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

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.

KEYWORDS:

• Meme
• students
• higher education
• collective identity
• networked publics
• humour

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: [email protected]].

Crystal Abidin is a socio-cultural anthropologist who focuses on vernacular internet cultures, particularly 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]].