$GME To The Moon : Mapping Memetic Discourse as Discursive Strategyin Reddit Trading Community r/WallStreetBets during the GameStop Short Squeeze Saga

Abstract: As social media has emerged to become a key site for contemporary communications and cultural production, the internet meme has penetrated every level of social networking online. Albeit being a global phenomenon with pervasive discursive power in a number of fields ranging from humour to international politics and cyber warfare, comparatively little research has been made into how internet memes work on the discursive level of identity formation and their influence on the formation of internet-based social movements. Using Reddit stock market anarchists r/WallStreetBets as case study, this thesis will use Critical Discourse Analysis to analyze how internet memes work on the level of socio-political formations and how their function can be understood in relation to entropic social environments online. This thesis investigates how internet memes are used as a tool for creation of motifs for action, identity markers, connective action, and social narrativization within an ambivalent social movement online. Introducing the novel term ”memetic discourse” as a way to understand memes as transferable units of memetically programmed content, this study shows the potential of memes to act as effective yet unstable modes of communication within networked environments.