Participatory Citizenship:Reclaiming The Singaporean Identity Through Internet Memes

The popularity of social media tools has given rise to a new pop culture artifact native to the Internet:the Internet meme. Yet despite the global nature of the Internet as a whole, popular memes are still largely influenced by Western and especially US American pop culture. The role of the mass media in identity construction is well documented, but the complexity of the Internet is paradigm-changing and merits a re-examination of traditional reception theories. The Internet meme, as the quintessential product of Web2.0, is thus the perfect vehicle to examine the relationship between media consumption and identity construction. Using the case study of a Singaporean meme collective, this project undertakes a content analysis of locally-adapted memes in order to explore how a local identity is articulated on the Internet.