Hey! Name's Luca. Am studying Information Science in Norway.
I'm interested in a wide range of topics, mostly regarding digital stuff. I am currently occupied by thinking about AI and its implications on different aspects of society.
I have been producing music as a hobby for around 8 years, and have newly started playing around with image creation/manipulation, using programming/AI models.
I'm not working on anything specific to meme culture now, but am nevertheless immersed as an observer/consumer of memes, and am fascinated by how/what they express and the impact they have on us.
I am interested in shifts/evolution of memes, culture, memeplexes etc. I love observing the collective movements of meme culture, how it flows, branches out, merges, develops, etc. One of my favourite things to do is look at how irony is used in memes, and how meme irony evolves.
I get most memes i see nowadays from my friend group's discord, although the best memes i see usually come from chance encounters across the internet (social media, imageboards, chatrooms). Quality memes never seem to come from predictable places.
Cheers! Let's experience the unfolding of society.
Hi! My name is Elliot and I’m a PhD student in Visual Studies. My background is in Philsophy and media studies but I also attribute a lot of my current work to my experiences growing up on tumblr/deviantart/early youtube/etc. A lot of my work is focused around experimental interactive media and topics of failure.
Right now I’m primarily working in games more than memes (as a tech for a GTA adjacent research project).
As for hobbies, I’m an artist and game designer (though not a particular good gamer). And I’ve recently developed a deep love for defunctland and amusement park history. So a lot of my meme interests are coming from YouTube and games.
My go to for memes is tumblr and Twitter right now, especially with the recent “Twitter migration” (?). And the last meme I have saved is also GTA related and a very specific joke I was sending to my advisor.
Hey hey, this is Helen. I am a Media Studies (or more precisely, New Media and Digital Culture) student who currently bases in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. I had a background of Journalism in my BA when I was back in China.
My research interests include convergence culture across media, the shifting power relations on digital infrastructures like platforms, sino-imperialism and the weaponization of Orientalism in globalized pop culture, the political economy of video games (more focusing on video games as commodity instead of text/artistic expression), Marxist Feminism and the global feminization of poverty and so on.
Currently, I am not really working on memes. I am now writing my thesis about the political economy of Steam, and how the gaming storefront well demonstrates Negri and Hardt's Empire in its transnational cultural corporation practice. In a way, this whole thesis of mine is rather memetic, just like one of my favorites from hard drive news.
My recent hobby which can be considered as related to memeculture is to collect thesis writing memes (obviously). And I most often collect memes from both the English-speaking and Chinese-speaking Internet. Reddit has become my go-to place recently.
This is actually not my most recently saved meme but I digged it up few days ago while browsing the recent Activion/Blizzard diversity controversy, so here we go:
Hey there fellow design person, I just completed my PhD with, and am currently teaching in, a school of design. I am really interested in hearing more about your ideas of how to apply education theories with design making in the classroom. I have been invited to design a new undergrad studio called "Co-designing with and for online communities" my focus for this subject is encouraging students to harness the vernacular creativity of their regular internet lives to facilitate participatory projects with (and "for" ) their non-designer community peers. I would really love to hear about your theories and practices in more detail if you'd be willing share.
Hi everyone! I’m Molly and I’m from Denmark. I run a Danish meme page on Instagram. That’s generally where I get my memes
I have no research background. However I’m generally really into memes as a medium, and I’m especially into researching what the fuck humor even is and why we laugh. I find it exciting to be immersed in the infancy of something I have a feeling will be more respected and taken more seriously in the near future.
Last interesting meme saved from my phone is this. Love cropped boomer memes
I just finished my M.A. at the University of Virginia in Media Studies, and am beginning my Ph.D. in Visual Studies at UC - Irvine in September. I wrote my thesis on leftist Twitch culture, specifically on Hasan Piker. I also have presented (and have under review) work on Yahoo! Answers and "internet question culture." Currently in the phases of mapping out an oral histories of Furry internet use on early internet systems. While in today's media environment, all hobbies are related to memeculture, I play music semi-professionally and do freelance PR for musicians. I like watching memes evolve on Twitter and Twitch currently, especially because they are memes in often non-static or non-image forms. Last meme I saved to my phone was...
Hi all! My name is Mimi and I am currently a PhD student at the University of Bath, in UK. Originally I am from Romania, but spent way too much time in the UK.
It is amazing to see the range of interests on this forum, and how everything collides under the same umbrella.
My research is based on Romanian political memes and looking how meme creators became the new political actors used in electoral campaigns, or as spin doctors. My background is in sociology and media, and this new political way of thinking is making me dread leaving sociology behind.
I usually get my memes from Reddit, 4Chan or some obscure Facebook groups.
Hi everyone, I'm FX from Paris, France. I have a background in political philosophy.
I am currently writing a Master's thesis on Memes and refusal of work in Sociology, at this point my work is basically an ethnography of a french facebook group called "Neurchi de Flexibilisation du marché du travail" - which approximately translates to labor market flexibilisation shitposting. It's the biggest group of the "neurchi" type. looking forward to discuss with you guys !
hi everyone my name is idil and I'm a phd student in sociology at the university of edinburgh. I'm almost done with my thesis and will be submitting it in a month or so. I founded MSRN (meme studies research network) which is how I met @Seong I'm working on a bunch of different meme projects atm and have published both academic and journalistic articles about internet memes. I made a meme about how I feel about my phd a while back here it is for your enjoyment
hi, my name is Manuel and I'm a fine arts student in Geneva. I'm part of a kind of "shitposting collective" who produces memes for Insta and Telegram in swiss-german. I am mainly interested in how a very informal language like swiss german is used and evolves on memes and how a niche bubble develops it's own aesthetic codes. I collect some personal highlights over at are.na but I'm also looking for an alternative solution to archive all those memes, since storage space on are.na is limited.
I'm also part of a collective in my hometown Basel, which is called Slap Me Baby. we host so called sticker conventions (irl-gatherings to exchange and produce stickers) and release zines, where we reflect on sticker culture. we see stickers as hyperlocal irl-memes that exist beyond algorithmic logics and we focus our observations more on stickers that have a post-internet aesthetic rather than the classic Obey/Banksy-inspired kitschy street art.
I get my memes usually from Discord, Insta, Reddit or Telegram and love to trace the ways a meme (specially OC) can go between the platforms.
looking very forward to be here. a big thx to seong and all the others involved who setted this forum up!
Hi! Some may still know me from Facebook as Yannick (Nick), although I'm mostly lurking these days.
I am a sociology student from germany, where I mostly work in an amalgam of history of ideas, theories of modernity, internet research sociology of illness, extremism and identity politics. For example I am currently researching Identity Politics in Autistic Online Spaces for my Masters Thesis.
Thus at the moment I am very interested in pictures of the mentally ill or disabled on the internet, which is why things like Schizoposting have me extremely interested.
I also have a fascination for extreme right wing memes and did a small research project on the extreme right on the internet some years ago.
I guess I just "love" everything transgressive.
I've been on Facebook every since I left 9gag 10 years ago for memes and I still hold the platform in the highest regards for them.
My name is Lara, I have a background in animal behaviour but I'm a musician now.
I'm an avid memer and my research interest in memes is purely amateur.
I did used to make memes for a record label I help run, they are highly specific to the artist/label- I now occasionally make memes for facebook groups relating to music usually.
For me, Facebook still feels like one of the best places for memes, I think now each community within those groups have developed so much lore it's interesting seeing memes out of their original context and how non members react to it.
I am a Philosophy student in Turkey. I have been deeply interested in philosophy my whole life and I really like seemingly unrelated fields or phenomena or thoughts to create an interesting explanations. Hence, I do not like to confine myself to analytic continental debate and I think philosophers should grow past such classifications.
Other than that, my interests are music, which includes history and philosophy of music. I love Jazz and Baroque composers. I also hold contemporary electronic musicians in very high regard.
Being a student in Istanbul, politics have always been at the center of my life. Being politically active had not always been a choice but a necessity. I like to bring the sensibilities gained from political action to other areas.
When it comes to internet culture and memes, the idea of analyzing memes philosophically fascinated me when I was in High School. At the time I wrote a couple of things which were all based on the meta-ironic and post-ironic trends of the era. As any young person, I grew up with internet and internet culture. Trying to understand internet using insights from other disciplines is quite interesting to me, although I can rarely do it because I am no longer that well versed in internet culture anymore. My main method of accessing memes is Facebook, and I don't use it all that often either.
I hope to find and also write some great discussion here, happy to be here with y'all.
I'm studying geopolitics and have a french political science background
If I was able to access norwegian memes about Russia and the Ukraine situation I would have a project relevant to meme studies within my thesis, but this is sadly not the case
I love politics and geopolitics which are obviously very much present in meme culture, but now that I think about it I don't find them very funny anymore since 2016 lol
I usually still use facebook pages, and share memes from chats on messenger
Not quite a meme but here's the last thing I saved :
Hello, my name is Joe, I was recommended to join here.
My research interests are generally what are colloquially known in some ecology studies as "mud," or compositions between what might be considered "unwanted" and "desirable" (dirt and water). The end result is a look at media that isn't leading (either negatively or positively), but helps inform everything around it.
I'm not working on a project actively related to meme studies, though memes do come up in my laborious and long book, which concerns liminal signs of ideology.
I'm not sure if I have something directly related to meme culture, but as someone in two meme-heavy communities (anime discussion and fighting games), I do come across them a lot.
The main platform is my phone, and the latest meme I have is this
Hi, I'm Alfie. I'm a board game designer and am currently working with A.I to create a text prompt based online game. I've been making stuff on the internet since 1997 and have watched the evolution of meme culture both up close and more recently from a distance.
Back in 2005 I created We Are Not Afraid which at the time was the biggest internet meme to emerge to date, so I'm interested also in the lived experience of people who create memes.
I'm very curious about how tools like midjourney and eventually Dall-e2/Imagen will disrupt or otherwise impact meme culture.
I'm Fotis. I go by Hermes in the TPM Disord and by UniPuff in general in cyberspace.
I am interested in the impact of memes on people's behavior, perception, worldviews and how the Cyber interfaces with the IRL. I am also interested in micro-evolutionary patterns of memes and meme-cultures and how they relate to cultural evolution in general.
Here's my idiosyncratic background:
Undergrad: History and Philosophy of Science
My thesis was on the crossroads of philosophical biology and embodied cognitive science.
Masters: Cognitive Science
The specific program was big in the 4E (Embodied, Embedded, Enactive, Extended) approach to cognition, and my thesis was on an Ecological approach to Auditory Perception. I also wrote a paper on memetics for a course which I had shared with the community.
Currently:
-I got a studentship for a PhD Reserach Programme at Exeter relating to Philosophy of Open Science which I will be starting from late September. John Dupre will be my co-supervisor for those who know
-I have been working on DAOs and blockchain-based Co-ops for 7 months now and I am currently part of the team at Smart Contract Research Forum where I work as Community Cross-Pollinator for Research-related blockchain organizations as well as doing research on governance and metascience from time to time.
From my experience in web3 (at least the side of social impact-related co-op orgs), the people involved take the weaponization aspect of memes as a means of social transformation and philosophical cohesion very seriously. I am part of the newly emergent field of DAO Science and the aspect of decentralized coordination through memetic cultural engineering (as a complement to incentive design) is something that I am trying to promote.
I am also interested in the aspect of locality and meme vernaculars and documenting sub-cultural meme niches, especially in Greece.
Besides all the brainy stuff, I am also a musician and producer occasionally making stuff. I usually take memes as inspiration for making stuff.
I generally choose different platforms for different reasons. Facebook for Schizoposting, Instagram for avant-garde post-ironic accounts, and Discord or Youtube for esoteric stuff.
Welcome! Your work/interest in cyber culture sounds fascinating-I'm particularly interested in how technology becomes the vessel for cultures and vice-versa. Feel free to share your article on memetics in a new thread in #research if you haven't already, I'm sure the community will want to discuss
Hello, I'm Pierre! I'm born in the south of France and now working as a post-doctorate research associate in applied mathematics in Oxford. My academic work focuses on partial differential equations modelling phenomena in the living sciences, namely computational neuroscience. Apart from my "main" career, I also write novels, short stories and theatre, but I barely send them to editors because I always write new texts instead of correcting and perfecting the previous ones .
I have a growing fascination with internet memes since I discovered the godforsaken website 9gag around 2011. Then, I grew an even stranger fascination for the analysis of memes thanks to facebook groups like tpmg. Being unable to perform proper analysis of memes myself, I get involved more and more in meme studies communities to benefit vicariously from treasures I cannot access. I also make some memes myself, most of them shitposts.
) their non-designer community peers. I would really love to hear about your theories and practices in more detail if you'd be willing share.
I'm working on a bunch of different meme projects atm and have published both academic and journalistic articles about internet memes. I made a meme about how I feel about my phd a while back here it is for your enjoyment
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