Glǎveanu Vlad Petre, de Saint Laurent Constance
Department of Psychology and Counselling, Webster University Geneva, Bellevue, Switzerland.
Centre for the Science of Learning and Technology, University of Bergen, Bergen, Norway.
Front Psychol. 2021 Mar 8;12:569987. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2021.569987. eCollection 2021.
The current pandemic and the measures taken to address it, on a global scale, are unprecedented. Times of crisis call for creative solutions, and these are not reduced to the work of scientists or politicians. In everyday life, both in online and offline spaces, people use their creativity to make sense of the current situation, to cope with it, and to learn its lessons. Social media is a privileged space for mundane and participative creativity through the production and sharing of coronavirus Internet memes. In this article, we examine the creativity of such memes from a dedicated Reddit community. We ask, in particular, what makes a coronavirus meme creative and what this creativity tells us about the pandemic and popular understandings of it. To answer these questions, we use a triangulation of quantitative and qualitative methods by having 480 memes coded by three social media users for surprise, meaningfulness, elaboration, humor, and creativity and qualitatively analyzing those memes that score highly on each dimension. An interesting finding concerns the importance of elaboration and humor for the evaluation of creativity in the case of memes, above the more traditional criteria of surprise (proxy for novelty) and meaningfulness (proxy for appropriateness), perhaps a feature unique for Internet spaces. The article ends with reflections on what these findings tell us about creativity on social media more generally and the creative processes involved in the generation and reception of coronavirus memes in particular.
当前的疫情以及全球范围内为应对疫情而采取的措施是前所未有的。危机时刻需要创造性的解决方案，而这些解决方案并不局限于科学家或政治家的工作。在日常生活中，无论是在线上还是线下空间，人们都运用自己的创造力来理解当前形势、应对危机并吸取教训。社交媒体是一个通过制作和分享新冠病毒网络梗图来展现平凡而具参与性创造力的特殊空间。在本文中，我们从一个专门的Reddit社区来审视此类梗图的创造力。我们特别想问，是什么让新冠病毒梗图具有创造性，以及这种创造力能告诉我们关于疫情以及大众对它的理解是什么。为了回答这些问题，我们采用定量和定性方法相结合的方式，让三位社交媒体用户对480个梗图在惊喜度、意义性、精细度、幽默度和创造力方面进行编码，并对在每个维度上得分较高的梗图进行定性分析。一个有趣的发现是，在梗图的创造力评估中，精细度和幽默度比更传统的惊喜度（代表新颖性）和意义性（代表恰当性）标准更为重要，这或许是网络空间独有的一个特征。文章最后反思了这些发现更广泛地告诉我们关于社交媒体上的创造力，特别是关于新冠病毒梗图的产生和接受所涉及的创造性过程。
