| Abstract (about 50 words): | It has been remarked by specialists and laymen alike that weather disasters have been preferentially constructed as media events for the past couple of decades. As such they constitute spectacles inviting participatory culture (Jannis Androutsopoulos), id est the consumer public, Social Media employers included, to react affectively to extreme weather texts in ways that can be culture specific. That is, although weather events media coverage are conservative in terms of gender, class and race, as well as eliciting in a controlled manner a range of emotions (Leyda and Negra), there are ways in which local audiences bypass the limitations intended and react, given the affordances of the New Media, empowering them as prosumers (consumers and producers of media).
This paper intends to explore how humourous multimodal posts in social networks sites by a hyperconnected local audience, place in a less-than-preferred perspective local forecast alerts against the hegemonic backdrop of the geopolitical regions of the world which traditionally register a high incidence of natural disasters. The corpus will contain a selection of multimodal contributions posted and distributed by digi-participants on various social network sites.
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