the society. This research will benefit linguists and students by expanding their understanding of digital language use, and help cultural and social researchers interpret online identities and stereotypes. It will also help the society to understand how meaning, humour and culture are communicated on a day-to-day basis, on an online platform.