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, J Vis Cult 13(3):340–358, 56) is spreading. The present research aims at the understanding how the online functions and practices of humor signification are featured considering linguistic and visual aspects. In particular it has a twofold goals: a) analyzing which differences emerged in terms of functions and emotions between humor in PhD Memes on Facebook and Instagram by means of ‘diatextual’ analysis; b) performing a fine-grained qualitative analysis about rethorical aspects based on linguistic and visual elements of Phd Memes in order to contribute to the field of humor automatic detection. To satisfy these purposes, 70 memes about the PhD on Facebook and Instagram were collected and, then, analyzed in two levels: (1) the quanti-qualitative, aiming to detect the semi-automatic emotional involvement, expression of humor in “meme discourses”; (2) the semiotic analysis of meme images. The results highlight first of all typical cases of incongruences in automatic and diatextual analysis in coding the effective emotions; furthermore they also show the peculiar function of humor, mediated by communication through memes, which is mainly a kind of ‘emotional sharing’ consisting in the complaint against a complex and precarious career path; in addition some differences in relation to the type of social media (Facebook or Instagram) are reported.