MPCA 2019 TIPS: Teaching Ideas for Popular Culture Studies Turner Ledgerwood
You Keep Using that Meme; I Don’t Think it Means What you Think it
Means: Using Memes to Teach Rhetorical Analysis
Kathleen M. Turner Ledgerwood
Turner8kathleen@gmail.com / @PopCultureDr
Recommended Courses: first-year composition, speech, rhetoric, social media
Rationale: Since memes surround us every day and play an increasingly important role in
rhetorical strategies used to influence people, this is a great entry point to help students think
analytically and critically about the memes that bombard them on social media every day. As a
means of entering into visual and verbal analysis, memes can be a really great way to introduce
analysis and rhetorical analysis to students.
Goals and Objectives:
By completing this activity, students should be able to:
1) Analyze a meme image without words.
2) Analyze the verbal messages on memes with the same image.
3) Think about how the verbal and visual unity of memes work together rhetorically to send a
message.
Instructions:
This activity can be completed in 50 minutes
Preparation and Materials Needed:
● Find some memes (knowyourmeme.com is a great resource)
● Three different colors of paper with one small (about 1/5 to 1/6 of a page), one medium
(about 1/4 of a page), and one large size (about 1/3 of a page)
o alternatively, have students draw a shape at the top of each and make their own
smaller pieces of paper from a single sheet of paper, instead of colored paper.
● Students, writing utensils
Implementing the Activity:
I like to run through this whole sequence together as a class, before splitting students into groups
to have them work on a different set of memes and meme images.
1. I often start this discussion by pulling up Google Trends (trends.google.com) and typing
in the word memes and setting the date range for 2004-present. This is a good time to talk
about the rise of memes in social media.
2. Break students into smaller groups and hand them a meme image without text.
MPCA 2019 TIPS: Teaching Ideas for Popular Culture Studies Turner Ledgerwood
3. Have students begin by looking at a meme image without any words. Ask the students to
think about what this image means to them. Have them read and analyze elements of the
image.
o What is present in the image?
o What colors are used in the image?
o If people are involved, what do their body language and facial expressions say to
you?
o What does this image say to you?
o How does it send this message?
Please note that if you are using popular memes, there is the possibility that students may
already be familiar with the image and how it is used, they can still participate in this
session, just ask them not to say the things that are typically printed on the image yet.
4. Have students record their answers to the above questions.
5. Now, hand them a meme that matches their image. And one set of the three different
sizes and colors of paper.
6. On the first and smallest piece of paper, have them write down briefly what the meme
says and shows in the image in their own words. This should be a very brief description
of the meme.
7. Then on the second piece of paper, the middle size, have them write down details for the
image and explain what details contribute to the message. This is the brief summary of
their meme.
8. On the third and largest piece of paper, students will need to analyze and explain how
these elements come together to pass on a message and what their thoughts are about how
that original image has been coopted for the meme’s intended message. Remind students
that this is the biggest part of their job. They need to delve deep into the image to figure
out how it sends its message and really analyze the verbal and visual rhetoric.
Discussion Questions/Other Information:
● I often have students share their memes and what they wrote with the rest of the class.
● Afterwards, ask students to think about the memes they looked at in class today and to try
to think about the following.
o What role do memes really play in society?
o How do memes spread compared to simple verbal posts?
o Do they help people? Hinder them?
o Can memes with hate rhetoric potentially cause harm?
o Can memes bring people together? Separate people from each other?
Debriefing:
● If I am doing this just before an essay, I make sure to talk about how these three pieces of
paper could form the beginning to a body paragraph. And I remind them that analysis is
the big part of their work, so it needs the most room in their essays.
● If I am introducing rhetorical analysis, I will talk with them more about visual rhetoric
and verbal rhetoric and how the two are combined in the memes.
Adding a Twist: Ways to Adapt this Teaching Activity:
● I’ve also used a similar activity with political cartoons using the three pieces of paper
with students.
● I find this especially helpful before an analytical essay assignment so students can
practice analysis.
MPCA 2019 TIPS: Teaching Ideas for Popular Culture Studies Turner Ledgerwood
● You could also extend this activity to talk about the role of social media in our society.
The references I’ve listed below are great for an extension of this into social media and
memes and their impact on society.
● I’ve also used the following video to extend the discussion of memes and copyright law
and intellectual property
o Wagner, Amy. “Article 13: Banning Memes & Cultural Expression (9.1).”
Article 13: Banning Memes & Cultural Expression (9.1), 6 Sept. 2019,
jumpplus.net/issue-9-1/article-13-banning-memes-cultural-expression-9-1/.
References
Coman, Alin, and William Hirst. “Cognition through a Social Network: The Propagation of
Induced Forgetting and Practice Effects.” Journal of Experimental Psychology: General,
vol. 141, no. 2, May 2012, pp. 321–336. EBSCOhost,
search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eric&AN=EJ992328&site=ehost-live.
Eyal, Nir and Ryan Hoover. Hooked: How to Build Habit Forming Products. Penguin, 2014.
Gal, Noam, Limor Shifman, and Zohar Kampf. "“It Gets Better”: Internet memes and the
construction of collective identity." New media & society 18.8 (2016): 1698-1714.
Ferrara, Emilio, and Zeyao Yang. "Quantifying the effect of sentiment on information diffusion
in social media." PeerJ Computer Science 1 (2015): e26.
Green, Joshua, and Sasha Issenberg. “Inside the Trump Bunker, With Days to
Go.” Bloomberg.com, Bloomberg, 27 Oct. 2016,
www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-10-27/inside-the-trump-bunker-with-12-days-
to-go.
Jane, Emma A. "‘Dude… stop the spread’: antagonism, agonism, and# manspreading on social
media." International Journal of Cultural Studies 20.5 (2017): 459-475.
Johnson, Eliana. “Trump Campaign Turns to 'Psychographic' Data Firm Used by Cruz.” National
Review, National Review, 8 Aug. 2016, www.nationalreview.com/2016/08/trump-
campaigns-data-firm-partner-cambridge-analytica-worked-cruz/.
Kien, Grant. "Media memes and prosumerist ethics: Notes toward a theoretical examination of
memetic audience behavior." Cultural Studies? Critical Methodologies 13.6 (2013): 554-
561.
Lissack, Michael R. “The Redefinition of Memes: Ascribing Meaning to an Empty Cliché.”
Emergence, vol. 5, no. 3, Sept. 2003, pp. 48–65. EBSCOhost,
doi:10.1207/s15327000em0503_6.
Miller, Daniel, et al. How the world changed social media. Vol. 1. UCL press, 2016.
Murrow, Gail B. and Richard Murrow. “A Hypothetical Neurological Association between
Dehumanization and Human Rights Abuses.” J. Law & BIOSCI. (2015.)
http://jlb.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2015/06/08/jlb.lsv015.full
OSEP Center on Positive Behavioral Interventions, et al. "Applying positive behavior support and
functional behavioral assessment in schools." Journal of positive behavior
interventions 2.3 (2000): 131-143.
Quattrociocchi, Walter, Guido Caldarelli, and Antonio Scala. "Opinion dynamics on interacting
networks: media competition and social influence." Scientific reports 4 (2014): 4938.
Roginsky, Alexandra B. and Alexander Tsesis.“Hate Speech, Volition, and Neurology.” Journal
of Law and the Biosciences (April 2016): 174–177, https://doi.org/10.1093/jlb/lsv058
Scott, Mark, and Melissa Eddy. “Facebook Runs Up Against German Hate Speech Laws.” The
New York Times, The New York Times, 28 Nov. 2016,
www.nytimes.com/2016/11/28/technology/facebook-germany-hate-speech-fake-
news.html?_r=0.
MPCA 2019 TIPS: Teaching Ideas for Popular Culture Studies Turner Ledgerwood
Susarla, Anjana, Jeong-Ha Oh, and Yong Tan. "Influentials, imitables, or susceptibles? Virality
and word-of-mouth conversations in online social networks." Journal of Management
Information Systems 33.1 (2016): 139-170.
Weng, Lilian, and Filippo Menczer. "Topicality and impact in social media: diverse messages,
focused messengers." PloS one 10.2 (2015): e0118410.
Woollacott, Emma. “After LinkedIn Ban, Russia Warns Facebook And Twitter.” Forbes, Forbes
Magazine, 11 Nov. 2016, www.forbes.com/sites/emmawoollacott/2016/11/11/after-
linkedin-ban-russia-warns-facebook-and-twitter/#7bf9aa0498e3.
Zappavigna, Michele. Discourse of Twitter and social media: How we use language to create
affiliation on the web. Vol. 6. A&C Black, 2012.
Sources for hateful memes
One shadowy person or a group using the name “Matthew Desmond Kerry” controls all these
meme web sites—and probably more…
This is a link to an article about this one person’s name who is used for all of these sites.
http://whiskeyandthemorningafter.blogspot.com/2012/10/the-truth-about-matthew-
desmond-and.html
Known websites:
www.beingliberal.org
www.addictinginfo.org
www.freewoodpost.com
www.ifyouonlynews.com
www.reverbpress.com
www.liberalamerica.org
www.occupydemocrats.com
www.leftwingnation.rocks
www.egbertowillies.com
www.americannewsx.com
These are several Facebook pages filled with Memes targeting a group of people. And often the
comments on these memes have interesting discussion points if you want to expand the
discussion in class about memes.
https://www.facebook.com/GirlDuJour
https://www.facebook.com/OccupyDemocrats
https://www.facebook.com/republicansareidiots
https://www.facebook.com/Republicansareidiots1
https://www.facebook.com/beingliberal.org
https://www.facebook.com/LiberalAndProudOfIt
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Americans-Against-Bobby-Franklin-By-
AddictingInfoORG
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Americans-Against-Martin-Harty-By-AddictingInfoOrg
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Michele-Bachmann-Needs-To-Read-A-History-Book-
By-AddictingInfoorg
https://www.facebook.com/opinionatedlib
https://www.facebook.com/LiberalAndProudOfIt
https://www.facebook.com/AmericansAgainstMittRomney
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Proud-to-be-a-Filthy-Liberal-Scum
https://www.facebook.com/LiberalAndProudOfIt
