Hypermedia political humour

the case of Argentinian President Alberto Fernández's "war on inflation" announcement

Abstract

This article analyses the role of the reidero in the construction of a particular event: we take as a case Alberto Fernández's presidential speech on 15 and 18 March 2022 when, in a post-pandemic situation and at the beginning of the war between Russia and Ukraine, a new generalised rise in prices occurs and the Argentinean president announces that his government will begin "the war against inflation”. The metalanguage used takes up the contributions of socio-semiotics and studies on hypermedia humour. The aim was to investigate the laughable operations produced in social networks and mass media, and the regulation of their circulation, as well as the creation of hashtags and the circulation of the case. Finally, the generation of collectives in response to this case was investigated. We confirm the hypothesis that, in the construction of the event in contemporary societies, there are complex procedures of collaborative appropriation by internet users and the media, which editorialise the events with their memes. In the conclusions, we answer what the characteristics of the phenomenon were, highlighting the social network Twitter, where such discourses proliferated most abundantly.