Surviving The Ph.D.: The Use Of Memetic Creativity in Informal Networks

Despite the general understanding of a Ph.D. being a yellow brick road to an academic career, the actual life of a Ph.D. student ends up, in many cases, being a struggle for survival between the sense of loneliness and the constant feeling of uncertainty about the future. To put up a united front and to share failures and successes about their Ph.D., students seem to have adopted a connective strategy by using the memetic language to build online communities in which to find support among peers. Memes, thanks to their engaging affordances and the ability to encourage individual participation, allow Ph.D. students to express themselves using vernacular creativity and to connect their everyday experiences in a collective knowledge. Using as a case study the Facebook page «High Impact Ph.D. Memes», this work investigates the use of memes in the narration of the Ph.D. and how these digital artifacts contribute to creating online communities where peers can share their experience and learn from each other how to «survive» the Ph.D. The conclusion of this work argues that memes, used as a form of digital creativity, can foster individual participation and transform it into a connective action to create networks of peers that share common values and understandings using the memification of their everyday experience.