“I was so happy, and then the paper’s reviews came back”, “Are you familiar with Maleficent? Yes, she’s my supervisor”, “There is no more coffee in the house, it must be deadline time”. The publish or perish imperative, the relationship with the Ph.D. supervisor or the overwhelming feeling of a deadline are just some of the major stumbling blocks that a Ph.D. student must deal with. It is said that “misery loves company” but due to the high mobility and the individualistic structure of the doctorate, that fosters the competition and the work alone, many times it’s hard for Ph.D. students to find a stable group of peers to process with these intimate or stigmatized aspects of their experiences. The informal online communities of Ph.D. students seem to be a collective response - although partial and unstructured - to these needs, constituting safe places in which to find support, exchange opinions or simply share the difficulties inherent to the long process of writing the dissertation. Within these digital groups, the narration of the constitutive aspects of one's experience is often told with the use of memes: transmedia symbolic forms (Shifman 2014) that use individual experience and, tapping into shared popular culture and practices (Knobel and Lankshear 2007), generate a collective knowledge within the online spaces that they are created in. Memes, through the practices of produsage (Bruns 2008) and vernacular creativity (Burgess 2006), stimulate a participatory process that acts on two levels: an individual level, in which each student can share their personal and intimate point of view (Grundlingh 2018) concerning the doctorate, abandoning the academic logic of a self-representation that requires being always impeccable and self-sufficient; and a connective level, in which the ability of memes to trigger the reactions of alike users allow them to build ad hoc communities (Bennett and Segerberg 2013) in which members can discuss even the “dark side” of the Ph.D., such as the impact of the program on the psychophysical and social health of doctoral candidates, the high workloads, or the uncertainty about the future. Using as a case study the Facebook page “High Impact Ph.D. Memes” and its related pages, this research aims to investigate through content analysis how digital creativity contributes to shaping online networks of doctoral students. The analysis examines the role of Facebook’s affordances in enhancing the structural and functional characteristics of memes and the resulting forms of polyvocal public conversation (Milner 2013) that create a collective knowledge. Therefore, the study explores which are the constitutive elements used in the memetic narrative of the Ph.D. and what are the main issues that students face in their doctoral path. Grounding into the logic of participatory culture, the memification of the Ph.D. experience foster forms of digital creativity that promote participation and encourage the creation of a public discussion where peers can share through humorous contents their own experience and learn in an informal environment the best practices on how to “survive” the Ph.D.
Surviving The Ph.D.: The Use Of Memetic Creativity In Informal Networks
Roberta Bracciale
;Junio Aglioti Colombini
2021-01-01
Abstract
“I was so happy, and then the paper’s reviews came back”, “Are you familiar with Maleficent? Yes, she’s my supervisor”, “There is no more coffee in the house, it must be deadline time”. The publish or perish imperative, the relationship with the Ph.D. supervisor or the overwhelming feeling of a deadline are just some of the major stumbling blocks that a Ph.D. student must deal with. It is said that “misery loves company” but due to the high mobility and the individualistic structure of the doctorate, that fosters the competition and the work alone, many times it’s hard for Ph.D. students to find a stable group of peers to process with these intimate or stigmatized aspects of their experiences. The informal online communities of Ph.D. students seem to be a collective response - although partial and unstructured - to these needs, constituting safe places in which to find support, exchange opinions or simply share the difficulties inherent to the long process of writing the dissertation. Within these digital groups, the narration of the constitutive aspects of one's experience is often told with the use of memes: transmedia symbolic forms (Shifman 2014) that use individual experience and, tapping into shared popular culture and practices (Knobel and Lankshear 2007), generate a collective knowledge within the online spaces that they are created in. Memes, through the practices of produsage (Bruns 2008) and vernacular creativity (Burgess 2006), stimulate a participatory process that acts on two levels: an individual level, in which each student can share their personal and intimate point of view (Grundlingh 2018) concerning the doctorate, abandoning the academic logic of a self-representation that requires being always impeccable and self-sufficient; and a connective level, in which the ability of memes to trigger the reactions of alike users allow them to build ad hoc communities (Bennett and Segerberg 2013) in which members can discuss even the “dark side” of the Ph.D., such as the impact of the program on the psychophysical and social health of doctoral candidates, the high workloads, or the uncertainty about the future. Using as a case study the Facebook page “High Impact Ph.D. Memes” and its related pages, this research aims to investigate through content analysis how digital creativity contributes to shaping online networks of doctoral students. The analysis examines the role of Facebook’s affordances in enhancing the structural and functional characteristics of memes and the resulting forms of polyvocal public conversation (Milner 2013) that create a collective knowledge. Therefore, the study explores which are the constitutive elements used in the memetic narrative of the Ph.D. and what are the main issues that students face in their doctoral path. Grounding into the logic of participatory culture, the memification of the Ph.D. experience foster forms of digital creativity that promote participation and encourage the creation of a public discussion where peers can share through humorous contents their own experience and learn in an informal environment the best practices on how to “survive” the Ph.D.I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
