skip to main content
10.1145/3411763.3451581acmconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication PageschiConference Proceedingsconference-collections
poster

MEMEography: Understanding Users Through Internet Memes

Published: 08 May 2021 Publication History

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a method we call MEMEography for HCI research to understand people and their interactional contexts from the remixed internet memes they post in internet communities. While memes might not be the most obvious choice of a research subject, they allow us to investigate unfamiliar domains even when access to the field is beyond reach. We describe an initial approach of data selection, collection, prioritization and analysis. In addition, we demonstrate the kinds of insights we can gain through MEMEographies by analyzing a corpus of memes in the intensive care unit (ICU) context posted 2020 on Instagram. ICU memes open up insights into the environment, work practices, challenges, emotions and familiarized us with ICU practitioners’ language, even though access to an actual ICU was completely impossible during 2020.

References

[1]
Mohamad Alameddine, Katie Dainty, Raisa Deber, and William Sibbald. 2008. The intensive care unit work environment: Current challenges and recommendations for the future. Journal of critical care 24 (08 2008), 243–8. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jcrc.2008.03.038
[2]
Tawfiq Ammari, Sarita Schoenebeck, and Daniel M. Romero. 2018. Pseudonymous Parents: Comparing Parenting Roles and Identities on the Mommit and Daddit Subreddits. In Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Montreal QC, Canada) (CHI ’18). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1145/3173574.3174063
[3]
Amid Ayobi, Tobias Sonne, Paul Marshall, and Anna L. Cox. 2018. Flexible and Mindful Self-Tracking: Design Implications from Paper Bullet Journals. In Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Montreal QC, Canada) (CHI ’18). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1145/3173574.3173602
[4]
Virginia Braun and Victoria Clarke. 2006. Using thematic analysis in psychology. Qualitative Research in Psychology 3 (01 2006), 77–101. https://doi.org/10.1191/1478088706qp063oa
[5]
Carlos Mauricio Castano Diaz. 2013. Defining and characterizing the concept of Internet Meme. CES Psicologa 6 (12 2013), 82 – 104. http://www.scielo.org.co/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S2011-30802013000200007&nrm=iso
[6]
Susan Folkman and Richard S. Lazarus. 1988. Coping as a mediator of emotion.Journal of personality and social psychology 54 3 (1988), 466–75.
[7]
Jean H. French. 2017. Image-based memes as sentiment predictors. In 2017 International Conference on Information Society (i-Society). IEEE, New York, NY, USA, 80–85. https://doi.org/10.23919/i-Society.2017.8354676
[8]
Timothy R. Graeff. 2005. Response Bias. In Encyclopedia of Social Measurement, Kimberly Kempf-Leonard (Ed.). Elsevier, New York, 411–418. https://doi.org/10.1016/B0-12-369398-5/00037-2
[9]
Annika Kaltenhauser, Verena Rheinstädter, Andreas Butz, and Dieter P. Wallach. 2020. ”You Have to Piece the Puzzle Together”: Implications for Designing Decision Support in Intensive Care. Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1509–1522. https://doi.org/10.1145/3357236.3395436
[10]
Robert V. Kozinets. 2015. Netnography. In The international encyclopedia of digital communication and society. Wiley Online Library, Hoboken, NJ, USA, 1–8.
[11]
Robert V. Kozinets. 2020. Netnography: The Essential Guide to Qualitative Social Media Research. SAGE Publications, London, England.
[12]
Jonathan Lazar, Jinjuan Heidi Feng, and Harry Hochheiser. 2017. Research methods in human-computer interaction. Morgan Kaufmann, San Francisco, CA, USA.
[13]
Effie Le Moignan, Shaun Lawson, Duncan A. Rowland, Jamie Mahoney, and Pam Briggs. 2017. Has Instagram Fundamentally Altered the ’Family Snapshot’?. In Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Denver, Colorado, USA) (CHI ’17). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 4935–4947. https://doi.org/10.1145/3025453.3025928
[14]
Anton J. Nederhof. 1985. Methods of coping with social desirability bias: A review.European Journal of Social Psychology 15 (1985), 263–280.
[15]
Andreas Osterroth. 2015. Das Internet-Meme als Sprache-Bild-Text. Image 22(2015), 26–46.
[16]
Elin Rønby Pedersen and Greg Wolff. 2008. Paper interface to electronic medical records: a case of usage-driven technology appropriation. In Proceedings of the 7th ACM conference on Designing interactive systems. Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 40–49.
[17]
Praful Ravi, Vincent Trinh, Maxine Sun, Jesse Sammon, Shyam Sukumar, Mai-Kim Gervais, Shahrokh Shariat, Simon Kim, Keith Kowalczyk, Jim Hu, Mani Menon, Pierre Karakiewicz, and Quoc-Dien Trinh. 2014. Is there any evidence of a ”July effect” in patients undergoing major cancer surgery?Canadian journal of surgery. Journal canadien de chirurgie 57 (04 2014), 82–8. https://doi.org/10.1503/cjs.002713
[18]
Limor Shifman. 2013. Memes in Digital Culture. The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, USA.
[19]
Limor Shifman. 2014. The Cultural Logic of Photo-Based Meme Genres. Journal of Visual Culture 13, 3 (2014), 340–358. https://doi.org/10.1177/1470412914546577 arXiv:https://doi.org/10.1177/1470412914546577
[20]
Statista. 2018. Number of monthly active Instagram users from January 2013 to June 2018.https://www.statista.com/statistics/253577/number-of-monthly-active-instagram-users/
[21]
Statista. 2020. Number of monthly active Facebook users worldwide as of 3rd quarter 2020.https://www.statista.com/statistics/264810/number-of-monthly-active-facebook-users-worldwide/
[22]
Melissa Wanzer, Melanie Booth-Butterfield, and Steve Booth-Butterfield. 2005. “If We Didn’t Use Humor, We’d Cry”: Humorous Coping Communication in Health Care Settings. Journal of health communication 10 (04 2005), 105–25. https://doi.org/10.1080/10810730590915092
[23]
Shlomo Zilberstein. 1996. Using anytime algorithms in intelligent systems. AI magazine 17, 3 (1996), 73–73.

Cited By

View all
  • (2024)Playing with Perspectives and Unveiling the Autoethnographic Kaleidoscope in HCI – A Literature Review of AutoethnographiesProceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3642355(1-20)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
  • (2021)Exploring Internet Meme Activity during COVID-19 Lockdown Using Artificial Intelligence TechniquesApplied Artificial Intelligence10.1080/08839514.2021.201421836:1Online publication date: 29-Dec-2021

Recommendations

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences
CHI EA '21: Extended Abstracts of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
May 2021
2965 pages
ISBN:9781450380959
DOI:10.1145/3411763
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

Sponsors

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 08 May 2021

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Check for updates

Author Tags

  1. ethnographic study
  2. intensive care medicine
  3. intensive care unit
  4. internet memes

Qualifiers

  • Poster
  • Research
  • Refereed limited

Funding Sources

Conference

CHI '21
Sponsor:

Acceptance Rates

Overall Acceptance Rate 6,164 of 23,696 submissions, 26%

Upcoming Conference

CHI 2025
ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
April 26 - May 1, 2025
Yokohama , Japan

Contributors

Other Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

  • Downloads (Last 12 months)88
  • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)10
Reflects downloads up to 20 Feb 2025

Other Metrics

Citations

Cited By

View all
  • (2024)Playing with Perspectives and Unveiling the Autoethnographic Kaleidoscope in HCI – A Literature Review of AutoethnographiesProceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3642355(1-20)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
  • (2021)Exploring Internet Meme Activity during COVID-19 Lockdown Using Artificial Intelligence TechniquesApplied Artificial Intelligence10.1080/08839514.2021.201421836:1Online publication date: 29-Dec-2021

View Options

Login options

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

PDF

eReader

View online with eReader.

eReader

HTML Format

View this article in HTML Format.

HTML Format

Figures

Tables

Media

Share

Share

Share this Publication link

Share on social media