I’d love to hear your thoughts, especially from those of you interested in digital culture, media literacy, or online communities.

The piece draws on findings from my recent PhD paper, 'Internet Memes as Stabilisers of Conspiracy Culture: A Cognitive Anthropological Analysis', co-authored with @britdavidson.bsky.social, Tim Hill, and Adam Joinson, and published in Social Media + Society.

I hope you enjoy it! 😄

Please do check it out! 😀

Key contributions:
• Develops a new theoretical framework for understanding memes as cultural representations
• Demonstrates how memes help maintain community cohesion and alleviate tensions in online spaces
• Advances a revised methodology for studying memetic communication

With this, we reveal that in certain contexts, meme usage is less about creative remixing and more about cultural stabilisation.

Through these recurring elements, three core cultural themes emerged and stabilised: Deception, Delusion, and Superiority.

We found that the communities gravitated towards specific memetic templates and characters that aligned with their conspiracist worldview. "NPC Wojak", for instance, became the quintessential representation of the foolish masses.

By adopting a cognitive anthropological approach, we explored how internet memes function as ‘cultural representations’ within online communities, analysing over 500 memes shared in COVID-19-related discussion spaces between 2020-2022.

Hi Jocelyn, could I please be added to this list? I work on social movements in the form of conspiracy movements

I second this! 💞

Oh and @dessibocheva.bsky.social is another colleague we do a lot of our research with, if she could be added to the lists too that would be amazing :)

Thank you so much!

Could I be added to this list please? 😃 I’m a SRA/PhD student who does lots of conspiracy-related research with @darja.bsky.social!