Mmmmm memes. I love that I do not have to explain them.
Yet there’s much more to just passing them around or responding to someone’s tweet/email/text message with one you yank off the web.
I’ve tried to make the case that there is a use for silly media (and again). We put them to use in #NetNarr as a creative act and a means of messaging the medium.
But this morning one of those little gems happened, when a student from a past class contacts you. For all the talk of assessment and ungrading and whatnot, the best measure of your reach to students is when you hear from them much later in life.
So this sound right, Memes have been a useful part of coping with stress during this little pandemic thing. It hits you right between the intuition and the gut. It carries an essence of truth. Or is it truthiness?
And here is a internet lesson, along the lines of a Caulfiedism- follow the links upstream. The article in the Washington Post is not the source. It describes the research of a Penn State University professor. Does Wapo link to the source?
Nope. They take you to another summary in the American Psychology Association press releases.
Keep going upstream.
Here is the research.
Well the research paper, titled Consuming Memes During the COVID Pandemic: Effects of Memes and
Meme Type on COVID-Related Stress and Coping Efficacy (thankfully free of paywalls).
So it’s not memes broadly, the research focused on “consuming” memes. Some 749 people were solicited via Amazon Turk to look at some images and respond to questions. More specifically:
Next, participants who were randomly assigned to the meme or plain text control conditions (described below) viewed three images—all from the same condition—sequentially. Participants randomly assigned to the no meme/no meme-related content control condition viewed one screenshot of a news headline about advances in car stereo systems. Participants only viewed images related to their randomly assigned condition (either one of the eight treatment conditions or one of the three control conditions). After viewing all the stimuli for their respective condition, all participants provided their overall reactions to the set of messages to which they were exposed along with their COVID-related coping efficacy and stress. Additional dependent variables were also assessed after these variables and are reported elsewhere. Participants received $1.
https://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/releases/ppm-ppm0000371.pdf
Sosome participants saw memes, others saw non-meme images. The research questions probed for memes about the “cuteness” of the image, whether it was an animal or not, and if the caption had a covid related message. And then asked about their covid stress factors. For a buck.
I am not criticizing the research design, it seems reasonable. And I’d like to know if memes have an effect on us.
But in my experience there is a world of difference between “consuming memes” (which again the majority of people do) versus creating them yourself. This seemed worth making a meme out of!
But hey, I am no researcher, I just make memes.
My curioustity spiked again, so what were the memes used in the study?
A pretest was used to choose the meme content for this study out of an initial pool of 112 memes to ensure they were viewed as equally humorous across our manipulations. These pretested memes were found on popular meme websites such as “Imgur” and “Imgflip.” Most memes were unaltered from their original online sources. However, to create comparable COVID versus non-COVID captions, some captions were written by the authors and reviewed by a nonauthor who frequently creates meme content on social media.
https://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/releases/ppm-ppm0000371.pdf
I like how the site names require quotes as if they are outlandish planets (URLs are helpful!). But they wrote their own captions! Neato. And look, these captions were “reviewied by nonauthor who frequently creates meme content on social media.”
But there is no data source provided for this study. Where are da memes? Lots of graphs and tables, but no data.
And not even a meme is used in the article.
Sad.
I guess I don’t know much about research. Ask Sad Pablo Escobar!
Featured Image: Batman slapping Robin meme. Know it?
