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assign meaning to the message, the decoding process initiates when the sender successfully
chooses the appropriate channel/s, then the receiver begins to interpret and make meaning of the
issue from experience this includes the knowledge about the topic, beliefs, attitudes and even the
relationship between the sender and receiver (Carah & Louw, 2015).
The greater public, specifically students, relate to the experiences of students from raising the
institutional money. It appears, after research that the issue got so much publicity as a result of
effective communication, even though receivers responded differently. The receiver’s feedback
compromised of dominant point of view, negotiated and oppositional.
Memes are known to be humorous and mock the situation at hand (Bayerl & Stoynov, 2016).
Bayerl and Stoynov elaborate on how the incident resulted in creating a Twitter account under
the name ‘Pepper-spraying Cop' with a bio of ‘I like pepper-spray. I dislike protestors'. Gained
200 followers from its initial stages, the account posted photo shopped memes, then expanded
the account to compare other incidents of pepper spray used by police, which later gained
approximately 1500 followers this account was inactive from 2013 to 2014 (2016). This
demonstrates the power of memes only last so long until the issue is forgotten about, which leads
to the representation of how memes do trivialize the issue. However, they are used in a sense to
capture the attention of the world, initially (Peck, 2014). In addition to creating a fake account,
users have created movies, theme songs, and video clips got uploaded to YouTube (Bayerl &
Stoynov, 2016).
The question is why this issue specifically gets highlighted amongst other emerging issues.
Answering the question above, experts set different point of views. Johnson argues that “the
meme is sheer surface, and there is nothing to interpret because the meme does not mean
anything, or contain anything” (2007, p.43). Moreover, Johnson clarifies that amongst other
memes one meme stands out because we conduit its replication rather than it gaining our
attention, meaning that attention is not the only significant factor that makes receivers select and
replicate the meme (2007). Social media created a place for the rising meme culture. “The sender
uses visual intertextuality to humorous effect” (Sci & Dare, 2014).
Furthermore, the second photo shopped meme got more attention because Lt. John Pike was
recontextualized into the declaration of independence, as shown in Figure 1. Pike’s use of

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