linking, copying, or creating with their own versions.
Thirdly, memes is their diffusion through competition
and selection (Shifman, 2013).
Apart from that, the term meme has been studied
including in academid field in many disciplines, such
as philosophy, psychology, anthropology, linguistics,
folklore, and communication (Shifman, 2013). In
language studies, Erhan Aslan explains that “They
[memes] may seem basic, but from a linguistic point
of view, they are surprisingly sophisticated. Meme
creators use “multimodal grammar” (in other words,
images, and captions) to express and share ideas and
opinions” (Aslan, 2018). Therefore, it is important to
study internet memes in order to understand the
meanings such as through images and captions or
texts.
3 SEMIOTICS OF
COMMUNICATION,
TERRORISM & COUNTERING
VIOLENT EXTREMISM
Semiotics of communication is one of the schools of
semiotics developed by Roland Barthes and Umberto
Eco. According to van Zoest, the semiotics of
communication studies the sign as part of
communication which emphasizes the theory of sign
production, that one of which assumes the presence
of six communication factors, namely the sender,
receiver, message, communication channel, and
reference. Briefly, the semiotics of communication is
a systematic study of signs to obtain the meaning of a
communication (Sobur, 2013, pp. xxii-xxiii). Yasraf
Amir Pilliang explains it as “the use and production
of signs socially in the process of communication”
but not separates from the other semiotics theory,
namely semiotics of signification and semiotics of
communication (Sobur, 2013, p. xvii). According to
Umberto Eco in A Theory of Semiotics, as quoted by
Pilliang, “semiotics of communication emphasizes
the aspect of ‘sign production’ rather than ‘sign
system.' Whereas a ‘production machine’ the
meaning of semiotics of communication relies
heavily on the ‘labor’ who chooses the sign from the
raw materials of the existing signs and combines them
in order to produce a meaningful language
expression” (Sobur, 2013, p. xii).
As an interdisciplinary study of linguistics,
cultural studies, and terrorism studies, the memes as
text do not only need to be analyzed by using
semiotics of communication perspective, but also in
the context of terrorism studies, in particular, the
CVE concept. The term ‘terrorism’ has many
definitions and has been defined by many experts,
researchers, as well as governments and international
agencies. One of them is basedn on a dissertation
study in Terrorism and Counterterrorism: A
Comparative Cross-National Analysis by Eran Shor.
In his dissertation, based on many debates and studies
of its definitions, he defines terrorism as “the strategic
use of violence or threats of violence by non-state
political actors againts non-combatans for symbolic
purposes, usually with he intention of influencing
policies” (Shor, 2010, p. 5).
According to Encyclopedia of Terrorism, the most
definitions of terrorism involves three factors, namely
(1) the method is violence, (2) the target is civiliant or
government, and (3) the purpose is to instill fear and
force political or social change (Kushner, 2003, p.
359).
Shor in his study also defines definition of
counterterrorism as “state policies, commonly
implemented following terrorist events or threats,
which are usually declared as directed at preventing
or limiting future terrorist acts” (Shor, 2010, p. 8). In
recent studies, in other words, it is also named
‘Countering Violent Extremism (CVE).’
CVE is the term that is used to counter terrorism.
The United Nations Security Council explains that
one of the approaches to countering the spread of
terrorism and violent extremism is known as CVE.
The Council encourages all people from government
to non-government actors and local communities to
engage in developing strategies to counter violent
extremism narrative that can incite terrorist acts and
the spread of violent extremism (United Nations,
2014). In other words, CVE can be done by anybody
by using any kinds of media. In this case, it can be
seen that CVE is done by using creative media of
internet memes in responding to the Sarinah
bombing.
4 CONTENT ANALYSIS
Many viral internet memes respond to the Sarinah
bombing on 14 January 2016 on M.H. Thamrin street,
Central Jakarta. The primary data of this research are
some memes related to CVE. The memes found from
the internet are taken with the keywords on Google
namely ‘Meme Bom Sarinah 14 January 2016'.
Based on this, there are 12 articles [ (Yulianingsih,
2015), (Hariadhi, 2016), (Ngazis, 2016), (Aziz,
2016), (Khoiruddin, 2016), (Surayabaya Tribun,
2016), (Young, 2016), (Bintang, 2016), (Abdul,
2016), (Berberita, 2016), (Habananggroee, 2016)]