Having paved the way for the Paris Agreement, a legally binding global treaty focused on climate change that was later ratified by 196 sovereign states, it is actively pushing for a more sustainable society in the face of this threat.īesides cutting down on fossil fuel and promoting clean energy sources, the EU is ready to address the elephant in the room: the negative impact international travel, particularly low-cost flights, has on the environment. The European Union (EU), of which Spain is a member, has taken up the mantle of leading pro-Green geopolitical entity.
Unfortunately, the Iberian nation could soon lie out of reach of budget travelers if these estimates prove correct: The European Union’s Crackdown On Gas Emission Is To Blame This should come as no surprise, taking into consideration all of its natural and historical attractions, not to mention year-round warm weather. Prior to the pandemic, Spain received a record 83.7 million tourists annually, effortlessly surpassing competitors like France and Italy to claim the status of Europe’s number one vacation hotspot. In fact, tourists visiting Spain, one of the world’s leading destinations, should expect airfares to rise even further due to new green policies about to come into force. A corpus of 644 memes that have flooded social networks are categorized and analyzed to witness how the Spanish have managed to bring out their humorous and creative side in difficult times even as they have criticized political decisions, let out their frustrations, described their new "normal" lives, interacted with others and anticipated the future.ĬOVID-19 WhatsApp cultural studies digital cultural humor memes.Covid may be gone, and many countries have reopened for normal tourism following two years of restrictions, but the outlook for international travel, especially when it comes to affordability, is still dire. The memes are considered to be an example of Netlore, digital contemporary folklore, and a theoretical framework on memes and humor is presented that discusses its different functions in order to channel grief, fear and suffering or to play down specific situations. In this paper, a qualitative methodology based on ethnography research is used and ethnographic fieldwork is carried out on the memes disseminated through WhatsApp during the lockdown period experienced in Spain (14 March to 21 June 2020).
The memes draw on irony, ingenuity and creativity to make a difficult and stressful experience more bearable. Throughout the confinement period, there was an excessive flow of humorous memes concerning Coronavirus and related shared experiences during the National State of Emergency decreed by the Spanish Government. During the COVID-19 crisis, the main means or channels of communication were social networks. It is deemed a particularly important feature of the Spanish personality. Humor is cultural: it varies from one country to the next and is part of the idiosyncrasies of a culture. Humor was one of the most frequent and widely used strategies in an attempt to keep perspective, deal with the seriousness of the situation and make the day-to-day more bearable. Different resources were employed to face this new stressful and unexpected situation (fitness, reading, painting, meditation, mindfulness, dancing, listening to music, playing instruments, cooking, etc.). In Spain, citizens were isolated in their homes and were not able to interact physically with family members, friends or co-workers. The COVID-19 crisis, and its ensuing periods of confinement, has generated high levels of social stress on a global scale.
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