ABOUT - Social Distancing in a world of Memes

The Story Behind This Project
Heidi A Campbell, July 2020
A Rationale and Observation

This project documents the dominant stories told about social distancing and how the practice is understood and represented through popular internet memes emerging during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic. In March 2020 social distancing was a concept new to many, who were introduced to this idea often through news reports and media coverage in the early days of the 2020 global COVID-19 pandemic.

Over the past few months, we see that social distancing has not only become a popular public health management strategy but a symbolic discourse of sorts. People have attached a variety of social, cultural, and even religious meanings to it. This project explores one arena where this symbolic discourse was created and acted out, through internet memes.
The Backstory: "Why Study Memes?"
Since early-March, I have been collecting and sharing internet memes on a variety of themes related to the Corona pandemic through a Facebook group I created called “Holy Pandemic! Encouragement & Memes.” I noted that humor was often used as a tool by others and myself, to cope with the stress and anxiety created by the uncertainty of what was happening and how best to address and combat the Coronavirus in public space.

Around mid-March, about a half dozen Facebook groups had emerged online that focused on memes about the COVID-19 pandemic. However, these groups featured many memes with crude references and adult-themes. So I decided to create my own Facebook group focused on light-hearted, family-friendly memes about the pandemic to distract me while being temporarily quarantined in Germany. I invited 80 of my friends from Facebook to join the group. Four weeks later Holy Pandemic! has grown to over 900+ members due to friends sharing these memes online with their social networks, with over 400 memes that have been posted on these groups.

The group is currently 1500+ members with members from all over the world who continue to share playful, sarcastic, and ironic memes about the global pandemic some 6 months on. What started as a way for me to personally process and cope with being quarantined, has now become a space of communal sharing and playful discussions about the pandemic.
Visit "Holy Pandemic!"
WHAT MEMES REVEAL
Social distancing is a prominent theme in many of the memes shared. Their interpretation of what it means to social distances raises interesting and provocative questions about how people understand care, community, and social responsibility in these times. By studying internet memes that have circulated online from March-June 2020 and the stories they tell about this practice reveal some of the common ways people define and debate understandings of events around this global pandemic.

I believe collecting and unpacking these memes here allows for a creative way to identify people’s public anxieties and emotional narratives surrounding social distancing practices. It also shows how internet memes can be succinct and poignant storyteller about our shared assumptions about people and society during these uncertain times.
Meme Image Gallery

Home

The Story Behind This ProjectHeidi A Campbell, July 2020

The Backstory: "Why Study Memes?"

WHAT MEMES REVEAL

The Story Behind This Project
Heidi A Campbell, July 2020