“Damn I Didn’t Know Y’all Was Sad? I Thought It Was Just Memes”: Irony, Memes and Risk in Internet Depression Culture

Depression memes are a widespread phenomenon across all social media platforms. To get your hit of depression memes, you can go to any number of pages on Facebook, the subreddit “2me4meirl”, where the posts that are “too real” for more mainstream subreddits go, but nevertheless counting over one million subscribers or, on Instagram, and find innumerable accounts dedicated to “sad memes”, many with tens to hundreds of thousands of followers. In a recent study, depression memes were found to be responsible for 35 per cent of the content researchers analysed in the “#depressed” hashtag on Instagram (McCosker and Gerrard). As a subculture, it is one that has truly embraced the polyvocality of memes, allowing many voices to speak at once through their lack of fixed meaning (Milner). In depression memes, polyvocality allows the user to identify with any number of anxieties affectively represented by the memes without being authentically tied to them, under the guise of irony. Therefore, depression memes find themselves being used in a myriad of ways that do not refer to a stable structure of meaning. This allows me to problematise their roles as both masks and intimate texts within an ironic meme culture.Drawing on traditional readings of irony such as Wayne C. Booth but also contemporary approaches to authenticity, mask cultures and meme culture (de Zeeuw; Tuters), this article situates depression memes specifically within neoliberal regimes of feeling, manifested both in online practices of authenticity and the subject of value (Skeggs and Yuill) and in discourses of resilience and accountability surrounding mental health (Fullagar et al.; James; McCosker). It argues that an internet depression culture based on the principles of dissimulation serves both the purpose of protection from recuperation by dominant narratives but paradoxically creates an ambiguity that generates that risk. In this way, I speak to current anxieties surrounding memes, including ambiguity, irony, and identity formation.Internet Depression Culture Intrinsic to their nature as memes, depression memes can be found in a variety of spaces, formats and platforms. The ones below (Figure 1) circulate on mainstream social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram through accounts dedicated to “sadposting” or the sharing of mental illness memes. They refer to overwhelming feelings of anxiety, a lack of will to live and a desire to recover. In their recent study on hashtagging depression on Instagram, McCosker and Gerrard found memes to be responsible for a wide range of content in the “depressed” hashtag on the platform. They argue that the use of the hashtag “depressed” is primarily as a “memetic device, often with a sense of irreverence, subversiveness and pathos, but in an effort to use the connective power of the popular tag to gain attention and Likes” (McCosker ; . Bottom row: ; ; .Indeed, meme culture depends both on the notion that certain forms of content can be relied on to “gain attention and likes” and increase a user’s social capital, but can also be interpreted as intimate and private forms of expression. The popularity of depression memes is a testament to this principle, but at the heart of this culture is a usage of irony that remains ambiguous and undefined. Whether these texts can be found to reflect genuine feelings of relatability is complex, but ultimately irrelevant. As Burton remarks on the culture of Kek, “sociologically speaking”, the sharing of these memes still constitutes a cultural engagement. Therefore, what I refer to as internet depression culture must be understood not as an attitude of self-presentation, but an inter-affective network that relies on precarious and overwhelmingly ironic objects whose authenticities as intimate texts are dependent on volatile and unstable structures of meaning.Wayne C. Booth’s A Rhetoric of Irony tells us that for an expression to be understood as ironic, their meaning needs to be reconstructed by the reader and intended by the author. The reader must therefore draw from the cultural and historical context of the expression to reconstruct covert meaning that the author intended. The inferential process draws from the context of the expression to give meaning to irony. Online, the cultural context in which depression memes have risen to popularity is precisely that which gives them their reason for being. To understand this, we need to realise that, for the last decade, the symptoms that depression memes cultivate have been lying dormant under the tyranny of happiness era of social media (Freitas). I tie this notion to the doctrine of authenticity behind the identity imperative of social media platforms like Facebook (Van Dijck), and contrast it to the forms of subjectivisation anonymous or pseudonym-based cultures on platforms like 4chan embody. Within this dialectic, memes have arisen as the logic of the Internet, and irony as their social contract (Tuters; Burton). New forms of sociality that manifest within this culture are necessarily ambiguous and risk-filled ones, and need to be explored.From the Happiness Effect to a New Sensibility In The Happiness Effect, Donna Freitas investigated social media usage in young adults by surveying over 800 college students about the relationship between social media and their emotional well-being. Her results allowed her to coin the term “happiness effect”, when: “young people feel so pressured to post happy things on social media”. She writes: “most of what everyone sees on social media from their peers are happy things; as a result, they often feel inferior because they aren’t actually happy all of the time” (14). Feelings of inadequacy result when users interpret what other users post to be authentically felt, despite themselves feeling “pressured” to post a certain type of content, one they do not resonate with but fabricate for the purpose of posting. Indeed, the authenticity imperative behind identity-based social media is what defines our relationship to it.Identity-based platforms like Facebook rely on allowing the user to create an identity on their site, but demand from users that the platform be used for “‘expressing who they are’, implying that users do not “perform” their identity on Facebook; they are the selves they portray on Facebook” (Kant 34). As always, this must be situated within the commercial logic behind the seemingly “free” and “public” service the platform offers. Multiplicity and having “multiple identities” (van Dijck) does not cooperate with Facebook’s platform logic because it does not produce valuable legible data which conforms to “normative, regulatory and commercially viable frameworks” (Kant 35). As Skeggs and Yuill note, the contemporary neo-liberal imperative to perform and authorize one’s value in public is more likely to produce a curated persona rather than the “authentic” self demanded by Facebook (380). The happiness effect manifests this. Despite not being legitimate, an identity must be curated to fit in with the other performed personas on the platforms, which are taken as authentic.To many, the irony that makes depression memes such as those in Figure 1 work is in their subversion of the happiness effect and the authenticity imperative. The meaning to be reconstructed in a depression meme consists in peeling back the layer that demands from us to act as the best, happiest, version of ourselves online. Simply put, it unmasks the actual authentic self behind the curated one. Therefore, the self made visible by partaking, sharing or liking depression memes is not necessarily the best one, but, fundamentally, it is a more authentic one. Indeed, it seemed that, in the early phase of its life, users were enamoured with depression memes because it released them from the burden of identity management. What emerged in this phase of the depression memes movement was the perception of a new sensibility based on a more authentic intimacy than had ever been associated with memes. Press coverage of the topic continued to celebrate the emancipatory potential of depression memes, citing the movement as reflective of a new, more sentimental public made possible by the internet (Roffman).As has been argued before by McCosker, the forms of digital intimacy that render personalised distress visible are ones entrenched in visibility and authenticity, pillars of the face culture of Facebook. Comments on memes or reviews of depression meme pages continuously cited relatability and visibility as their reason for identification with the page. Users felt that these memes allowed them to be seen online, with their mental illness, and feel intimately connected to other viewers; “it feels good to know that other people go through the same thing as me” (Figure 2). Though it is a form of public performance, the intimacy generated here feels inherently private because it relies on unravelling certain structures of meaning. This is a skill that, users imply, can only be attained by having experienced the feelings evoked in the depression memes. In these comments, intimacy is a form of identity performance, and a discourse of accountability underpins one of authenticity. Irony, though present, is quickly reconstructed and explained away into more stable structures of