Meme Pages for UK Universities

After that extraordinary AoIR 2012 plenary session, the first of the parallel sessions I'll be attending starts with a presentation by Gordon Fletcher on Internet humour memes in UK universities. The genesis for this was a line in The Guardian which asked where memes were the new site of class struggle; Gordon then began to gather up university-related memes pages on Facebook, and identified their popularity.

Most of these pages were single pages related to one university, created by students, and named in a way which clearly spoke to insiders (using popular abbreviations and slang, for example). The majority of these sites had been set up in the space of three or four days around February 2012, interestingly - and Scottish universities' pages started up a day earlier than other UK pages. Generally, there could only be one page per university – where two pages existed, the second tended not to be particularly popular at all.

Gordon examined the use of these pages for five of the universities. What emerged in each case is a kind of psychogeography of the university; the content of the pages was generally created with meme generators, and based on popular Internet meme conventions; for most of the universities, there was insider humour as well as content directed at their traditional rival universities. The bulk of activity happened in the first two or three days after the creation of these pages in February; there is also a recent increase again, around timetabling. (Gordon now takes us through some very entertaining examples, which are impossible to blog.)

This is a representation of local, student and university politics; the memes may be driven by rivalry with other, local institutions, but do bring out the issues – but Facebook is hardly the space to start a revolution.