A more systematic analysis of the families’ cohesiveness based on T-Tests for the mean differences between generic attributes within and outside a meme families reaffirmed this tendency. We found significantly more common attributes between meme instances from the same family. In general, each instance shared more attributes with other family members (3.49) than with nonfamily members (2.39), T(18865) = , p < .01. This similarity between instances of the same family is significant in terms of content (T(6534) = , p < .01), participants (T(12755) = , p < .01), and form (T(16379) = 41.2, p < .01).
Yet ,, while looking by themselves within articles, participation, and function characteristics, there were of several parents that have nonsignificant differences between this new mean interior and you will outer preferred properties. This was particularly true toward articles feature. Simply a dozen away from fifty meme family members mutual much more articles functions for the household members. In other words, content functions had been faster cohesive in most meme group. In addition, for the families was posts are found to be far more cohesive, it had been plus far more novel and you may special.
Furthermore, extremely meme parents had men in addition to teenager and younger mature people since their preferred keeps. Other age range, such as the elderly, adults, children, and kids as well as female, celebrities, and particularly creature users was in fact significantly more distinctive to particular meme families. In the end, regarding function, really meme group put simple image with text or movies. Meme group in which function is actually a whole lot more cohesive common remix and you will graphic control and additionally acronyms and wordplay.
Brand new relationship ranging from cohesiveness and you can uniqueness
The cohesiveness of meme families around more unique generic attributes already provided a partial answer to RQ4, regarding the link between cohesiveness and uniqueness in meme families, and a Pearson .jpg)
correlation between the two revealed a very strong and significant positive correlation (r = .911, p < .001). In other words, the more unique the shared attributes within a meme family, the higher the difference between shared attributes within and outside a meme family. When looking at each group of attributes separately, it was mainly the uniqueness of form (r = .870, p < .001) and content (r = .726, p < .001) attributes that positively correlated with family cohesiveness. The uniqueness of participation attributes had a weaker correlation with family cohesiveness (r = .366, p < .01).
Quiddities, concreteness, uniqueness, and you can cohesiveness
In response to the last research question, we found a significant positive correlation between quiddity concreteness and both the cohesiveness (r = .363, p < .01) and uniqueness (r = .431, p < .01) of Internet memes. In other words, a meme family with a more concrete quiddity was also more cohesive and unique in its generic attributes.
In particular, a significant positive correlation was found between the percentage of instances in a meme family sharing a similar object and the cohesiveness (r = .286, p < .05) and uniqueness (r = .349, p < .05) of their content. This suggests that instances of meme families in which the quiddity is a specific object tend also to deal with the same unique themes. Thus, for example, instances of the “Flying Spaghetti Monster” family always included this specific character or object, and many of them also contained references to religion, which is a unique theme in the memetic sphere.
Meme families in which the quiddity is a character, such as “Charlie the Unicorn,” are more cohesive, but also unique in terms of participation. This is typically reflected in a higher percentage of instances containing animal participants. Perhaps less obvious is the negative correlation between action and uniqueness of participation (r = ?.329, p < .05). This means that the participants in meme families in which the main quiddity is an action are not unique, but rather part of the mainstream. Thus, for example, most participants of “Caramelldansen,” “The Evolution of Dance,” or “Planking” are teens or young adults.