A Social Semiotics and Critical Discourse Analysis On Online Memes Warfare

This research used library research in analyzing online forums related to Memes Warfare in the internet. Social Semiotics is seen as a compatible approach in analyzing the three dimension of Fairclough’s theory regarding the text which include pictures and quotes as the data. This research was aimed to investigate how there are power in visual and textual representation in Memes Warfare by analyzing memes from The Great Meme War in 2016. The theories adopted in this research were the developed version of visual communicational grammar by Kress and van Leeuwen (1996) from Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar. In completing this thesis, the writer used qualitative method to present the data in form of selection and description. From the analysis of the representational, interactive, and compositional meaning of the memes, this thesis shows that memes in The Great Memes War have power relation that affecting society. Furthermore, this thesis aims to make a bit contribution in analyzing multimodal discourse such as memes, and how to better approach memes.