Student Protest Banners as Analog Memes

Résumé

During the 2024/25 student protests across Serbia, protest banners emerged as the dominant form of communication. In the age of digital media and social networks, Generation Z students unexpectedly chose (analog) banners as a communication tool that not only conveys political and social messages, but also incorporates elements of memes and viral culture. The aim of this paper is to examine the discursive features of banners characterized by social engagement, intertextuality, and humor. The features of mimetic media (multimodality, reappropriation, resonance, collectivism, and specific modes of dissemination) are interpreted through various forms of student protest banners as a medium for conveying protest messages. By applying content analysis, the key messages of the protests were identified, along with their thematic, linguistic and visual/formal classification. Forms of citationality were observed, as well as the interaction between digital and physical forms of communication, in which protest banners become a link between offline actions and online reactions, but also a specific symbiosis of different elements of art and popular culture. The results obtained were further examined from the perspective of critical discourse analysis, while the conclusions point to the specific potential of this form of communication as an example of the realization of intertextual relations which, in comparison with meme culture, are interpreted as part of a broader, metamodern paradigm.