My project is about online disability communities and how memes are used to create rhetoric and foster relatability and understanding. I also want to look into how online crip space and anonymity play a part in these communities. I want to present the information through a digital form, either through a text-image based post much like the posts I’m seeing in my research, or through a video essay, where I would use a more conversation voice in my writing. I would be writing a script instead of an essay.
With some of my research so far, I’ve found out a lot of things I didn’t really consider. A really interesting part of this project that I found out was that there seems to be two spheres of communities in these spaces. There are a lot of posts that are informational, that are more oriented towards non-disabled people, or people who are new to the online community. They could be helpful to newly-disabled people or people who need information on how to support their disabled friends. The second sphere is more focused towards people in the community. It is founded on the basis that the information found in the first sphere is already known fairly in depth. This foundation is used to have more nuanced discussions, share more specific experiences, and where a lot of the memes are found. For instance, the migraine memes use words like, “brain fog” and autism memes discuss “masking” without feeling the need to explain these words because it is expected of the audience to already be familiar with these terms — usually the audience is people within these communities. There is a generalized knowledge based on common experiences that is used to create relatability and quickly convey a lot of rhetoric. It is the context of this rhetoric that allows it to take shape. I wasn’t all that aware of these two spheres, or at least I didn’t really notice them until I was doing research for this project.
The main struggles I’m facing is choosing if I do a video essay or not, and also the social media aspects of this assignment itself. While it is enjoyable to see these online communities, I also find social media really draining and don’t really use it personally. Depending on what app I use, there are drastically different vibes and a lot of posts could be discussing really bad negative experiences. Which is not to take away from the actuality of these experiences, but a lot of apps are arithmetically going to be focusing on the most extreme or polarizing posts, so often it is difficult to find posts about pride without them being touched by negativity. There is also the immediate nature of social media that is to be considered, in-depth discussion could be harder to come across on instagram and twitter, because the format of the apps are limited. Reddit is more likely to have long posts, and things like podcasts and video essays are more in-depth as well.
I’m going to show to memes in class though. If I can.