Yes, my class researched memes for an assignment.

Whenever I teach academic writing, I am always conscious of different types of English--whether it is academic, "informal," or other dialects of English. The students I teach come from different backgrounds linguistically. This summer I have some students who speak 3+ languages, and there are some students who only know English. There are also some students who are well-versed in academic language, and others who never had the opportunity to learn these skills. Keeping this in mind, I decided to discuss a pretty common dialect of English that most students are familiar with: internet linguistics.

For that day, we read Tia Baherl's "Your Ability to Can Even: A Defense of Internet Linguistics" for our discussion. Baherl explains that the interesting part of internet linguistics is "when the new grammatical structures and phrases express something that conventional language simply cannot." The example the author uses, the phrase "I can't even," is a phrase that has a much deeper and lengthy meaning (see the article for how the author translates the phrase) compared to the short phrase. Internet language, Baherl argues, requires "participation and imagination."

My students were receptive to the idea of internet linguistics (even when I challenged them), and they drew two important conclusions in our discussion. One was that internet linguistics and technological literacy should be taught early on in school. One student explained how she didn't know what "T" meant (according to what this student said and I've read in Sweet Tea: Black Gay Men of the South, it means "gossip" or even "truth") and she used Urban Dictionary to help her understand. Another student pointed out that internet linguistics is just as important as learning academic English today because of how much the U.S. in general uses the internet. Building on that point, one student proposed a course in middle or high school that focuses on this type of English. Overall, students agreed that knowing how to navigate and use internet linguistics would be useful to their personal and professional lives. The second conclusion we drew diverged slightly from internet linguistics. Naturally, our class discussed social media websites, where much of internet linguistics is created and disseminated, but we also analyzed social media websites and how they have changed. For instance, my students and I talked how Facebook was incredibly popular when it first debuted, and now, as my sister says, "It's normally for old people." Our class agreed with but also examined my sister's statement, and we came up with an idea as to why this might be true: Facebook is now commercialized. It creates ads just for you. If your feed is anything like mine, it's full of posts about working from home with companies like It Works and the like. These posts typically attempt to get others to buy products and/or to join that company. Perhaps the commercialization drives younger people away, we thought. But then again, maybe not. More popular social media with younger people, such as Instagram, has ads as well. My class last semester also discussed the popularity of Instagram and Snapchat, and that class agreed that there was something about social media sites centered around images, especially images that are temporary. These two important conclusions both show how technology changes communication, and also, as Cynthia Selfe discusses in the 1999 book Technology and Literacy in the Twenty-First Century, technology and economic growth are have the potential to be and are thought of as interdependent.   

Our assignment for the day, which we did before we discussed Baherl, was finding a meme and explaining the meme to the class. One student decided to show a meme that played off song lyrics from the 2012 hit "Call Me Maybe" by Carly Rae Jepsen (see picture below). Like other students, this student explained the meme's origin; however, they also played the Jepsen's song while they presented the meme, and explained that they didn't know what a meme was before our last class. This student's presentation in particular, I believe, contributed to our conclusions that we came up with. Firstly, this student wasn't aware of memes. This further encourages the idea of learning about internet linguistics, especially since many people communicate on the internet through images like memes, including businesses.  According to Randy Hall's article "Do Memes Have a Place in the Professional Business Environment?" memes can "make a statement" about your business. Hypothetically, if you were navigating the internet and saw a meme for the business, it would probably be in your best interest to know how to read that image and understand what the business is about. Secondly, here again, we see how certain aspects of technology are commercialized (businesses using memes). In addition to businesses using memes as a vehicle to promote their product(s), memes disseminate popular culture, such as music and television, and make this song or television show even more popular. Even if the maker of the meme does not intend on popularizing the original song or television show, it may happen anyway. 

My students have a major project where they will have to analyze a music video or commercial later this summer, and this meme project was one step toward getting students to visually (and rhetorically) analyze images and videos. I can't wait for this project because, when I've taught this project in the past, it's been my favorite because students typically come up with genius ideas and analysis. Learning how to visually and rhetorically analyze images in our world today, as my class concluded, is an important language that we must teach sooner rather than later.

Works Cited

Baherl, Tia. "Your Ability to Can Even: A Defense of Internet Linguistics." The Toast, 20 November 2013, http://the-toast.net/2013/11/20/yes-you-can-even/. Accessed 28 May 2017.

Hall, Randy.  "Do Memes Have a Place in the Professional Business Environment?" One World Technology, 7 October 2016, https://www.oneworldtechnology.com/blog/do-memes-have-a-place-in-the-professional-business-environment. Accessed 29 May 2017.

Johnson, E. Patrick. Sweet Tea: Black Gay Men of the South. The University of North Carolina Press, 2008.

Selfe, Cynthia. Technology and Literacy in the 21st Century: The Importance of Paying Attention. Southern Illinois University Press, 1999.