05-19-2020, 07:14 PMhhh81 Wrote:

05-19-2020, 07:01 PMDaftRaincloud Wrote: Using the "just a meme" excuse to attack someone is a cop out and a dismissal of responsibility for your actions and how they can impact others. There's a fine line between memes and attacks and to be fair I wasn't the one that raised the issue in the first place. Putting hurtful text on a funny image doesn't turn that text into a meme on the merit that it's now attached to a funny image.

Actually, there's some really cool scholarship out there on the role of humor and group bonding out there that applies to this. To disconnect from the larger conversation here, that's not to say that hurtful language in meme/joke format is a good or acceptable thing. It does serve an explicit purpose of creating in-group/out-group based on the humor.

So in short, people can find a joke funny, and you might not, and you're BOTH right on the surface.

Douglass, Mirpuri, English, & Yip (2016) is the first example I remember off the top of my head, and then there's something from Nolan Cabrera that's also very interesting iirc