Blog 5

 Blog 5

    Above we can see the meme that I have chosen to be the subject of my analysis where I will focus on the visual elements within the meme and then drawing my attention to the exigence of this piece. The image above depicts a meme in which  Kanye West is pictured multiple times with his facial expression changing slowly throughout the meme as a whole. His face becomes progressively more concerned which is appropriate when you consider the context of the meme. The context is clearly given at the top of the meme where it says 'Laughing at corona memes like' and this works well to establish and lure in the target audience. I believe tailoring work to a certain target audience is very key especially with memes as an important characteristic of a meme is being shareable. The target audience for this meme is anybody who has been affected by Covid-19 or simply knows about the spread of the virus, meaning that the majority of the world is the target audience and if not the primary audience, then certainly the secondary. This is a very effective choice of target audience by the author as they have managed to make their piece of work understandable and relatable by nearly everyone which makes it substantially easier to share.

    The meme addresses the way in which the general population viewed the spread of coronavirus and how many people failed to take the virus seriously initially, however after seeing how quickly the number of cases and deaths raised, people had to realise that what they were recently joking about, is no longer a joke and is now reality. The problem being addressed is the way people were late to take the virus seriously which, in turn, caused the spread and severity of the virus to increase. This main message is, in a way, concealed by the humourous nature of the meme and therefore from the audience's perspective simply a joke and a topic for discussion.  The exigence of this meme is the way that the meme cleverly talks about how people failed to understand the severity of the virus until it affected them and how rapidly it did affect them and this, when analyzed, will cause people to reflect on how poorly the world reacted. The image shows the facial expression changing from a nervous look to an even more nervous look in the last picture with the caption 'A little later this morning' showing that people were understanding the seriousness of the virus within hours where before it was taking days and even months. This links to the bigger picture of how many governments across the globe failed to act quick enough to prevent the virus becoming a pandemic and drastically changing our lives.