Beyond bonding icons: memes in interactional sequences in digital communities of practice

Abstract The article situates the discursive treatments of internet memes and other possible graphicons in the interactional sequences and argues that memes deployed therein are performative acts that sequentially link utterances and actions for task-motivated digital-based communications. Our ethnographical research design revolves around five members from different communities of practice that are purely digital-based. Our data consists of 105 screenshots of targeted theme-thread digital discourse, supplemented by four-hour follow-up group interviews and a couple of spontaneously structured one-on-one digital chats. Following a CMDA research paradigm and drawing on the insights from communicative functions and discourse semantic parallelism , we examine how the memes, in the form of animated GIFs, Stickers, as well as image-macros, are embedded in the unfolding task-motivated interactions. We propose that knowing when and where to use memes to do things constitutes community members’ interactional competence, which in turn reflects memes’ communicative value of addressivity . Close examination of the discourse data also reveals a new type of animator meme typically found in interactional sequences. The study is expected to contribute to the move of excavating the wealth out of the coupling of memes and digital communication.