Do the ends justify the memes? Exploring the relationship between youth, internet memes, and digital citizenship

Tulloch, Bonnie J.

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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/123063 Copy

Description

Title

Do the ends justify the memes? Exploring the relationship between youth, internet memes, and digital citizenship

Author(s)

Tulloch, Bonnie J.

Issue Date

2023-09

Keyword(s)

• Digital Citizenship
• Education
• Information Literacy
• Information Needs
• Information Practice
• Information Use
• Internet Memes
• Literacy
• Specific Populations
• Youth

Abstract

Internet memes are an extremely popular form of online communication that are often disregarded as “trivial” due to their association with humor, emotion, and youth (Shifman, 2014, p. 15; Shifman, 2019). While these digital texts (e.g., image macros, tweets, hashtags, short videos, GIFs, etc.) play a significant role in the circulation of information (e.g., Milner, 2016), there is little empirical research on how they figure into young people’s daily information practices. To address this issue, I collaborated with a secondary school teacher, co-designing a class unit that invited students to examine the relationship between memes and digital citizenship. Adopting an ethnographic approach (Markham, 2017) inspired by several design-based research methodologies, I collected a variety of data from 21 youth participants (e.g., field notes/photos, assignments), performing 15 semi-structured student interviews and 2 semi-structured teacher interviews. These materials, which I analyzed using narrative and visual analysis (Frank, 2012; Rose, 2016), included student projects on various meme-related topics (e.g., free speech, dark humor, misinformation, etc.). My findings showcase the significance of humor to students’ conceptualization of memetic storytelling and the joyful nature of the personal experiences they associated with it. Laughter, I argue, impacted their negotiations of the values memes represent and shaped the information they provided. Through its conceptualization of the informational role humor plays in young people’s meme engagements, this research contributes to present knowledge of how memes factor into civic discourse, offering valuable insight to educators, librarians, and guardians who engage youth in information literacy and citizenship education.

Series/Report Name or Number

Proceedings of the ALISE Annual Conference, 2023

Type of Resource

text

Language

eng

Handle URL

https://hdl.handle.net/2142/123063

DOI

https://doi.org/10.21900/j.alise.2023.1326

Copyright and License Information

• Copyright 2023 Bonnie J. Tulloch
• This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/).

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