Memetic (r)evolution - A momentary trend or the way of the future?
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| Year of publication | 2023 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | The project focuses on the use of memes on social media, their prevalence in conversation and their usage based on the age of the contributors. The main research question it asks is whether the use of memes in computer-mediated discourse is a momentary trend (a revolution in online talk) or whether it exhibits signs of language evolution. A quantitative linguistic study is employed to answer this question within the scope of the project. The subject of the study, the social media platform analyzed, is Facebook, mainly for the fact that its users often include indicators of their age on their profiles. The project then looks at three most popular pages on Facebook and their three most recent posts. With the use of an online software (Exportcomments.com), the top 5000 comments (if available) along with the responses to them were selected and searched for memetic elements. Out of 16 760 comments, the results include analysis of 2837 memetic posts in total, which are then subjected to categorization according to the age group that their posters belong to, based on their provided public profile data. The specific personal data remains anonymous within the study, but the work does demonstrate the distribution of the use of memetic elements by different age groups in the selected posts. The study distributes the comments into four different age groups (Senior, Adult (Working/University), High School and Younger) and an additional group of Unspecified results for the profiles that do not provide enough public information about the user’s approximate age. Based on the quantitative results, the project considers whether the use of memetic elements rises exponentially the lower the approximate age of the user. The most recent demographic studies of Facebook are employed and compared to the quantitative results to surmise whether the result is representative of a language evolution. |
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