Abstract
The ingenious deployment of the digital media by online users in Nigeria offers opportunities in this chapter to monitor the trajectories of netizens' engagement with public dialogues on Nigerian Twitter. By exploring the dimensions of intermedial exchanges (i.e., intermediality), this study will analyzes how digital users explore innovative digital media tools such as Twitter memes in reinstating their views on critical discourses in the Nigerian polity. The author adopts a mixed methods design, which includes quantitative content analysis, discourse and semiotics analyses. Two prominent Nigerian Twitter accounts—@KraksTV and @I_pissVodka—are purposively selected for this chapter, and the author will evaluate memes posted between April 2018 and May 2018 by paying close attention to the themes and issues propagated. The author concludes that intermediality promotes a dynamism of opinion characterized by technological innovation, in which Twitter meme is categorized, enabling the expression of political agency and furtherance of critical engagement.
TopIntroduction
The creative use of Twitter memes by young online users in Nigeria provides a window of opportunity in this chapter to monitor and report the details of their engagement in issues surrounding Nigerian mainstream politics, which cut across the digital world. Twitter memes are seen as subaltern tactics for participating in public discourses. In this essay, intermediality refers to how contemporary and digital media borrow and reinterpret contents as a common wheel of culture and, sometimes, remediation. It is in this light that the author will engage the memes tweeted by Nigerian Twitter users. The author will examine the ways in which intermediality features in contemporary Nigerian media, and how memes deployed by Nigerian netizens signify intermedial relations in the digital media space. That is, how intermedial exchanges on social media, in this case the use of Twitter memes, is able to provide an avenue for political participation in Nigerian politics.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Text: It refers to both the visual and/or textual components of a message or media content.
Critical Discourse/Engagement: This is a form of immersion into issues of national importance, thereby contributing to a process that is analytical, resistant and emotional.
Intermediality: This describes the interconnectedness of modern media of communication. That is, it involves both traditional media and new media.
Twitter Memes: These refer to digital images, texts and contents that are humorous, sarcastic or ironic and are used for expressing opinions, shared beliefs, and knowledge and so on by Twitter users.
Theme: It minimally systematizes and describes data in rich detail.