Die globale Corona-Pandemie im Spiegel persönlicher Postings – Plattformbezogene Kommunikationsmodi in Sozialen Medien

The article typifies individual experiences as well as collective negotiations of the crisis and the handling of it in the course of the COVID-19 pandemic on the basis of the platform Imgur.com. For this, we draw on a sample of 2% of the highest rated posts (645 posts) published under the hashtag #coronavirus. The posts were coded according to the principles of (Visual) Grounded Theory and descriptively-statistically analyzed following a mixed-method approach. It is not only noticeable how many different media formats are used, but also that the participants’ own posts appear alongside posts from other social media that have been reused. The platform itself is thus also a filter for contributions from other platforms. In addition, personal posts on dealing with the pandemic appear alongside political criticism and informative postings. Along the analyzed data material, it can thus be shown that users can combine different communication purposes, such as entertainment, information and social connection, in rapid succession on the same platform. One focus of the analyses is on the media format of memes, which play a prominent role in social media and which, due to their multimodality and their reference context based on adaptive seriality, pose challenges to the process of data collection and analysis. The reflection on the basis of the material therefore provides new impulses for the study of memes and communication on social media.