My life is a mess: self-deprecating relatability and collective identities in the memification of student issues

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My life is a mess: self-deprecating relatability and

collective identities in the memification of student

issues

Kristine Ask & Crystal Abidin

To cite this article: Kristine Ask & Crystal Abidin (2018): My life is a mess: self-deprecating

relatability and collective identities in the memification of student issues, Information,

Communication & Society, DOI: 10.1080/1369118X.2018.1437204

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2018.1437204

Published online: 19 Feb 2018.

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My life is a mess: self-deprecating relatability and collective

identities in the memification of student issues

Kristine Ask

and Crystal Abidin

b,c

Department of Interdisciplinary Studies of Culture, Norwegian University of Science and Technology,

Trondheim, Norway;

Media Management and Transformation Centre (MMTC), Jönköping University,

Jönköping, Sweden;

Centre for Culture and Technology (CCAT), Curtin University, Perth, Australia

ABSTRACT

In this paper, we investigate memes about student issues. We

consider the memes as expressions of a new networked student

public that contain discourses that may fall outside the

mainstream discourse on higher education. The paper is based on

content analysis of 179 posts in the public Facebook Group

‘Student Problem Memes’, combined with a nine-month media

watch and a discussion workshop with 15 students. Through self-

deprecating humour, students create an inverse attention

economy of competitive one-downmanship, where the goal is to

display humorous failure instead of perfect appearance. Our

analysis shows that students use humour to express, share, and

commiserate over daily struggles, but also that the problems

related to work/study balance and mental health, are experienced

as a persistent feature of student living. We also analyse

limitations of meme-based publics, emphasizing processes of

inclusion and exclusion through specific vernaculars of visual and

discursive humour where issues related to gender, race,

orientation, class, and ability are sidelined in favour of relatable

humour.

ARTICLE HISTORY

Received 7 October 2017

Accepted 31 January 2018

KEYWORDS

Meme; students; higher

education; collective identity;

networked publics; humour

Student voices and counter publics

The inclusion of student perspectives in higher education is frequently lauded as both

necessary and valued. However, many processes used to include student voices reduce

their contribution to ‘student feedback’, which places limits on what issues students can

speak of, and is tied to institutional attempts to gain a competitive edge (Mockler &

Groundwater-Smith, 2015). Consequently, we need alternative ways to engage with stu-

dent discourses, also in non-institutional settings, to ensure that students are heard. We

believe memefied discourses on the internet represent one such avenue that can give us

insight into otherwise marginalized stories about students and issues they face.

On the internet, stories about the life of students take a variety of forms: Opinion blogs

on news portals (Istudent, 2016), listicles on popular media outlets like Buzzfeed (Misener,

2013; Stryker 2015), and dedicated forum threads on platforms like Reddit (/r/LifeHacks,

2017). In recent years we have also seen a rise in visual and short form user-generated

CONTACT Kristine Ask [email protected]

INFORMATION, COMMUNICATION & SOCIETY, 2018

https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2018.1437204

content on social media used to air grievances and form digital communities of support with

each other (Horton, 2016;Malhotra,2011; Sylvester, 2017; Weinberg, 2016). The online

presence of student stories has culminated in a bona fide genre of ‘student problem’

memes dedicated to sharable, remixable, and relatable narratives about the student life world.

In this paper, we address these memefied discourses about higher education to inves-

tigate the lifeworld of students: How is higher education framed by student memes? How

do memes produce collective identities of students and what characterizes such identities?

A rising numbers of students around the world grapple with struggles like student debt

(Connick, 2017; Rivero, 2017), mental health issues (Burns, 2017; Wakeford, 2017), racism

(Frias, 2017; Lord, 2017; Porter, 2017), and sexism (Geek Girl Rising, 2017; McCombs,

2017). How are such issues of inequality articulated, if articulated at all, in memetic

discourse?

We focus on a widely popular Facebook Page that collates and publishes user-generated

submissions from students around the world known as ‘Student Problems’ and refer to

them throughout the paper as SP Memes. With over 7 million subscribers at the time

of writing, and 3.4 million subscribers at the time of data collection 10 months earlier,

SP memes is escalating in prominence among Facebook users around the world. It belongs

to the multi-platform brand ‘Student Problems’ and is promoted as ‘the home of all the

best student entertainment, knowledge and comedy’ (http://www.studentproblems.co.

uk). The paper is based on content analysis of Facebook content posted during two

weeks in March and May 2017 through an inductive approach which generates theory

as gleaned from the data (Thomas, 2006), and coded according to the principles of

grounded theory (Glaser & Strauss, 2017). We also analyse limitations of meme-based

publics, emphasizing processes of inclusion and exclusion through specific vernaculars

of visual and discursive humour.

Memefied networked publics

We argue that the SP Memes are representations of a counter-public built on collective

identities and shared experiences as students. The investigation of publics and counter-

publics (Warner, 2002) has proven fruitful in directing attention to discourses that fall out-

side the mainstream, and as educators we should take care to value content ‘that makes at-

risk youth more visible and thus accessible to adults’ (Dobson, 2016, p. 179). Here, publics

are broadly defined as a collection of people with a shared understanding, identity, interest

or rhetoric. Since the SP collective is intimately tied to their online presence, they are

further specified as a networked public; ‘a linked set of social, cultural, and technological

developments that have accompanied the growing engagement with digitally networked

media’ (Ito, 2008, p. 2). Networked publics position the makers and sharers of memes

as active users and contributors (rather than as a passive audience or consumer) and

poses their own set of challenges. For instance, some audiences are visible while others

are unseen, audiences may maintain distinct social contexts or engage in collapsed con-

texts, and audiences may shift between public and private spheres of discourse (boyd,

2010).

Networked publics are built on technical features that allow for increasingly complex

communication and the property of bits means that memes are performed in a space

with material affordances for persistence, replicability, scalability, and searchability.

2 K. ASK AND C. ABID IN

This means that when content such as memes are shared in networked publics, they are

materially configured to be automatically archived, easily duplicated, potentially seen by

many and can be retrieved by searching (boyd, 2010). In other words, the practice of

meme-making and meme-sharing is often a public but social practice. Additionally, as

a networked public of a Facebook Page, shareability (Jenkins, Ford, Green, & Green,

2012) and relatability (Abidin, 2017; Kanai, 2016) are highly valued social practices that

can be achieved through competence in particular forms of internet vernacular, which

in the case of SP Memes is related both to the use of memes as expression and use of

humour in said expression.

Another key feature of networked publics relevant to our study is how it positions digi-

tal technologies, screens, and social media as established and ubiquitous features of our

everyday lives. The concept actively encourages us to avoid dichotomous divides between

online/offline, users/producers, and the social/material. Instead, it embraces the diffuse co-

presence of both digital and physical spaces, distributed and loosely connected creative

communities and the co-production of technology and culture (Ito, 2008). Taken together,

these features direct the form and content of the meme discourse, and in turn shape how

meme producers and audiences relate to each other.

Meme culture, relatability, and self-deprecation

While there are several competing definitions of memes, in this paper we focus on the

intersection of the following three (overlapping) fields. From vernacular cultures, we

understand memes as ‘the propagation of content items such as jokes, rumours, videos,

or websites from one person to others via the Internet’ (Shifman, 2013, p. 362), a form

of ‘pop polyvocality’ or ‘a pop cultural common tongue that facilitate[s] the diverse

engagement of many voices’ (Milner, 2013, para. 9). From the perspective of media and

communications, we deem memes a form of ‘shared social phenomenon’ propagated

through ‘imitation’, ‘competition’, and ‘selection’ (Shifman, 2013, pp. 364–365); and

from the socio-cultural frame memes are a ‘common instrument for establishing norma-

tivity’ (Miller & Sinanan, 2017, p. 193).

Analysing memes as objects beyond mere internet frivolity, we support the idea that

they shape the mindsets, forms of behaviour, and actions of social groups’ (Shifman,

2014, p. 18). As highly adaptable and penetrative visual units, memes have the power

stimulate contentious public commentary (Bayerl & Stoynov, 2014), overcome the hege-

mony of messages dominated by mainstream media (Huntington, 2013; Leaver, 2013),

and delegitimize long-standing corporate discourses (Davis, Glantz, & Novak, 2015).

Through a performative lens, the use of memes may be understood as a form of boundary

work, where normality and deviance, inside and outside, are continually made and

remade. Familiarity with certain memes and meme vernacular are ways to distinguish

between groups and to create a sense of belonging, as only those with the requisite inter-

textual know-how will understand the joke (Miltner, 2014). Consequently, the making and

sharing of memes is a way to make and negotiate collective identities through shared

norms and values (Gal, Shifman, & Kampf, 2015).

To understand how memes create a sense of community, we also consider the concepts

phatic communion (Miller, 2008; Senft, 1995) and phatic communication (Malinowski,

1993; Žegarac, 1999). The notion of the ‘phatic’ is derived from anthropologist Bronislaw

INFORMATION, COMMUNIC ATION & S OCIETY 3

Malinowski, who in his study of human communication wrote about a form of speech in

which the ‘mere exchange of words’ fosters ‘ties of union’ (1993, p. 10). This phenomenon

has been studied as a ‘communion’ practice between speakers who communicate for

‘exclusively social, bonding functions’ (Senft, 1995, p. 3), and as a ‘communication’ struc-

ture with its own social conventions that differ from regular information-driven talk as

opposed to feeling-driven talk (Žegarac, 1999). In the digital age, such phatic communions

and communications are argued by new media scholar Vincent Miller (2008, p. 387) to be

derived from ‘the social contexts of “individualization” and “network sociality”, alongside

the technological developments associated with pervasive communication and “connected

presence”’.

While prior research on phatic communities in digital spaces has focused on the struc-

tural aspect and communicative frameworks of conviviality (Varis & Blommaert, 2015,

p. 43), we wish to focus on the social aspect and relational practice of ‘self-deprecating

relatability’ that is especially evident among student populations and publics in meme cul-

ture. SP Memes belongs to a legacy of self-deprecating memes on the internet alongside

other prominent meme genres such as ‘losers in china’ (Szablewicz, 2014), ‘what should

we call me’ (Kanai, 2016), the ‘no make-up selfie’ (Deller & Tilton, 2015), and ‘girl

pain’ (Dobson, 2016) memes. Self-deprecating memes have been enacted to ‘demonstrate

affective affinities with others’ (Kanai, 2016, p. 4) and display ‘young netizens’

disillusion-

ment

with the apparent lack of possibility for upward socio-economic mobility’ (Szable-

wicz, 2014, p. 259). In this way memes display emergent practises for identification that

emphasize affective dimensions where ‘alternative desires and forms of mobility may be

imagined and enacted’ (Szablewicz, 2014, p. 260). As such, the memefication of everyday

struggles are not merely online presentations of offline pain (Dobson, 2016, p. 179), they

also allow new public discussions to take place by addressing conversations and topics not

normally granted public attention.

The three themes from our data – (1) Overwhelmed, stressed and ashamed; (2) Self-

deprecating humour, flexibility and seriousness; and (3) Procrastination, control and

self-blame – represent both existing and new discourses about student lives, where the

meme format has rendered some experience visible, while silencing others. Drawing on

our collective experience and fieldwork on highly prolific digital communities such as

Influencers (Abidin, 2017) and gamers (Ask, 2016), whose ‘visibility labour’ strategies

(Abidin, 2016) are oriented towards the market logic of positive self-branding, we also

argue that the self-deprecating relatability of SP Memes has arisen in opposition to the

rise of pristine, prestigious, and celebratory content.

Methodology

The paper builds on content analysis of memes posted on the SP Memes Facebook Page in

2017. Data were collected in two periods, namely 15–31 March and 1–15 May, where all

posts were downloaded and saved amounting to 179 posts. All posts were then coded

using an inductive approach (Thomas, 2006) informed by the coding principles of

grounded theory (Glaser & Strauss, 2017): Initially, posts undergo substantive coding in

which data is extracted from our sample. Then, the data is subject to open coding in

which we read for emerging themes and core categories. Finally, we analyse and further

fracture each of our open codes via axial coding, until core and related concepts emerge

4 K. ASK AND C. ABID IN

upon saturation. To facilitate this coding process, each post was summarized in text form,

coded with key words for content, and saved with a free-form description of what the post

considered relatable and who was visible in the post. Our aim was to identify central

themes addressed in the data, as well as how the memes were used to produce relatability

and shared identities through memefied discourse.

Following Shifman’s(2013) framework for memes, our data may be described as con-

ventional in form, persistent in stance and varied in content. The posted memes consisted

of either only text or a combination of image/gif/video and text, which in most cases re-

contextualized old and popular memes to a student setting. There was little to no remixing

in the comment section, which was primarily used to tag other users or express sentiments

of relatability (‘same’, ‘that’sme!’, etc). The stance was largely the same throughout the

material, with self-deprecating humour being pervasive, while showing great variety in

content (though limited to student problems as dictated by the genre), making it our

focus for analysis.

In addition to content analysis, we have gathered supplemental material to contextua-

lize the dataset, as our own positions as professional academics might skewer interpret-

ations. The first author hosted a small workshop where a group of 15 students (both

BA and MA level) participated in coding part of the dataset (a total of 27 posts) and

answered a short questionnaire about their perception of student memes. Their coding

and interpretation of what the memes were saying, as well as what the memes considered

relatable were in line with our own readings, validating our analysis of the material.

Responses from the survey also reminded us that students varied in how much they related

to the problems depicted, and humour/being entertained was the primary motivation for

use. These discussion points were incorporated into our findings. Furthermore, our study

has been supplemented by a nine-month long (January–September 2017) media tracking

of current student trends and issues, culminating in a data set of press articles, expert com-

mentaries, and opinion editorials that have circulated widely among student and academic

circles on social media.

We would also like to note the limitations of our data set given that SP Memes is an

entity largely prolific on Facebook despite having several interconnected digital estates.

SP Memes on Facebook represent merely one facet of student publics, being hosted on

the platform Facebook that is dominantly used only in some parts of the world, corre-

sponding to a host of users who are likely English-speaking, middle-class, college-aged stu-

dents from around the world. As such, the differentiated visibility of the student

population and student experience on SP Memes may alienate marginalized student popu-

lations such as the disabled, mature aged students, non-English-speaking students, and

students from low-income backgrounds, to name a few.

Theme 1: overwhelmed, stressed and ashamed

SP memes builds its community through commiseration and self-deprecating humour,

where ‘telling’ and not ‘solving’ is the primary directive. However, how student’spro-

blems are framed: as ubiquitous, something impossible t o change, and as an inesca p-

able part of student life, is cause for concern. The shared SP identity is one where the

demands of student living are insu rmountable, and the only available option is to

endure the agony.

INFORMATION, COMMUNIC ATION & S OCIETY 5

Consider this small sample of memes that we deem to be exemplar of posts depicting

distress and student life. The post on the left illustrates how the management of seemingly

normal everyday responsibilities (money, assignments, work, exams, sleep) presents as an

overwhelming experience. While there are memes dealing with each of these issues separ-

ately, they are often shown as an unmanageable package deal. Some might interpret this as

a sign of a coddled or immature student body, but an equally valid interpretation is that

students are undergoing financial struggles, feeling academically inadequate, attempting to

balance work with studying, and not finding time to rest. These various strands of distress,

especially when compounded over time, are in fact a set of powerful stressors. In corro-

boration of this, an ACHA Report on US student health (American College Health Associ-

ation, 2017) showed that in the last 12 months 86% felt overwhelmed by all that they had

to do, 82% felt exhausted (not from physical activity) and 50.9% reported feeling things

were hopeless, and we believe the memes articulate this experience.

We are not arguing that all students feel overwhelmed all the time, but rather that stu-

dent issues extends beyond academic pursuits, and that something an adult/non-student

might find mundane or manageable is actually a struggle in the context of student life. The

laundry list of basic stresses – money, assignments, work, exams, sleep – are an almost uni-

versal struggle for all students and thus appeals to a wide spectrum in the SP meme audi-

ence, although the memes do not differentiate between students, the intersectionality of

their identities, and thus their varying resources to cope with these stresses.

The ubiquitous presence of students’ stressors that stretches far beyond the classroom

and study hall is also articulated in the post in the centre (Figure 1). Although ‘watching

Netflix’ is used as an example of leisurely pursuits, it is but a placeholder for several other

relaxing activities students may engage in, as evidenced by the vast collection of similar

memes on the Page. The general narrative is that while engaging in a leisurely pursuit,

the act of remembering or being reminded about deadlines, exams, or assignments dis-

rupts a student’s ability to rest. Such memes convey that seemingly safe, everyday activities

of leisure are regularly and suddenly interrupted with feelings of dread, hopelessness, and

anxiety due to the omnipresence of stress. As the post on the right (Figure 1) points out,

this distress is something you should hide. The meme uses an image of a man who is lit-

erally on fire, but walking in a calm manner, to illustrate the experience of hiding distress

and keeping up appearances. While direct mentions of ‘shame’ in the captions did not fea-

ture often in our data, the visual and discursive stories embedded in the memes indicated

that these negative feelings and experiences were deeply shameful and difficult to express.

Figure 1. Examples of posts theming distress and student life.

6 K. ASK AND C. ABID IN

This interpretation is strongly supported by similar memes in our data, where the ‘audi-

ence’ watching a student ‘keep it all together’ interchanges between fellow students, edu-

cators, and family members, also implying that dealing with distress and shame is a lonely

experience.

Seen together, the memes in Figure 1 build on relatable experiences of feeling over-

whelmed, stressed, and ashamed. The way distress and student living is intertwined cor-

responds with how student issues were represented in our media watch, and current

research on the wellbeing of students. The media watch was abuzz with a ‘student health

crisis’, referring to the rising number of students with mental illness (e.g. Gurney-Read,

2016). The American College Health Association (2017) reported that among US students

in the last 12 months 66% felt very sad, 60.8% felt overwhelming anxiety, 38.2% so

depressed it was difficult to function and 10.4% seriously considered suicide. Similarly,

studies on mental health in UK (Thorley, 2017) and Norway (Nedregård & Olsen,

2014) show a rising number of students with mental illness, mental distress and low

wellbeing.

While entertainment value and humour are important for the success of the genre, the

memes are also articulating shared pain that might be difficult to express in other forms.

Given the stigma surrounding mental health issues, we should consider the memefied dis-

courses of persistent sadness, fear, and frustration as a valued outlet about topics that

might be hard to raise in general, and especially in higher education where characteristics

like resilience and independence are praised. We should also see SP Memes in connection

to how validation from peers helps combat the surrounding stigma (Naslund, Aschbren-

ner, Marsch, & Bartels, 2016), and how young adults with mental illness are more likely to

use online communities to seek support (Gowen, Deschaine, Gruttadara, & Markey, 2012).

However, we are not implying that the making and sharing of memes are in and of them-

selves therapeutic. In the next section, we further investigate the importance of humour in

creating flexible and relatable narratives and making this pain palatable.

Theme 2: self-deprecating humour, flexibility and seriousness

Several subgenres of memes are dedicated to laughing at one’s own or others’ misfortune.

The classic ‘Fail’ meme, and later iterations like ‘You had one job’ and ‘Karma’, depict both

trivial and epic mistakes where enjoyment comes from observing the failure of others, akin

to a Schadenfreude. On the other hand, SP Memes (like other self-deprecating Problem

Memes such as First World Problem Memes, Gamer Problem Memes or Girl Problem

Memes) derives its humour from identifying and relating with the depicted experience.

In addition to referring to a shared identity, the self-deprecating humour is also a way

of constructing that collective identity, and in this section we will analyse how humour

is used in telling the student story.

In line with previous research, we found that sarcasm and silliness were prominent

forms of humour in SP Memes alongside ‘comparison, personification, exaggeration,

pun, surprise’ (Taecharungroj & Nueangjamnong, 2015, p. 288). In particular, exagger-

ation was a dominant form of expression, where the difficulties of studying or the personal

failing of students were taken to extremes. For example, in a meme about how university is

going (Figure 2, left), the answer to the question ‘How would you describe your university

career?’ is ‘Failing My Way to Success. An Emotional, Financial and Physical Journey from

INFORMATION, COMMUNIC ATION & S OCIETY 7

Hell’. While the meme is referring to a shared experience of distress (as described in the

above section), the exaggerated nature of the response adds flexibility to the statement by

allowing for multiple interpretations. For some, the description of a ‘journey from hell’ is

accurate, for others it is mainly an entertaining way of articulating challenging aspects of

student living. Similarly, a meme with the text ‘Exams don’t even test your knowledge they

just test how much stress you can handle without having a mental breakdown’ may be

relatable for those who simply worry about test results, as well as for those experiencing

crippling anxiety during exams. As responses from the student workshop reminded us,

they relate to the memefied statements to a varying degree. Some found joy in how SP

memes describe a relatable experience in a humorous way, others simply saw them as

exaggerated for the sake of entertainment and not really referring to real-life situations.

In this way, humour fuels the memes’ virality by expanding their relatability.

In other memes, the degree of silliness is more unclear. This is illustrated in Figure 2

(middle): ‘I sometimes consider dropping out and becoming a stripper, but then I remem-

ber that I’m ugly and can’t dance’. Humour is derived from exaggeration (of the student’s

lack of skills) and a put down of both themselves and strippers (as an accessible occupation

that does not require a degree). However, the humorous exaggeration does not necessarily

extend to the potential honesty of the message’s implication: that a degree is the only way

to ensure future employability, and that quitting higher education is in many cases not a

‘real’ option. As Figure 2 (right) demonstrates with the text ‘Keep studying, you can sleep/

cry after you get your degree’, academic success is not only rated as more important than

personal well-being, distress is framed as something students have to simply endure, as

whatever distress is experienced currently is nothing compared to the pain a future with-

out a degree would bring.

In these posts humour and exaggeration are still the primary effects of the message, but

the selection also shows how student sentiments in meme form also can be keyed in a

more serious tone. Internet memes have a strong association with humour, and is some-

times used interchangeably with internet humour, but humour is not a required feature.

Memes are also used to share experiences of distress and failure, where eliciting sympathy

with the memefied position or statement rather than laughter is the goal (Lindsay, 2017).

SP Memes make jokes, but they also speak to real experiences and the liking and sharing of

such memes may just as well represent support, as it does entertainment.

Figure 2. Memes about higher education as painful.

8 K. ASK AND C. ABID IN

Theme 3: procrastination, lack of control and self-blame

The third and final theme in our data is procrastination and is by far the most common

topic in our dataset of SP Memes. It is also the one topic that all the students participating

in our workshop related to. The high relatability factor is not surprising considering that

80–95% of college students procrastinate and almost 50% do so regularly (Steel, 2007).

Procrastination is defined as the voluntary delay of due tasks, and can negatively affect

learning, achievement, academic self-efficacy, and quality of life (Steel, 2007). Some choose

to delay tasks to work under pressure and find good use for their postponement tactics

(active procrastinators), others do so involuntarily and with negative consequences for

both health and performance (passive procrastinators) (Chun Chu & Choi, 2005). How-

ever, in the SP Memes procrastination was always expressed as the latter, as something

negative that not only impacted academic performance, but also happiness and self-worth.

While procrastination is defined as the voluntary delay of due tasks (indicating that

there are no external forces or seemingly rational reasons for postponing) the SP

Memes speak to an experience where delays happen for seemingly no reason and are

beyond their control. The posts alternate between (1) relatable moments of delays getting

out of hand; (2) descriptions of powerlessness as the procrastination continues; and (3) the

consequences that follow from procrastination. All three are present in the meme on the

left (Figure 3):

That awkward moment when your 10 minute study break turns into 2 hours of Netflix, sleep-

ing for the rest of the week, failing your exams, being disowned by your parents, and spend-

ing the rest of your life as a Mongolian goat farmer.

Not only does the meme describe a gradual decent from safe leisure to feared future, it

also makes a direct and causal link between failing to study, being socially shamed (dis-

owned by family), and having poor career prospects (goat farming). The sense of futility

that procrastination may bring is illustrated in the image on the right (Figure 3) where

studying for exams after a semester of procrastination is equated with throwing a single

bucket of water on a massive fire.

In our dataset, even though only a small number of posts (3) use the word procrastina-

tion explicitly, a larger number (30) addressed it in variants as ‘not studying’ or ‘ failing to

study’, often by referring to time being spent on something else. Activities like eating,

sleeping, drinking, going out/meeting friends, and watching TV were frequently

Figure 3. Examples of posts theming procrastination.

INFORMATION, COMMUNIC ATION & S OCIETY 9

positioned as something that either got in the way of studying, or as something that was

deliberately used to ignore academic responsibilities. Although many of these activities are

central components of well-being, their importance is severely underplayed in the meme-

tic discourse, and often framed as antithetical to studying. This framing corresponds with

research showing that procrastination, and its related experience of shame, may prevent

students from doing things that will improve their well-being and health, including work-

ing out, eating healthily, being social, or doing enjoyable activities (Sirois, Melia-Gordon,

& Pychyl, 2003).

Studies in psychology show that for the procrastinator, the delay is marked by discom-

fort that can manifest as anxiety, irritation, regret, despair, or self-blame (Glick & Orsillo,

2015), and these findings matches the affective dimensions in our data: anxiety (about

exams and life post exams), regret (for not studying enough), despair (about the future),

and self-blame (for ‘wasting time’ not studying). While either of the above emotions, when

compounded over time, represent a risk to mental health and well-being, we wish to high-

light the role of self-blame in the framing of student problems.

It is notable that with the exception of jokingly calling multiple exams in one day a

‘breach of human rights’, the responsibility for student-related problems is projected

inwards. Although the primary discourses on student problems in our media watch

focused on institutional failure and structural inequalities in society as causes of student

stresses, the SP Memes place the blame squarely on the shoulders of each individual stu-

dent. While there can be many reasons for not finding the time to study (many students

are, for example, reliant on income from part-time or full-time jobs) the narrative is still

parochially one of personal failure. With procrastination being common and leading to

self-blame, we are likely missing important feedback about student lives and their learning,

as student problems are individualized rather than used to fuel institutional critique. Inter-

nalizing institutional failure is a problem for academics as well as students (Gill, 2010), but

in dealing with student issues, the internalization of responsibility may further compound

students’ relative lack of voice in higher education and their potential to change proble-

matic structures that shape their student experience.

Collective identities, relatability and limitations of memefied publics

In many ways, the SP Memes mirror ongoing debates in the mainstream public about the

consequences of the neoliberal university, and the effect it has on academics and their well-

being. The increasing pressure to publish and perform, compounded by factors such as

individualization, insecure job situations, audit culture, and the intensification and exten-

sification of work has highlighted and normalized insecurity, stress, anxiety, and shame

(Gill, 2010). It is telling that the following quote about the feelings of inadequacy and

shame of academics also adequately summarizes the student experiences we have just

analysed:

These feelings, these affective embodied experiences, occupy a strange position in relation to

questions of secrecy and silence. They are at once ordinary and every day, yet at the same

time remain largely secret and silenced in the public spaces of the academy. (Gill, 2010,p.229)

The blurring of audiences in a networked public, combined with self-deprecating

humour to add flexible interpretability, makes memes an appealing way of articulating

10 K. ASK AN D C. ABID IN

common, yet silenced, aspects of everyday life. As such, SP Memes may be understood as a

safe way of expressing and sharing negative emotions about student living.

One of the reasons SP Memes appears as a safe venue to express potentially shameful

experiences is because they are framed as relatable. SP Meme admins frequently introduce

posts with comments like ‘All the time’, ‘Every weekend’,or‘Currently me’ (usually

accompanied by an appropriate emoji). By giving clear instructions to users to identify

with the situation or emotion depicted in the meme, as opposed to ridiculing the content,

they simultaneously show that such experiences are not unique and that it is ok to share in

them and commiserate together. Because of this explicit framing, we should understand

relatability not as something inherent in the posts or the community, but as the result of

explicit practices of sociality. Furthermore, the use of SP Memes becomes a form of bound-

ary work that results in a collective SP Memes identity, as it tells stories about ‘us’ and what

‘we’ relate to. However, this shared identity expressed through memes has its limitations.

Whereas the ‘we’ in SP Memes appear to be quite general, depicting and speaking to

students who, to some degree or another, feel like they are failing, it is in other ways

quite specific. Of the many student issues depicted as SP Memes, any problem related

to structural inequalities is conspicuously missing. In great contrast to our media watch

where issues of sexism and racism were prominent, SP Memes depict a student life

world characterized as free of issues related to gender, sexuality, race, or ability. By render-

ing these voices and issues invisible, the narrative implies, at best, that issues of discrimi-

nation are outside the genre constraints of SP Memes, and at worst, that issues of social

inequality are unimportant or irrelevant for the average student. Either way, the shared

student identity is built on a discourse where it is acceptable for students to complain

about being stressed, but not about being sexually harassed or racially profiled. A range

of problems faced by students because of structural inequality is rendered invisible and

outside the collective, and implied ‘normal’, student experience. Consequently, the meme-

tic expression that for some students provide a space and means to speak of issues that is

difficult to address, might serve to further marginalize others.

Memes have great potential to subvert dominant discourse and critique those in power.

Examples of this include how users added new subtitles to Hitler’s emotional breakdown

in the World War 2 movie Der Untergang to point out heretical behaviour and media spin

among politicians and companies (Silva & Garcia, 2012), and how memes were used in the

2016 US Presidential election in attempts to delegitimize the candidates (Ross & Rivers,

2017). At the same time memes may a force for consolidation of norms and exclusion

of marginalized groups. Even though many memes employ racist symbolism and stereo-

types, critique is frequently dismissed because they are ‘just jokes’. Memes then become

ways to perform discourses that deny structural racism while simultaneously mocking

people of colour (InJeong, 2016). Analyses of ‘It Gets Better’ meme, aimed at preventing

gay teen suicide, demonstrate how an attempt to create more openness and inclusion,

amplified already privileged voices (Gal et al., 2015). Similarly, our own analysis shows

how white, able-bodied, middle-class students are given further visibility and prominence

through the meme discourse, evidencing that not all racialized bodies are granted equal

visibility and politics in the visual culture of the internet (Nakamura, 2008)

The one student issue (beyond mental health as already discussed) where our data from

media watch and memefied discourse overlapped was money, or rather lack thereof. The

rising debt associated with higher education and insecure job market is clearly of concern

INFORMATION, COMMUNICATION & SOCIETY 11

to both the public and to students. However, also in this case the lack of differentiation of

student identities hides how issues of debt, employability and social capital is also affected

by gender, race, class, and ability. Paying attention to such differentiating categories might

not be necessary in the construction of a meme-based collective student identity, but it

limits its potential to address issues from all students – and thus how accurately the mem-

efied public can describe the lifeworld of students.

Student problem memes: competitive onedownmanship and the need to

support student life

Laughter fosters group identity (Terrion & Ashforth, 2002). Within the community of SP

Memes in particular, the self-deprecating humour that has generated feelings of competi-

tive onedownmanship where students strive to ironically outdo each other in performing

and conveying self-deprecating inferiority, failure, and struggles in other to gather the

most relatability, sympathy, attention, and engagement with other students. We argue

that competitive onedownmanship has arisen in opposition to the normative attention

economy of self-celebratory social media posts, and emerges as an anti-thesis to prestige

on social media. It is an alternative meme ecology hinged upon self-debasement, and an

inverted hierarchy of social capital where students who feel they are unable to succeed in

higher education can instead acquire a different form of social status by competitive

memeing. In addition to catharsis and community building for struggling students, SP

Memes has emerged as a shadow economy to the normative higher education system,

where instead of academic achievement and a healthy lifestyle, students instead assign

value to the linguistic acrobatics of memeing, practising honesty through humour, disclos-

ure through deprecation, and relatability through rhetoric.

In this sense, we may also understand the memes as forms of emotional or affective

labour where the liking and sharing of memes are ways to transform lived pain into rela-

table and humorous (and therefore palatable) struggles (Kanai, 2017). As this takes place

on Facebook where socio-material scripts direct users to self-branding and quantification

of worth (Van Dijck, 2013), we may also interpret this as a form of ‘feeling rules’ where one

is expected to have the right feelings as the right time (Kanai, 2017). Humour is used to

increase relatability by adding flexibility, and allows students a degree of plausible denia-

bility should their meme repertoires ever be rigorously interrogated or intruded upon by

an unwelcomed authority.

Having expounded on the value and importance of digital shadow economies such as

SP Memes, as researchers of internet culture and educators of digital literacies, we want to

emphasize the importance of learning digital, youth, and student literacies in order to con-

scientiously access and understand student discourses in the appropriate context. After all,

proclaiming an intentionally exaggerated account through memes to attempt virality is not

quite the same as joking about depression among close friends in a large group chat as

revelry, or disclosing personal struggles to a guidance counsellor in person to seek help

and intervention. Each setting solicits a different vocabulary, fosters a different affect,

and assumes a different audience, thus reminding us that platform vernaculars (Gibbs,

Meese, Arnold, Nansen, & Cater, 2015), community norms (García-Rapp & Roca-

Cuberes, 2017), and tacit knowledge (Polanyi, 1958) are all crucial to understand the stu-

dent experience.

12 K. ASK AN D C. ABID IN

We have analysed the SP Memes as memefied discourses of student lives to investigate

how they frame and describe higher education and the student experience. Overall, higher

education was positioned as important and necessary, while the student experience

described as interchangeable with mental and emotional distress. At first, it was conflicting

that the high value placed on higher education was contrasted with the miserable experi-

ence of the education system. However, they appear to be intimately linked. It is exactly

because higher education is seen as so vital to future success that so much misery is tacitly

accepted along the way. Through a close reading of SP Memes, our paper offers a register to

extrapolate personal struggles to the failing of institutional structures, thus translating black

humour for educators to improve youth wellbeing and mental health in the digital age.

The analysis shows how memes articulate the lived experienced covered under the

heading ‘student health crisis’, how humour is integral in creating relatability and virility,

and finally how student problems are framed as individual failings while underplaying sys-

temic inadequacies and issues. The range of issues that SP Memes have addressed is how-

ever limited by never addressing social inequalities, and might thus serve to further

marginalize minority or vulnerable students.

While digital spaces and repositories such as SP Memes provide valuable avenues and

stimulants for students to construct a safe and supportive environment to air their woes

and manage hardship through humour, the implicit messages of their struggles is worrying

and warrants care and attention from educators, as well as action and dedicated resources

from higher education systems. User-generated digital artefacts such as SP Memes should

thus be treated not as mere internet frivolity but as valuable and insightful discourse on

young people’s personal experiences. After all, SP Memes serves as an effective but only

transient panacea for student struggles, and while humour and solidarity may briefly

lift one’s spirits, it cannot feed the hungry, claim justice for the discriminated, or right

the internalized shame, blame, helplessness, and mental stress that current and future gen-

erations of students undergo en masse.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Kristine Ask (PhD) is an associate professor of Science and Technology Studies at NTNU. She

researches human–technology relationships, with a focus on emergent practices, ways of knowing

and processes of inclusion and exclusion in online communities. A particular research interest lies

in internet culture dismissed as being too trivial for serious analysis. She is the co-founder of Nordic

Journal of Science and Technology Studies, and writes for the award winning blog Spillpikene and

can be reached at @kristineask [e-mail: kristine.ask@ntnu.no].

Crystal Abidin is a socio-cultural anthropologist who focuses on vernacular internet cultures, par-

ticularly young people’s relationships with internet celebrity, self-curation, and vulnerability. Her

primary research is on Influencers, and she has recently written about the virality of young children

on social media, young people’s expression of grief on the internet. Crystal is Postdoctoral Fellow in

Media Management and Transformation Centre (MMTC) at Jönköping University, supported by

Handelsrådet (Swedish Retail and Wholesale Development Council), and Adjunct Researcher with

the Centre for Culture and Technology (CCAT) at Curtin University. Reach her at wishcrys.com or

@wishcrys [e-mail: [email protected]m].

INFORMATION, COMMUNICATION & SOCIETY 13

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