CDCS Symposium: Reframing Leisure, Humor, and Play in Global Digital Culture

CDCS Symposium: Reframing Leisure, Humor, and Play in Global Digital Culture

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About the Event

This symposium brings together scholars of digital culture to consider global perspectives on the changing nature of leisure, humor, and play in the digital age. Speakers will examine the blurring boundaries between leisure and work through notions like “fan labor,” the broadening of “digital play” outside of its typical framing in early childhood development to varieties of online play among all age groups, and the ramifications of viral memes and online humor for political and social landscapes worldwide. Finally, this symposium explores how marginalized communities engage in digital leisure spaces in ways that impact existing power structures, as well as digital leisure practices outside of Global North contexts.

Schedule

Friday, April 25, 2025

Annenberg School for Communication

9:00-10:00am-Registration and Breakfast

The Forum

10:00-10:15am-Welcome and Introductory Remarks

Room 109

• Sarah Banet-Weiser (University of Pennsylvania)
• Guobin Yang (University of Pennsylvania)

10:15-11:45pm-Panel 1: Private Spaces and Microcommunities of Play and Leisure

Room 109

Moderator: Lucy March (University of Pennsylvania)

• Sueen Marie (Noh) Kelsey (North Park University) - Spoofing and Socializing: A Case Study of a Pokémon GO Community
• Ryan Milner (College of Charleston) - Memetic Microcultures: Studying Private Places of Online Humor and Play
• Jess Maddox (The University of Alabama) - TikTok as Television: Rethinking Entertainment and Fan Cultures in The Creator

11:45-1:00pm-Lunch

The Plaza

1:00-2:30pm-Panel 2: Humor, Memes, and Identity

Room 109

Moderator: Devo Probol  (University of Pennsylvania)

• Lori Morimoto (University of Virginia) - Short-form Humor as Transcultural Vernacular
• Carolyn Biltoft (Geneva Graduate Institute) - The Joke in the Machine: Bergson, Freud and the Comedic as Psycho-Social Cryptogram
• Zari Taylor (New York University) - "You Think You Just Fell Out of a Coconut Tree?”: Kamala Harris, Controlling Images, and Political Memes

2:30-2:45pm-Coffee break

The Forum

2:45-4:15pm-Panel 3: Work, Labor, and Power in the Digital Play Economy

Room 109

Moderator: Ran Wang (University of Pennsylvania)

• Adrienne Shaw (Temple University) - Working Hard for Play
• Sulafa Zidani (Northwestern University) - Temporal Play and Power in Digital Culture
• Qian Huang (University of Groningen) - Cautious Labor in Digital Leisure Practices

4:15 - 4:30pm-Closing Remarks

Room 109

Guobin Yang (University of Pennsylvania)

4:30 - 6pm-Post Symposium Reception

The Plaza

Program details

Panel 1: Private Spaces and Microcommunities of Play and Leisure

Moderator: Lucy March

Sueen Marie (Noh) Kelsey - “Spoofing and Socializing: A Case Study of a Pokémon GO Community” 

Pokémon GO is a location-based, augmented reality (AR) mobile game launched by Niantic on July 6, 2016. The game quickly became a global sensation and one of the “fastest mobile games to reach 10 million downloads worldwide” in December 2016, according to Statista. More than eight years after its launch, the game is still popular globally and generates hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue. Its greatest impact, however, does not reside in its financial success or longevity. What is more noteworthy is its integration into everyday lives and its catalytic role for social/cultural change. This case study closely examined a Pokémon GO community on Discord, an instant messaging and social platform. The members are physically located in the great Chicago area and interact via the private online group. Through participant observation, this study explores a wide variety of intersections technologically engineered by the game’s design and culturally negotiated by its members. The gaming community thus intersects 1) gender, race, and class, 2) local and global terrain, 3) virtual and physical spaces, 4) serious and casual gamers, and 5) leisure/playfulness and work/responsibility. These characteristics establish a basis to form a ludic community (ludic is originated from the Latin word ludus meaning “play”). As Frans Mäyrä argues, Pokémon GO has cultivated “the ludic mindset and playful practices” among its players, which may facilitate “more complex skill sets and cultural practices” and eventually usher them into “the Ludic Society” (p. 47)

Ryan Milner - “Memetic Microcultures: Studying Private Places of Online Humor and Play” 

The internet is bigger than ever, more public than ever, and more consequential than ever. But that consequence is also fueled by the small, the private, and the interpersonal. Reddit, Twitter, TikTok, and YouTube have rightly received significant attention as sites of online humor and play, but what’s happening in family groupchats, locked Discord servers, and community WhatsApp feeds is just as important to the changing nature of leisure in the digital age. New projects, new methods, and new questions are needed to better understand the big impact of small online spaces

Jess Maddox - “TikTok as Television: Rethinking Entertainment and Fan Cultures in The Creator”

Economy Online “drama,” or viral events that captivate niche communities to large social media discourse, have become commonplace. This talk explores how online drama has come to be understood through the language of television. Drawing on Bolter and Grusin’s work on remediation, I discuss TikTok’s interface and in-app culture both contribute to discussing TikTok in terms of television. However, this brings longstanding ethical issues in film and television, specifically reality television, to the fore on social media. This work presents the following questions: What does it mean to view real people as characters online? What happens to representation and empathy for others when we view real people as fictional? 

Panel 2: Humor, Memes, and Identity

Moderator: Devo Probol

Lori Morimoto - “Short-form Humor as Transcultural Vernacular” 

In the midst of an increasingly precarious social media landscape, in which the cohesion of imagined communities seems all too vulnerable to the whims of oligarchs, short-form video has remained remarkably resilient. Perhaps by virtue of their shareability, reels and TikToks transgress not only platform, but also national and cultural, borders as “pieces of cultural information that pass along from person to person, but gradually scale into a shared social phenomenon” (Shifman 2014: 18, original emphasis). Among these, videos whose humor is predicated on the ‘unspeakable bliss’ (Barthes 1975) of transcultural recognition constitutes, I argue, a potent vernacular. Through their reinterpretation, adaptation, and critique of cultural texts made familiar through the distribution networks of transnational media corporations, short-form humor videos may engender membership in an affinity-based culture (Shifman 2014: 169) through which, in turn, a sense of transcultural kinship becomes possible.

Carolyn Biltoft - “The Joke in the Machine: Bergson, Freud and the Comedic as Psycho-Social Cryptogram” 

This paper reviews and compares the theories of humor of Henri Bergson (Laughter, 1900) and Sigmund Freud (The Joke and its Relation to the Unconscious, 1905). While each figure had a different view of human consciousness, each also wrote about how humor served as a kind of “key” for decoding not only the contents of an individual mind, but also how minds interact with, navigate and are bound to social mores, values and expectations. In other words, laughing at certain things, and not at others betrayed a range of personal instincts and social conditions.  Bergson even more than Freud also demonstrated the ways in which forms of technology interacted with, or formed an interface between mind and world. He saw as particularly “funny”  instances in which humans behaved as machines, from the hyper ritualized gestures and speech of the “expert,” to the jerks and starts of a human body caught in an automated task. Thus, by looking carefully at Bergson’s theory of humor compared to Freuds in the nineteenth century context of early cinema and mechanical production, we have a way of re-thinking our own contexts of digital media and the coming of AI. For, we know that humor changes with time and context. The paper then ends by reflecting on our own digitally mediated forms of humor, and how they parallel current debates on the nature of consciousness, and in particular, how the joke can or can’t help us distinguishes “artificial” from “natural” intelligence. 

Zari Taylor - “You Think You Just Fell Out of a Coconut Tree?”: Kamala Harris, Controlling Images, and Political Memes”

This presentation analyzes the online discourse around Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign and the viral coconut tree meme within the context of gender and race representations, particularly controlling images of Black women. Black feminist scholars have used controlling images as an analytical tool and ideological framework to understand the justified subjugation of Black women across aspects of society. This includes popular culture, education, film and media, and politics. I frame the online discourse around Harris, particularly her embracing of and construction within memes and humor as a subversion of the controlling images that would call into question her legitimacy as a candidate. Particularly, I offer the “Coconut Tree” meme as a case study of racist and sexist attempts to undermine her that she has turned into a way to reach potential voters on social media platforms such as TikTok which relies on what has been called “memetic culture.” That she was able to reclaim the meme demonstrates a prowess of internet culture given the increased relationship between social media and politics, but the election results demonstrates that the subjugation of Black women within both politics and society more broadly remains.

Panel 3: Work, Labor, and Power in the Digital Play Economy

Moderator: Ran Wang

Adrienne Shaw - “Working Hard for Play”

Game scholars have often taken the approach of disproving negative claims about digital games and proving positive claims, in efforts to reform games images in popular discourse. Claims that gamers are anti-social beget scholarly articles about how social gamers really are. Assumptions about the negative impact of games lead to research showing that games do not lead to violence. Discourses around games being a waste of time emboldens researchers to demonstrate that games lead to learning and other positive outcomes. Moral panics around game addiction drives research showing addiction is not a proper lens for understanding “excessive” game play. At the same time, gamification efforts imply that the built-in compulsions of games could be redeployed to make work more fun. As an answer to the symposium’s call to “reframe leisure, humor, and play in global digital culture,” this talk will explore whether how work, rather than fun and play, might be a better way to understand games space within broader media culture. It will argue that thinking about games as work may help us make sense of the seemingly contradictory, and yet indelible, popular discourses around digital games.

Sulafa Zidani - “Temporal Play and Power in Digital Culture”

The timing of digital culture, and memes as part of that culture, can feel ephemeral and fast-paced; all of a sudden children are eating tide pods, and next thing you know, they have moved on to something else. Yet, sometimes meme makers can also take you back, making you watch a song from the 1980s through trends like rickrolling. Such examples complicate ideas about internet culture's temporality. Is the timing of digital culture indeed as transient as it seems? How do meme makers decide when to create a meme or participate in a trend? What makes the right timing for creating and posting a meme? I explore these questions through 14 in-depth interviews with global meme makers and analysis of 287 multilinguistic memes. I build on Judy Wajcman's argument that social norms, technology, and time all affect one another mutually, and Ludmila Lupinacci work on platforms' orchestration of "real-time," and put them in conversation with Limor Shifman's work on memes as connectors of the personal and the political. I find that meme makers use temporal play to practice their digital cultural memory, creating or reviving memes to intervene in events around them. A meme's seeming disappearance, then, is not necessarily its end, and a trend's rise is not necessarily always a sign of novelty. Rather, digital creators have complex ideas about timing which inform their decision as to what to post and when, and the temporal play memes are involved in has implications on global digital culture.

Qian Huang - “Cautious Labor in Digital Leisure Practices”

The production and consumption of social media content have become integral to digital leisure practices. Such interactions generate digital visibility, which can lead to harm, including online shaming, doxing, and harassment, particularly when perceived violations of social norms occur. This risk is exacerbated by platform algorithms that amplify controversial content to drive engagement. With the intention to curb such harm, Chinese platforms empower users to report harmful speech and behaviors, often resulting in banning or de-platforming of the accused. These dynamics significantly affect users' digital leisure experiences. I introduce the concept of "cautious labor" to describe the physical, cognitive, and emotional work users undertake to navigate these challenges, aiming to underscore how digital platforms profit from users’ leisure activities in the economy and politics of visibility. This exploration draws on my long-term digital ethnography and autoethnography on Xiaohongshu, illustrated with example practices such as post disclaimers, using dog-head emojis, adopting specific hashtags, pre-emptive blocking, wordplays, and guaren [tagging and shaming].

Speakers’ and Moderators’ Bios

Sarah Banet-Weiser is the Walter H. Annenberg Dean of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania and is Lauren Berlant Professor of Communication. In addition, she is a research professor at the University of Southern California's Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism and the founding director of the Center for Collaborative Communication at the Annenberg Schools. Her teaching and research interests include gender in the media, identity, citizenship and cultural politics, consumer culture and popular media, race and the media and intersectional feminism. Committed to intellectual and activist conversations that explore how global media politics are exercised, expressed and perpetuated in different cultural contexts, she has authored or edited eight books, including Believability: Sexual Violence, Media, and the Politics of Doubt (Polity Press, 2023), the award-winning Authentic M: The Politics of Ambivalence in a Brand Culture (NYU Press, 2012), Empowered: Popular Feminism and Popular Misogyny (Duke, 2018) and dozens of peer-reviewed articles, book chapters and essays.

Carolyn Biltoft was trained in the world/global intellectual history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Princeton, 2010) Methodologically, her work fuses the tools of intellectual history, media history and theory, cultural studies and critical theory. She is interested in how the changing material and immaterial infrastructures of globalization emerged, developed and altered finance, politics and culturally local and globally. Her first book, A Violent Peace: Truth, Media and Power at the League of Nations (University of Chicago Press, 2021) demonstrates how the League of Nations constituted a global stage for the production and contestation of a wide range of truth claims in an era of mass media, propaganda and totalitarian political projects. Her other work has also focused on the concepts of modern myths and the question of belief and disbelief in an era of disinformation. 

Her current project is entitled, The Trouble with Avatars: Henri Bergson’s Digital Premonitions. The book claims that the French philosopher Henri Bergson’s theories of the self and consciousness can be interpreted as having anticipated many of the humanistic dilemmas of our own digital age. The book also offers a Bergsonion critique of AI and a scientific defense of humanistic inquiry.

Dr. Qian Huang is an assistant professor in digital cultures at the Centre for Media and Journalism Studies at University of Groningen. She obtained her Ph.D. degree at Erasmus University Rotterdam in 2022 and was a visiting research fellow at the University of Oxford China Centre in 2024. Her research expertise includes digital vigilantism, online visibility, participatory surveillance, digital cultures, and creative labor. She co-edited Introducing Vigilant Audience (Open Book Publishers) and co-authored Digital Media, Denunciation and Shaming: The Court of Public Opinion (Routledge). Her work has also appeared in peer-reviewed journals including Social Media + Society, International Journal of Cultural Studies, and International Journal of Communication.

Dr. Sueen Marie (Noh) Kelsey is an Associate Professor in the Communication Arts Department at North Park University. Dr. Kelsey’s research interests revolve around digital and social media, globalization, virtual fan communities, popular culture, gender issues, and identity negotiation in local and global contexts. She has published book chapters and academic journal articles and has been invited to give talks on her research nationally and globally. Most recently, she has explored cultural globalization via digital and social media in the wake of the Korean Wave (Hallyu) phenomenon. Originally a South Korean native, she enjoys watching Korean TV shows and movies to keep in touch with her cultural roots and to get inspiration for her research projects. She is also an avid Pokémon GO (Team Instinct) player.

Jessica Maddox (Ph.D., University of Georgia) is an associate professor of digital media at the University of Alabama. Her work focuses on content creators, influencers, and social media platforms. She is the author of The Internet is for Cats: How Animal Images Shape our Digital Lives (Rutgers University, 2023) and of the forthcoming book, Anatomy of an Internet Scandal: Content Creators and the Politics of Going Viral (University of California Press).

Lucy March is a scholar of Internet cultures, popular music, and identity. She earned her PhD in Media and Communication from Temple University. The questions that drive her research include how representations of gender, racial, and sexual identity manifest in popular media, and how cultural production and circulation in online environments can reveal and reflect structural inequalities. Lucy’s work is highly interdisciplinary, and centers on the ways that people experience culture online through qualitative methodologies, including digital ethnography.

Lucy’s dissertation, which she is currently developing into a book manuscript, explores the phenomenon of digitally based popular music scenes, or “Internet music.” The project interrogates dynamics of cultural borrowing and hybridity through textual and discourse analyses informed by a deep immersion in Internet music spaces. This project also explores how the dynamics of the online platforms shape the characteristics of Internet music scenes, including their tendency toward anonymity, low barrier to entry, and blurred lines between producers and consumers. Ultimately, this project shows how social and cultural identities and differences come to be constructed and articulated in online environments, and how individuals are increasingly using popular media to make sense of their relationships with digital technologies. Lucy is also interested in the intersection of popular music and meme cultures, digital celebrity, and how platform dynamics impact these phenomena.

Her work has been published in Popular Communication, Television and New Media, and others, and has been presented at the annual conferences for the International Communication Association, the International Association for the Study of Popular Music, and the Cultural Studies Association (for which she also serves on the Governing Board). Lucy also has expertise in East Asian popular culture and music, and has lived and studied in Beijing and Taiwan.

Ryan M. Milner is a professor in the Department of Communication at the College of Charleston and serves as its chair. He studies how internet culture matters socially, politically, and culturally. Ryan is the author and co-author of multiple books, including The World Made Meme, The Ambivalent Internet, and Share Better and Stress Less, a guide to life online for middle-grades audiences. He also regularly contributes commentary to public outlets and less polished thoughts to Bluesky @rmmilner.

Lori Morimoto researches transnational/transcultural fandoms and transnational media co-production and distribution. Her work has been published in East Asian Journal of Popular Culture, Transformative Works and Cultures, Participations, Asian Cinema, and Mechademia: Second Arc. She teaches courses in media fandom, East Asian film and media, television, and videographic criticism.

Devo Probol is a Penn Presidential Ph.D. Fellow, a Fontaine Fellow, and a Joint Doctoral Student in the Annenberg School for Communication and  the Department of Sociology. She presently holds two doctoral fellowship positions at Penn, the first within the Center on Digital Culture and Society (CDCS), where she leads and facilitates the Digital Activism & Data Justice (DADJ) research group, and the second in the Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication (CARCG), where she collaborates on the “Turning Points” project that reexamines global internet histories occurring during the long 1990s, as a means to unsettle Western-dominated, Anglophone north-Atlantic narratives of internet and media history. 

Devo’s research explores the role that collective identity formation plays in both the emergence and sustainment of social movements originating online. She’s also interested in the social, political, and cultural consequences of collective identity construction in digital cultures and how these collectives generally create political opportunities. Recently, her work has expanded to include performance studies, where she considers the role that endurance plays in these two areas of research inquiry. 

Devo acquired her M.S. in Strategic Communication from Columbia University in 2020 and earned a B.A. in History and Religious Studies from Arizona State University in 2016. Upon graduating, she received the highest honor awarded by the university – the Dean’s Medal Award for the School of Historical, Philosophical, and Religious Studies.

Adrienne Shaw is an Associate Professor in Temple University’s Department of Media Studies and Production, a member of the Lew Klein College of Media and Communication graduate faculty, and an affiliate member of the Gender, Sexuality, and Women Studies program. Since 2022, she has served on the Interactive/Immersive Media Board of Jurors for the Peabody Awards, and has been a judge for the Gayming Magazine Awards since 2021. She also is a member of GLAAD’s Gaming Advisory Council and a Higher Education Video Game Alliance Fellow.

Shaw is the founder of the LGBTQ Game Archive and was co-curator of Rainbow Arcade, the world’s first exhibit of LGBTQ game history (Dec 2018-May 2019 in Berlin, Germany) and co-author of the exhibit catalog. She is also author of Gaming at the Edge: Sexuality and Gender at the Margins of Gamer Culture (winner of the 2016 International Communication Association's Popular Communications Division's Book Award). She has co-edited three anthologies: Queer Game Studies (2017), Queer Technologies: Affordances, Affect, Ambivalence (2017), and Interventions: Communication Research and Practice (2018), as well as a special issue in the Journal of Communication on Open Research practices (2021, Vol 71 Issue 5). Shaw was the host and program chair for the 2021 (online) and 2023 (Philadelphia) Association of Internet Researcher’s Annual Conferences. She is also a co-editor of New York University Press's Critical Cultural Communication book series and serves on editorial/review boards for several journals.

Zari Taylor is a Faculty Fellow and Assistant Professor at New York University (NYU). As a critical cultural and media studies scholar, her research is interested in the relationship between identity, technology, beauty, celebrity culture, and the creator economy. She has published numerous academic and public-facing work on the interplay of digital and popular culture, an intersection that increasingly reflects dynamics of power, identity, politics, and value within society, as well as how marginalized groups operate within and against historical and ongoing oppressions in these contexts. She is affiliated with the TikTok Cultures Research Network (TCRN), the Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life (CITAP), and the Content Creator Scholar Network (CCSN).

Ran Wang is a joint doctoral student at the Annenberg School for Communication and the Department of Sociology. Her research focuses on the interaction between censorship and digital culture, particularly cultural production. Using the Chinese fandom as the case study, her work unpacks how the state, platforms, and users collectively create and sustain digital censorship as a dynamic negotiation of power rather than a top-down monolithic oppression-resistance model. By analyzing how users understand their everyday interactions with censorship, she aims to acknowledge individual agency and value the alternative knowledge produced within communities about opaque censorship. Beyond the topic of censorship, Ran is also interested in the connection between fandom cultural production and other cultural phenomenon including cyber-nationalism and digital feminism.

Guobin Yang is the Grace Lee Boggs Professor of Communication and Sociology at the Annenberg School for Communication and Department of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is Director of the Center on Digital Culture and Society and Deputy Director of the Center for the Study of Contemporary China. He is the author of The Power of the Internet in China: Citizen Activism Online (2009), The Red Guard Generation and Political Activism in China (2016), and The Wuhan Lockdown (2022). He has edited or co-edited seven books, including, most recently, Pandemic Crossings: Digital Technology, Everyday Experience, and Governance in the COVID-19 Crisis (with Bingchun Meng and Elaine Yuan, 2024). His current research focuses on digital activism, civic storytelling, and the digital politics of emotions.

Sulafa Zidani is a writer, speaker, and educator at Northwestern University, where she is an Assistant Professor in Communication Studies. She holds a courtesy appointment with the Middle East and North African Studies Program at Northwestern and is also affiliated with the Institute for Advanced Study in the Global South at Northwest Qatar.

Sulafa is currently working on her first book project called All Your Meme Are Belong Us about how meme creators navigate the changing power dynamics of globalization. Her research has appeared in venues such as: Information, Communication & Society; International Journal of Communication; and Asian Communication Research. She is a co-editor of the forthcoming anthology, The Intersectional Internet II: Power, Politics and Resistance Online.