Bea Glancey

My body work for this project consists of observations of why parts of meme culture have come to light in Gen Z’s generation and the narratives they follow. I portrayed this idea in the form of an A-Z dictionary so my work would be accessible for all generations or people who weren’t or were familiar with memes, and use this publication as piece to reflect on mobile usage and its effects on our human nature. I used the size of a phone for my publication to bring the online world of ones phone into something real that one could reflect upon popular meme culture from a perspective that encouraged in person interaction with media rather than just on a phone as the online world, as found in my research, seems to make more of a negative impact on people than positive. I wanted also for people to recognise how meme was used as a seemingly ironic form of commentary to discuss the issues of the online world as it was so much a part of it furthering my desire to see how this would playout as an in person tangible object rather than on a screen. Perhaps, I wanted to come to the conclusion that coming offline would not change the tangibility of these messages or their value in how we respond to them. It would have a psychologically preferred impact on people to interact with content this way as teens and young adults in the modern world find themselves racking up screen times of 8-10hrs a day on average which has subsequently altered neuro links we make in our brain in social situations and in our attention spans. Overall, I hope my project can help people consider if the memes they are just looking at for passive entertainment value are simply just humorous, or are they far more telling about the way in which a generation has become thanks to the move towards the digital side to the modern world. I also hope parents could use this A-Z as a way to also understand this young generation being the first to grow up in an online world and the effects it could have on their children.