Impact Memes: PhDs Humor(e)

The era of User Generated Content (USG) on Social Networks has invested different areas of human experience, including one of the highest levels of education, i.e. the PhD grade. As regards the opportunity to "imitate" a virtual content, the phenomenon of Memes (Shifman, 2014) is spreading. The research has two goals: to demonstrate how the practices of signification of humor on the doctorate are modified with the "memes factory" and how artificial intelligence is able to detect a complex rhetorical strategy such as humor. To satisfy these purposes, 39 memes about the PhD were collected and, then, analyzed in two levels: the quanti-qualitative, aiming to detect the semi-automatic emotional involvement, expression of humor in “meme discourses”; the semiotic analysis of meme images to understand if it is possible to classify PhD humor. The analysis show a further function of humor mediated by communication through memes, that is the complaint against a complex and precarious career path.