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Paper Number
1790
Paper Type
short
Description
Analyzing symbols shared within online communities (OCs) is essential to better understand communities’ expressed cultures. To evaluate how OCs differ in their expressed culture and analyze the effects of community rules (CR) and moderation policies (MP), we examined meme sharing of subreddit and interaction communities on Reddit. To detect memes shared within subreddits automatically, we trained a convolutional neural network and applied a feature-matching algorithm to create meme networks with components consisting of visually similar memes. Based on each community’s component composition, we created community-specific meme languages that we compared across subreddit and interaction communities. Our results show that memes can be aggregated to characteristic meme languages linked to individual OCs; yet MP and CR do not impact the homogeneity of shared memes. Based on these findings, we plan to analyze dynamically the relationship between memes and OCs, examining memes’ textual content and diving deeper into users’ individual meme languages.
Recommended Citation
Henn, Theresa and Posegga, Oliver, "What Do They Meme? Exploring the Role of Memes as Cultural Symbols of Online Communities" (2023). ICIS 2023 Proceedings. 8.
https://aisel.aisnet.org/icis2023/socmedia_digcollab/socmedia_digcollab/8
What Do They Meme? Exploring the Role of Memes as Cultural Symbols of Online Communities
Analyzing symbols shared within online communities (OCs) is essential to better understand communities’ expressed cultures. To evaluate how OCs differ in their expressed culture and analyze the effects of community rules (CR) and moderation policies (MP), we examined meme sharing of subreddit and interaction communities on Reddit. To detect memes shared within subreddits automatically, we trained a convolutional neural network and applied a feature-matching algorithm to create meme networks with components consisting of visually similar memes. Based on each community’s component composition, we created community-specific meme languages that we compared across subreddit and interaction communities. Our results show that memes can be aggregated to characteristic meme languages linked to individual OCs; yet MP and CR do not impact the homogeneity of shared memes. Based on these findings, we plan to analyze dynamically the relationship between memes and OCs, examining memes’ textual content and diving deeper into users’ individual meme languages.
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15-SocialMedia