Search This Blog

Monday, March 15, 2021

Workplace bullying in academia

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workplace_bullying_in_academia

Bullying in academia is a form of workplace bullying which takes places in the institutions of higher education, such as colleges and universities in a wide range of actions. It is believed to be common, although has not received as much attention from researchers as bullying in some other contexts.

Academia is highly competitive and has a well defined hierarchy, with junior staff being particularly vulnerable. Although most universities have policies on workplace bullying, individual campuses develop and implement their own protocols. This often leaves victims with no recourse. Recently, a Non-Profit Organization called "The Academic Parity Movement" has been established in Massachusetts to provide legal and mental advises to the targets of academic bullying.

Academic mobbing is a sophisticated form of bullying where academicians gang up to diminish the intended victim through intimidation, unjustified accusations, humiliation, and general harassment. These behaviors are often invisible to others and difficult to prove. Victims of academic mobbing may suffer from stress, depression and suicidal thoughts, as well as posttraumatic stress disorder.

Workplace bullying

Bullying is the longstanding violence, physical or psychological, conducted by an individual or group and directed against an individual who is not able to defend himself in the actual situation, with a conscious desire to hurt, threaten, or frighten that individual or put him under stress.

Workplace bullying ranges into the following categories.

  • Threat to professional status, such as, public professional humiliation, accusation of lack of effort and belittling.
  • Threat to social status, such as, teasing and name calling.
  • Isolation, such as, withholding information and preventing access to opportunities, such as training workshops, attendance and deadlines.
  • Overwork, such as setting impossible deadlines and making unnecessary disruptions.
  • Destabilization, for example, setting meaningless tasks, not giving credit where credit is due, removal from positions of authority, gaslighting.

Bullying and academic culture

Several aspects of academia lend themselves to the practice and discourage its reporting and mitigation, due to concerns of possible damage to the reputation of the institution. Its leadership is usually drawn from the ranks of faculty, most of whom have not received the management training that could enable an effective response to such situations. There have been cases of tenured professors acting as perpetrators of academic bullying leading to their dismisal. Victims include the increasing number of adjunct professors as well as students, c.f. Bullying of students in higher education.

The generally decentralized nature of academic institutions can make it difficult for victims to seek recourse, and appeals to outside authority have been described as "the kiss of death." Therefore, academics who are subject to bullying in workplace are often cautious about reporting any problems. Social media has recently been used to expose or allege bullying in academia anonymously.

Although tenure and post-tenure review lead to interdepartmental evaluation, and all three culminate in an administrative decision, bullying is commonly a function of administrative input before or during the early stages of intradepartmental review. Recent publications by Nature emphasize the need for improving institutional reporting systems for academic bullying.

Mobbing

Mobbing is endemic at universities because universities are a type of organization that encourages mobbing. Academic victims of bullying may also be particularly conflict-averse.

Kenneth Westhues' study of mobbing in academia found that vulnerability was increased by personal differences such as being a foreigner or of a different sex; by working in a post-modern field such as music or literature; financial pressure; or having an aggressive superior. Other factors included envy, heresy and campus politics.

Morteza Mahmoudi proposed some strategies to address academic bullying.

Manifestations

The bullying in this workplace has been described as somewhat more subtle than usual. Its recipients may be the target of unwanted physical contact, violence, obscene or loud language during meetings, be disparaged among their colleagues in venues they are not aware of, and face difficulties when seeking promotion. It may also be manifested by undue demands for compliance with regulations.

Effects

The kinds of abusive behaviors in academic bullying cause serious and long-lasting effects on both the academic and personal lives of targets and their families. Victims of academic mobbing may suffer from "stress, depression and suicidal thoughts" as well as posttraumatic stress disorder. The psychological scars have been described as potentially worse than with sexual harassment, and they may not heal for many years.

A 2008 study of the topic, conducted on the basis of a survey at a Canadian university, concluded that the practice had several unproductive costs, including increased employee turnover.

Incidence

Similarly to studies in general workplace bullying, incidence varies a lot depending on where and what definition of bullying is used. There is up to one quarter or one third of academics who declare they have been bullied in the past year. This is considerably higher compared to other workplaces, with 10-14% workers declaring having experienced bullying in the past year in the United States, but less than in healthcare, where a studies in 17 Greek hospitals reported that half of the doctors and nurses reported they had experienced bullying. Around 40% say they have witnessed or heard about bullying behaviors happening to someone else. One of the largest studies of bullying in universities, surveying 14,000 higher-education staff over 92 institutions in the United Kingdom, found the rate of bullying varied widely across institutions, from 2% to 19% of the staff at each university reporting being always or often bullied.

In 2008 the United Kingdom's University and College Union released the results of a survey taken among its 9,700 members. 51% of respondents said they had never been bullied, 16.7% that they had occasionally experienced it, and 6.7% that they were "always" or "often" subjected to bullying. The results varied by member institutions, with respondents from the University of East London reporting the highest incidence.

The Times Higher Education commissioned a survey in 2005 and received 843 responses. Over 40% reported they had been bullied, with 33% reporting "unwanted physical contact" and 10% reporting physical violence; about 75% reported they were aware that co-workers had been bullied. The incidence rate found in this survey was higher than that usually found via internal polling (12 to 24 percent).

Author C. K. Gunsalus describes the problem as "low incidence, high severity", analogous to research misconduct. She identifies the aggressors' misuse of the concepts of academic freedom and collegiality as a commonly used strategy.

University bullying policies and processes are open to misuse, however, and the AAUP notes that faculty who dissent on academic governance issues or who complain about workplace inequities may become the target for retaliatory bullying complaints aimed to silence unpopular views.

Bullying of medical students

In a 2005 British study, around 35% of medical students reported having been bullied. Around one in four of the 1,000 students questioned said they had been bullied by a doctor, while one in six had been bullied by a nurse. Manifestations of bullying included:

  • being humiliated by teachers in front of patients
  • been victimised for not having come from a "medical family"
  • being put under pressure to carry out a procedure without supervision.

Recently, the Lancet journal proposed a need for establishment of a global committee on academic behaviour ethics to consider academic bullying reports in a robust, fair, and unbiased manner.

Academic dishonesty

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Academic dishonesty, academic misconduct, academic fraud and academic integrity are related concepts that refer to various actions on the part of students that go against the expected norms of a school, university or other learning institution. Definitions of academic misconduct are usually outlined in institutional policies. Academic dishonesty has been documented in every type of educational setting from elementary school to graduate school. Throughout history this type of dishonesty has been met with varying degrees of penalties.

History

Chinese Examination Cells at the South River School (Nanjiangxue) Nanjing (China). This structure prevents cheating in exams.

Academic dishonesty dates back to the first tests. Scholars note that cheating was prevalent on the Chinese civil service exams thousands of years ago, even when cheating carried the penalty of death for both examinee and examiner. Bribery of examiners was also common, as represented in works such as the Ming-dynasty story collection The Book of Swindles and Qing-dynasty novel Rulin waishi [The Unofficial History of the Scholars].

Standards for citation and referencing began at the end of the 19th century with the emergence of guidance provided by scholarly societies that developed discipline-specific expectations for referencing such as the MLA and the APA. About the same time, scholars began researching issues related to cheating, with some early research dating back to the late 19th century and early 20th centuries, when cheating was identified as a widespread problem at college campuses in the United States.

It has been estimated that as many as two-thirds of students cheated at some point of their college careers at the turn of the 20th century. Fraternities often operated so-called essay banks, where term papers were kept on file and could be resubmitted over and over again by different students, often with the only change being the name on the paper.

The issue of academic dishonesty became more prominent in the latter half of the twentieth century, as universities shifted towards more democratic approaches to admission.

Today

Academic dishonesty does not have a universal definition. Educational institutions in different regions understand and act on academic dishonesty in different ways. Much like many other areas of student affairs, academic integrity also boasts organizations that help students, faculty and staff of postsecondary institutions discuss and understand the values of academic integrity such as the International Centre for Academic Integrity (ICAI). Multiple institutions, such as the University of Waterloo, Queen's University and York University base their culture of academic integrity on ICAI's 6 fundamental values (honesty, trust, respect, fairness, responsibility and courage). The following is not an exhaustive listing of regions.

United States

In the United States, one study has shown that 20% of students started cheating in the first grade. Similarly, other studies reveal that currently in the U.S., 56% of middle school students and 70% of high school students have cheated. A large-scale study in Germany found that 75% of the university students admitted that they conducted at least one of seven types of academic misconduct (such as plagiarism or falsifying data) within the previous six months.

Students are not the only ones to cheat in an academic setting. A study among North Carolina school teachers found that some 35% of respondents said they had witnessed their colleagues cheating in one form or another. The rise of high-stakes testing and the consequences of the results on the teacher is cited as a reason why a teacher might want to inflate the results of their students.

The first scholarly studies in the 1960s of academic dishonesty in higher education found that nationally in the U.S., somewhere between 50 and 70% of college students had cheated at least once. While nationally, these rates of cheating in the U.S. remain stable today, there are large disparities between different schools, depending on the size, selectivity, and anti-cheating policies of the school. Generally, the smaller and more selective the college, the less cheating occurs there. For instance, the number of students who have engaged in academic dishonesty at small elite liberal arts colleges can be as low as 15–20%, while cheating at large public universities can be as high as 75%. Moreover, researchers have found that students who attend a school with an honor code are less likely to cheat than students at schools with other ways of enforcing academic integrity. As for graduate education, a recent study found that 56% of MBA students admitted cheating, along with 54% of graduate students in engineering, 48% in education, and 45% in law.

There is also a great difference in students' perceptions and the reality of their own ethical behavior. In a 2008 survey of 30,000 students in high school carried out by the Josephson Institute for Youth Ethics, 62 percent of students polled said they "copied another's homework two or more times in the past year." Yet, on the same survey, 92 percent said they were "satisfied with their personal ethics and character." Hence, there is generally a discrepancy between actual behavior and self-image of high school students' character.

As more students take courses and assessments online, there is a persistent perception that it is easier to cheat in an online class than a face-to-face course. Moreover, there are online services that offer to prepare any kind of homework of high school and college level and take online tests for students. While administrators are often aware of such websites, they have been unsuccessful in curbing cheating in homework and non-proctored online tests, resorting to a recommendation by the Ohio Mathematics Association to derive at least 80% of the grade of online classes from proctored tests. In addition, colleges and universities are increasingly turning to online proctoring services to oversee tens of thousands of exams per year.

While research on academic dishonesty in other countries is less extensive, anecdotal evidence suggests cheating could be even more common in countries like Japan and the Philippines.

A typology of academic misconduct has been devised by Perry (2010). Perry's typology presents a two dimensional model of academic misconduct with one dimension measuring the degree to which rules are understood and the other dimension measuring how closely these rules are followed. According to the typology only those students who understand the rules but fail to adhere to the rules are classified as 'cheats'.

Australia

In Australia, academic dishonesty is addressed by the Tertiary Education Quality Standards Agency, which is a government agency.

UK

In the UK, the Quality Assurance Agency is responsible for quality assurance in higher education. It has produced several policy and guidance documents for policy makers, educators and the general public.

Canada

In Canada, academic misconduct is handled by individual post-secondary institutions with the help of policies and guidelines published by the university itself, though research into the topic has lagged behind that of other countries. Research has shown that the incidence of academic dishonesty in Canada is similar to that of the United States. While many institutions are guided by ICAI, there also exists provincial organizations, such as the Academic Integrity Council of Ontario (AICO). Handling cases of academic dishonesty was mainly done using the rule compliance approach, which was more punitive in nature. However, more and more institutions are now adopting the integrity approach, which is based on a more educational and restorative model.

Types

Bribery

Bribery is an act of giving money or gift giving that alters the behavior of the recipient. Bribery constitutes a crime and is defined by Black's Law Dictionary as the offering, giving, receiving, or soliciting of any item of value to influence the actions of an official or other person in charge of a public or legal duty.

The bribe is the gift bestowed to influence the recipient's conduct. It may be any money, good, right in action, property, preferment, privilege, emolument, object of value, advantage, or merely a promise or undertaking to induce or influence the action, vote, or influence of a person in an official or public capacity.

Cheating

Cheating can take the form of crib notes, looking over someone's shoulder during an exam, or any forbidden sharing of information between students regarding an exam or exercise. Many elaborate methods of cheating have been developed over the years. For instance, students have been documented hiding notes in the bathroom toilet tank, in the brims of their baseball caps, up their sleeves, along their thighs or in their cleavage. Also, the storing of information in graphing calculators, pagers, cell phones, and other electronic devices has cropped up since the information revolution began. While students have long surreptitiously scanned the tests of those seated near them, some students actively try to aid those who are trying to cheat. Methods of secretly signalling the right answer to friends are quite varied, ranging from coded sneezes or pencil tapping to high-pitched noises beyond the hearing range of most teachers. Some students have been known to use more elaborate means, such as using a system of repetitive body signals like hand movements or foot jerking to distribute answers (i.e. where a tap of the foot could correspond to answer "A", two taps for answer "B", and so on).

Cheating differs from most other forms of academic dishonesty, in that people can engage in it without benefiting themselves academically at all. For example, a student who illicitly telegraphed answers to a friend during a test would be cheating, even though the student's own work is in no way affected. Another example of academic dishonesty is a dialogue between students in the same class but in two different time periods, both of which a test is scheduled for that day. If the student in the earlier time period informs the other student in the later period about the test, that is considered academic dishonesty, even though the first student has not benefited him or herself.

One other method is taking advantage of time zones, particularly in exams administered worldwide. Those who take the exam first (likely in Oceania) can then post answers for those about to take the exam (in a time zone behind like Europe).

Deception

Deception is providing false information to a teacher/instructor concerning a formal academic exercise. Examples of this include taking more time on a take-home test than is allowed, giving a dishonest excuse when asking for a deadline extension, or falsely claiming to have submitted work. This type of academic misconduct is often considered softer than the more obvious forms of cheating, and otherwise-honest students sometimes engage in this type of dishonesty without considering themselves cheaters. It is also sometimes done by students who have failed to complete an assignment, to avoid responsibility for doing so.

Fabrication

Fabrication is the falsification of data, information, or citations in any formal academic exercise. This includes making up citations to back up arguments or inventing quotations. Fabrication predominates in the natural sciences, where students sometimes falsify data to make experiments "work". It includes data falsification, in which false claims are made about research performed, including selective submitting of results to exclude inconvenient data to generating bogus data.

Bibliographical references are often fabricated, especially when a certain minimum number of references is required or considered sufficient for the particular kind of paper. This type of fabrication can range from referring to works whose titles look relevant but which the student did not read, to making up bogus titles and authors.

There is also the practice of dry-labbing—which can occur in chemistry or other lab courses, in which the teacher clearly expects the experiment to yield certain results (which confirm established laws), so the student starts from the results and works backward, calculating what the experimental data should be, often adding variation to the data. In some cases, the lab report is written before the experiment is conducted—in some cases, the experiment is never carried out. In either case, the results are what the instructor expects.

Impersonation

Impersonation is a form of cheating whereby a different person than the student assigned an assignment or exam completes it. Attending a class or completing an interview on another student's behalf is also considered impersonation. The academic work is totally 'outsourced' to another person or organization, usually for pay.

Contract cheating

Contract cheating, also known as ghostwriting is similar to impersonation in that a student hires a third party to complete work on their behalf. Essay mills fall under this category. While it is believed that contract cheating has significantly increased since 2014, there are currently no figures to demonstrate this surge. This is a relatively new form of cheating, seemingly gaining traction in the 1940s when an increasing amount of advertisements for ghostwriters could be seen on university campuses and in newspapers. This trend continued to grow into the 1960s and 1970s. According to a study conducted in 2019, it is estimated that the ghostwriting industry produces a revenue of approximately $100 million.

Plagiarism

Plagiarism, as defined in the 1995 Random House Compact Unabridged Dictionary, is the "use or close imitation of the language and thoughts of another author and the representation of them as one's own original work". In academia, this can range from borrowing without attribution a particularly apt phrase, to paraphrasing someone else's original idea without citation, to wholesale contract cheating.

The modern concept of plagiarism as immoral and originality as an ideal emerged in Europe only in the 18th century, while in the previous centuries authors and artists were encouraged to "copy the masters as closely as possible" and avoid "unnecessary invention". The 18th century new morals have been institutionalized and enforced prominently in the sectors of academia (including academic science, education, engineering etc.) and journalism, where plagiarism is now considered academic dishonesty and a breach of journalistic ethics, subject to sanctions like expulsion and other severe career damages. Not so in the arts, which have resisted in their long-established tradition of copying as a fundamental practice of the creative process, with plagiarism being still hugely tolerated by 21st-century artists. Lawmaking is a professional field which is not structured around the concept of originality and for which plagiarism is less relevant.

Plagiarism is not a crime but is disapproved more on the grounds of moral offence. It may be a case for civil law if it is so substantial to constitute copyright infringement.

Since 2000, discussions on the subjects of student plagiarism have increased with a major strand of this discussion centering on the issue of how best students can be helped to understand and avoid plagiarism. Given the serious consequences that plagiarism has for students there has been a call for a greater emphasis on learning in order to help students avoid committing plagiarism.

Also under the scope of plagiarism is self-plagiarism. Self-plagiarism occurs when a student submits an assignment, essay or piece of work that was originally submitted for the purpose of another course without the instructor's permission to do so.

Professorial misconduct

Professorial misconduct includes improper grading of students' papers and oral exams, grade fraud, deliberate negligence towards cheating or assistance in cheating. This can be done for reasons of personal bias towards students (favoritism) or a particular viewpoint (intellectual dishonesty), for a bribe, or to improve the teacher's own perceived performance by increasing the passing rate. It is still occasionally done for matters of ego or to procure sexual favors (sexual harassment).

Sabotage

Sabotage is when a student or professor prevents others from completing their work. This includes cutting pages out of library books, deleting data off of classmate's computer or otherwise willfully disrupting the experiments of others. Sabotage is usually only found in highly competitive, cutthroat environments, such as at extremely elite schools where class rankings are highly prized. Poor behavior and the low level disruption of other students' learning, however, is extremely common in all educational settings. Some medical-school librarians have noted that important articles—required reading for key courses—are frequently missing from bound journals—sliced out with razor blades, scalpels, or other sharp blades. Other journals will be marked up in crayon.

Abuse of confidentiality

This takes place when data or results from research or a piece of academic work is disseminated or shared while the author(s) expectation was for them to remain confidential.

Aiding & abetting

Aiding and abetting is the act of helping, enabling or encouraging someone to engage or attempt to engage in any act of academic dishonesty.

Improper research practices

Improper research practices involve fabricating, misrepresenting or selectively reporting research data as well as not giving proper credit to authors or researchers when reporting results of their work.

Causes

There are a variety of causes of academic misconduct. Researchers have studied the correlation of cheating to personal characteristics, demographics, contextual factors, methods of deterring misconduct, even stages of moral development.

Incentives to cheat

Some scholars contend that there are students who have a pathological urge to cheat. The writer Thomas Mallon noted that many scholars had found plagiarism in literature (Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Charles Reade being two notable examples) to often be perpetrated in a way similar to kleptomania (a psychological disease associated with uncontrollable stealing, even when it is against the interests of the thief). On the other hand, Mallon concludes it is probable that most "cheaters" make a rational choice to commit academic misconduct. A common reason for unethical behavior is the desire to "gain a competitive advantage in the race for position or power".

Richard Fass puts forward the possibility that business scandals in the real world make students believe dishonesty is an acceptable method for achieving success in contemporary society. Academic dishonesty, in this case, would be practice for the real world. For some students, there would be a dichotomy between success and honesty, and their decision is that: "It is not that we love honesty less, but that we love success more." Conversely, other scholars consider that with the recent rise in corporate ethics related dismissals in the business world, this approach to cheating may be losing its appeal, if it ever really had any. However, it has been shown that the expected benefits of cheating as well as student's morality plays an important role for the engagement in dishonest behavior.

Recent studies have indicated that there is no clear link between academic dishonesty and academic success. One study showed that students given an unexpected opportunity to cheat did not improve their grades significantly from the control group. Another study showed that students who were allowed to bring cheat sheets to a test did not improve their grades. While this may conflict with the common perception of cheating (one survey found only 13% of males and 46% of females think that cheating does not help grades,) it is often apparent to professors and members of academic conduct committees when a paper has been plagiarized by its inferior quality.

In the US, William Bowers reported that, on average, one third of grade A students cheated in 1964. And asserts that academic dishonesty acts as a shortcut, so even grade A students might be tempted to cheat. He contends that even if a plagiarized paper receives a relatively low grade, that grade is actually high, given how much time and effort went into the paper. In the study mentioned above (in which students were allowed to bring crib sheets to a test but did not improve their scores), the researcher concluded that the students used the crib notes as alternatives to studying, rather than as complements to studying, and thus spent less time preparing for the exam.

Teachers

The federal government of the United States has mandated high-stakes testing as part of the No Child Left Behind Act, signed into law in 2002. Schools and teachers are held accountable for the results. According to Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, co-authors of Freakonomics, teachers are known to "teach to the test": while not teaching the actual answers, they teach the questions and similar ones, and they neglect any topic that will not be tested on. Levitt also states that teachers may inflate the results of tests given in their classroom. Teachers and librarians can have a significant proactive impact on doing honest work.

Demographic and personal causes

Research has identified a number of demographic characteristics that appear to be important influences on cheating, including age, gender and grade point average. Older students, females, and students with higher academic achievement are less likely to cheat, whereas students involved with many extra-curricular activities are more likely to do so. Students involved in extra-curricular activities may be less committed to their studies, or may have more demands on their time, which interfere with their studies, creating a greater incentive to cheat. It has been found that younger students are somewhat more likely to cheat: one study finding the highest incidence of cheating occurs during sophomore year at college. Although cheating might be expected to decline with greater moral development, one experiment found that there was no relationship between how a student performed on a morality test and his likelihood of cheating (that is, students at a pre-conventional stage of morality are as likely to cheat as those at a post-conventional stage). Higher academic procrastination was also found to increase the frequency of seven different forms of academic misconduct (using fraudulent excuses, plagiarism, copying from someone else in exams, using forbidden means in exams, carrying forbidden means into exams, copying parts of homework from others, and fabrication or falsification of data) as well as the variety of academic misconduct. This German panel study among thousands of university students argues that academic misconduct might be a coping-strategy to overcome the negative consequences of academic procrastination such as lower performance.

Race, nationality, and class all show little correlation with academic misconduct. There is also no correlation between how religious someone is and the likelihood that that person will cheat. A comparison between students of different religions yielded similar results, although the study did show that Jews tend to cheat less than members of other religions. One of the strongest demographic correlations with academic misconduct in the United States is with language. Students who speak English as a second language have been shown to commit academic dishonesty more and are more likely to be caught than native speakers, since they will often not want to rewrite sources in their own words, fearing that the meaning of the sentence will be lost through poor paraphrasing skills. In the University of California system, international students make up 10% of the student body but comprise 47% of academic dishonesty cases. In British universities, students from outside of the European Union make up 12% of the student body but comprise 35% of academic dishonesty cases.

Impostor syndrome and academically dishonest behaviours have been found to be correlated. Students who do not believe they deserve to be where they are in terms of academics actively engage in self-sabotaging behaviour (plagiarism and cheating) in order to prove that they do not belong where they are while students who do not suffer from impostor syndrome are less likely to engage in academic dishonesty.

Contextual causes

Academic misconduct is more easily traced to the academic and social environment of students than to their background. These contextual factors can be as broad as the social milieu at school to as narrow as what instructions a teacher gives before an exam.

Contextual factors that individual teachers can affect often make the least difference on cheating behavior. A study found that increasing the distance between students taking an exam has little effect on academic misconduct, and that threatening students before an exam with expulsion if they cheat actually promotes cheating behavior. Indeed, increased exam proctoring and other methods of detecting cheating in the classroom are largely ineffective. According to one survey of American college students, while 50% had cheated at least once in the previous six months, and 7% had cheated more than five times in that period, only 2.5% of the cheaters had been caught. As teachers invent more elaborate methods of deterring cheating, students invent even more elaborate methods of cheating (sometimes even treating it as a game), leading to what some teachers call a costly and unwinnable arms race. Increased punishment for academic misconduct also has little correlation with cheating behavior. It has been found that students with markedly different perceptions of what the severity of the punishment for cheating were all equally likely to cheat, probably indicating that they thought that increased penalties were immaterial since their cheating would never be discovered. However, if a professor makes clear that he disapproves of cheating, either in the syllabus, in the first class, or at the beginning of a test, academic dishonesty can drop by 12%. Some professors may have little incentive to reduce cheating in their classes below a point that would otherwise be obvious to outside observers, as they are rated by how many research papers they publish and research grants they win for the college, and not by how well they teach.

Teachers can, however, accidentally promote cheating behavior. A study found a correlation between how harsh or unfair a professor is perceived as and academic misconduct, since students see cheating as a way of getting back at the teacher. Also, students who see themselves in a competition, such as when the teacher is using a grade curve, are more likely to cheat.

Research has also shown a correlation between goal orientation and the occurrence of academic cheating. Students who perceive their classroom to have high mastery goals are less likely to engage in cheating than those who perceive their classroom to emphasize performance goals. In other words, students who are encouraged to learn for the sake of learning and who exhibit an intrinsic value of education are less likely to cheat than those who are encouraged primarily by grades and other extrinsic rewards.

The most important contextual causes of academic misconduct are often out of individual teachers' hands. One very important factor is time management. One survey reported two-thirds of teachers believed that poor time management was the principal cause of cheating. Often social engagements are to blame. It has been found that there is a strong correlation between extracurricular activities and cheating, especially among athletes, even those on intramural teams. It has also been found that student cheating rates rise significantly the more time students spend playing cards, watching television, or having a few drinks with friends. Relatedly, fraternity or sorority membership is also strongly correlated with academic misconduct.

One of the most important causes of academic misconduct is the contextual factor of an environment of peer disapproval of cheating, that is, peer pressure. Psychologists note that all people tend to follow the norms of their peer group, which would include norms about academic dishonesty. Thus, students who believe that their peers disapprove of cheating are less likely to cheat. Indeed, multiple studies show that the most decisive factor in a student's decision to cheat is his perception of his peers' relationship with academic dishonesty. For instance, on average 69% of students cheat at colleges with low community disapproval of academic misconduct, whereas only about 23% of students cheat at colleges with strong community disapproval of academic misconduct. Peer pressure works both ways, as a study found that there is a 41% increase in the probability of a student cheating if he or she has seen someone else cheat. However, even if most students strongly disapprove of cheating, there has to be a community in order for those norms to be enforced via peer pressure. For instance, larger schools, which usually have much higher cheating rates than small schools, tend to have a weaker community, being more split up into different peer groups that exert little social pressure on each other. Another measure of a college community, how many students live on campus, further shows a significant relation with a school's cheating rate. Relatedly, many professors argue that smaller classes reduce cheating behavior.

Ethical causes

No matter what the demographic or contextual influences are on a student who decides to engage in cheating behavior, before they can cheat they must overcome their own conscience. This depends both on how strongly someone disapproves of academic dishonesty and what types of justifications the student uses to escape a sense of guilt. For instance, students who personally do not have a moral problem with academic misconduct can cheat guilt-free. However, while many students have been taught and have internalized that academic dishonesty is wrong, it has been shown that on average a third of students who strongly disapprove of cheating have in fact cheated. People who cheat despite personal disapproval of cheating engage in something called "neutralization", in which a student rationalizes the cheating as being acceptable due to certain mitigating circumstances. According to psychologists of deviant behavior, people who engage in neutralization support the societal norm in question, but "conjure up" reasons why they are allowed to violate that norm in a particular case. Neutralization is not a simple case of ex post facto rationalization, but is rather a more comprehensive affair, occurring before, during, and after the act of cheating. Researchers have found four major types of neutralization of academic dishonesty, which they categorize by type of justification. Denial of responsibility – that is, the accusation that others are to blame or that something forced the student to cheat – is the most common form of neutralization among college students who cheated, with 61% of cheaters using this form of justification. Condemnation of condemner – that is, that the professors are hypocrites or brought it on themselves – is the second most common form of college student neutralization at 28%. The third most popular form of neutralization among college students is the appeal to higher loyalties, where the student thinks their responsibility to some other entity, usually their peers, is more important than doing what they know to be morally right. About 6.8% of cheaters in higher education use this form of neutralization. Denial of injury – thinking that nobody is worse off for the cheating – is the fourth most popular kind of neutralization at 4.2% of cheaters.

Cultural considerations

Many studies have revealed that academic honesty is not a universal concept. Some cultures accept the memorization and regurgitation of information, without citing sources, while others would consider this plagiarism. Additionally, some cultures believe that knowledge belongs to everyone and that this knowledge needs to be shared. Studies have shown that in certain Asian cultures, it is more important to share information widely than to properly cite the owner of this knowledge.

COVID-19 and academic dishonesty

Cases of academic dishonesty have increased during the COVID-19 pandemic. As a result of the sudden transition from in-person to online course delivery, instructors (who may have been engaging in the same evaluation practices for years) did not have the opportunity to consider how to deliver online evaluations, how they differ from in-person evaluations and what the online process entails. The sharing of academic files, contract cheating and the unauthorized receipt of assistance from classmates and other sources have increased due to the transition to online course delivery.

Effects

Cheating in academics has a host of effects on students, on teachers, on individual schools, and on the educational system itself.

For instance, students who engage in neutralization to justify cheating, even once, are more likely to engage in it in the future, potentially putting them on a road to a life of dishonesty. Indeed, one study found that students who are dishonest in class are more likely to engage in fraud and theft on the job when they enter the workplace. Students are also negatively affected by academic dishonesty after graduation. A university diploma is an important document in the labor market. Potential employers use a degree as a representation of a graduate's knowledge and ability. However, due to academic dishonesty, not all graduates with the same grades actually did the same work or have the same skills. Thus, when faced with the fact that they do not know which graduates are skilled and which are the "lemons", employers must pay all graduates based on the quality of the average graduate. Therefore, the more students who cheat, getting by without achieving the required skills or learning, the lower the quality of the average graduate of a school, and thus the less employers are willing to pay a new hire from that school. Because of this reason, all students, even those that do not cheat themselves, are negatively affected by academic misconduct.

Academic dishonesty also creates problems for teachers. In economic terms, cheating causes an underproduction of knowledge, where the professor's job is to produce knowledge. Moreover, a case of cheating often will cause emotional distress to faculty members, many considering it to be a personal slight against them or a violation of their trust. Dealing with academic misconduct is often one of the worst parts of a career in education, one survey claiming that 77% of academics agreed with the statement "dealing with a cheating student is one of the most onerous aspects of the job".

Academic misconduct can also have an effect on a college's reputation, one of the most important assets of any school. An institution plagued by cheating scandals may become less attractive to potential donors and students and especially prospective employers. Alternatively, schools with low levels of academic dishonesty can use their reputation to attract students and employers.

Ultimately, academic dishonesty undermines the academic world. It interferes with the basic mission of education, the transfer of knowledge, by allowing students to get by without having to master the knowledge. Furthermore, academic dishonesty creates an atmosphere that is not conducive to the learning process, which affects honest students as well. When honest students see cheaters escape detection, it can discourage student morale, as they see the rewards for their work cheapened. Cheating also undermines academia when students steal ideas. Ideas are a professional author's "capital and identity", and if a person's ideas are stolen it retards the pursuit of knowledge.

If never formally retracted, fraudulent publications can remain an issue for many years as articles and books remain on shelves and continue to be cited. The case of S. Walter Poulshock, a 1960s early-career historian whose work was found to contain wholly fabricated material, was exposed in 1966 with the American Historical Review providing a warning on the topic. Nonetheless, his book was never removed from the shelves of many university libraries and (together with his related thesis) was still being cited in 2013, 47 years after it was intended to have been withdrawn by its publisher.

Deterrence

All parties involved in the dishonesty—not just the individual whose grade is increased by it—can be punished.

Historically the job of preventing cheating has been given to the teacher. It used to be that in college the professor acted in loco parentis and was able to regulate student behavior as a parent. Thus, professors who discovered cheating could assign essentially any punishment they deemed appropriate. Students often had no mechanism for appeal. Generally, proctors were hired to patrol exams. If a case was particularly serious, a dean or other top-level administrator might have been involved. Against this inconsistent and paternalistic system, students at some schools rebelled and demanded to be treated as adults.

Honor codes

First at the College of William and Mary in 1779, and then followed by schools like the University of Virginia in the 1850s and Wesleyan University in 1893, the students, with the agreement of faculty who declared themselves dedicated to ideals of democracy and human character, created honor codes. B. Melendez of Harvard University defined an honor code as a code of academic conduct that includes a written pledge of honesty that students sign, a student controlled judiciary that hears alleged violations, unproctored examinations, and an obligation for all students help enforce the code. This system relied on student self-enforcement, which was considered more becoming of young gentlemen than the policing by proctors and professors that existed previously. Of interest, the military academies of the US took the honor code one step further than civilian colleges, disallowing "tolerance", which means that if a cadet or midshipman is found to have failed to report or outright protected someone engaged in academic dishonesty (as well as other dishonesties or stealing), that individual is to be expelled along with the perpetrator.

Mixed judicial boards

However, many people doubted the advisability of relying on an abstract notion of honor to prevent academic dishonesty. This doubt has perhaps led to the reality that no more than a quarter of American universities have adopted honor codes. Moreover, many professors could not envisage a student run trial process that treated faculty accusers fairly. In response to these concerns, in the middle of the twentieth century, many schools devised mixed judicial panels composed of both students and faculty. This type of academic integrity system was similar to the traditional faculty control system in that it relied on professors to detect cheating, except in this system cheaters were brought before centralized boards of students and faculty for punishment. By the 1960s over a quarter of American universities had adopted this system of mixed judicial boards. Still, though, over half of American universities continued to use faculty-centered control systems.

Student due process rights

Starting in the 1960s, the U.S. Supreme Court began chipping away at the in loco parentis doctrine, giving college students more civil liberties such as the right of due process in disciplinary proceedings (Dixon v. Alabama Board of Education, 1961). In Cooper v. Blair (1973), specifically academic misconduct was ruled to require due process, being a disciplinary matter and not an educational matter. The due process rights of students in academic misconduct cases is not to the same degree as in a court of law. For instance, the student has no right to representation and the burden of proof is not necessarily stringent. In the "General Order on Judicial Standards of Procedure and Substance in Review of Student Discipline in Tax Supported Institutions of Higher Education", (1968) student due process rights were laid out as follows:

  1. The student should be given adequate notice in writing of the specific ground or grounds and the nature of the evidence on which the discipline proceedings are based.
  2. The student should be given an opportunity for a hearing in which the disciplinary authority provides a fair opportunity for hearing of the student's position, explanations, or evidence.
  3. No disciplinary action may be taken on grounds which are not supported by any substantial evidence.

These new rules put an end to the old faculty-based system of policing academic dishonesty, now students were entitled to an impartial hearing. While schools using the old honor code method or the mixed judicial system were not affected by these decisions, schools using the faculty based system generally instituted systems that relied on a committee of faculty and administrators or a dean to run the academic misconduct hearings.

Modified honor codes

Recently, Donald L. McCabe and Linda Klebe Trevino, two experts in the field of academic dishonesty, have proposed a new way of deterring cheating that has been implemented in schools such as the University of Maryland. Modified honor codes put students in charge of the judicial hearing process, making it clear that it is the students' responsibility to stop cheating amongst themselves, but at the same time students still have proctored exams and are not allowed to take pledges of good conduct in place of professor oversight. The researchers who advocate this type of code seem to think that the normal honor code is something of a special case that is not applicable to many schools. According to supporters of this system, schools with a large student body, a weak college community, or no history of student self-governance will not be able to support a full honor code. However, while modified honor codes seem to be more effective than faculty or administration run integrity codes of conduct, research shows that schools with modified codes still have higher rates of cheating than schools with full honor codes.

Comparison of different systems of enforcement

Research has shown that there is a strong correlation between forms of academic integrity system and levels of cheating at a school. Several studies have found students who attend schools with honor codes are less likely to cheat than students at schools with traditional integrity codes. Another study found that only 28% of schools with honor codes have high levels of cheating, whereas 81% of schools with mixed judicial boards have high rates of cheating. Whereas faculty or administration run codes of conduct tend to rely on policing and punishment to deter students from cheating, honor codes tend to rely on and cultivate student senses of honor and group peer pressure to deter academic misconduct. As mentioned above in the section on causes of cheating, increased enforcement or punishment is rarely effective at discouraging cheating, whereas there is a high correlation between peer pressure and academic honesty. The modified honor code attempts to cultivate peer disapproval of cheating while maintaining the traditional proctor system, although critics argue that the proctor system undermines the creation of an atmosphere of student self-policing, reducing the effectiveness of the honor code, possibly explaining why modified honor codes have not been as effective as the original version.

Faculty issues in deterring academic dishonesty

There are limitations to relying on the faculty to police academic dishonesty. One study found that up to 21% of professors have ignored at least one clear cut case of cheating. Another study revealed that 40% of professors "never" report cheating, 54% "seldom" report cheating, and that a mere 6% act on all cases of academic misconduct that confront them. A third survey of professors found that while 79% had observed cheating, only 9% had penalized the student. According to a manual for professors on cheating,

the reasons for this lack of action include unwillingness to devote time and energy to the issue, reluctance to undergo an emotional confrontation, and fear of retaliation by the student, of losing students, of being accused of harassment or discrimination, and even of being sued for these offenses and/or defamation of character.

There are other reasons as well. Some professors are reluctant to report violations to the appropriate authorities because they believe the punishment to be too harsh.

Some professors may have little incentive to reduce cheating in their classes below a point that would otherwise be obvious to outside observers, as they are rated by how many research papers they publish and research grants they win for the college, and not by how well they teach.

Others do not report academic misconduct because of postmodernist views on cheating. Postmodernism calls into question the very concepts of "authorship" and "originality." From the perspective of cultural studies and historicism, authors themselves are simply constructs of their social surroundings, and thus they simply rewrite already written cultural stories. Moreover, in the field of composition studies, students are being encouraged more and more to do group work and participate in ongoing collective revision. The postmodernist view is that "the concept of intellectual malpractice is of limited epistemological value. Under the ironic gaze of postmodernism, the distinctions between guilt and innocence, integrity and deceit permeating the scandal debates appear irrelevant." However, there is an argument that postmodernism is just moral relativism, therefore cheating is condoned as a valid academic method, even if it is morally and legally wrong. One professor wrote in an article in The English Journal that when he peeked in on an unproctored class taking a test and saw several students up and consulting with one another, he decided that they were not cheating, but were using non-traditional techniques and collaborative learning to surmount the obstacles teachers had put in their way. Issues of cultural relativism also affect professors' views on cheating; the standard objection being that "students from certain Middle Eastern, Asian, and African cultures are baffled by the notion that one can 'own' ideas, since their cultures regard words and ideas as the property of all rather than as individual property".

Another issue teachers may have with deterring cheating is that they may decide that it is not their job. The argument that "they're professors, not policemen" is often heard in academia. In economic terms, some professors believe they are being paid to provide learning, and if the student loses that learning through cheating, he is only cheating himself out of the money he paid.

Detection

There are multiple online tools now available to faculty and students to detect the incidence of plagiarism and similarity. Turnitin is often used by professors to analyze the similarity index of a student's assignment against previously published writing. Turnitin is also being used by students prior to submitting assignments to eliminate the chances of a faculty member detecting plagiarism.

With the advancement of the internet, there are now several tools available to aid in the detection of plagiarism and multiple publication within biomedical literature. One tool developed in 2006 by researchers in Harold Garner's laboratory at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas is Déjà Vu, an open-access database containing several thousand instances of duplicate publication.

Due to the nature of contract cheating, it is hard to detect it, as it is often an original piece of work that is being produced. While Turnitin has recently released its Authorship Investigate tool, it has not yet been vetted by research and is not being widely used in postsecondary institutions. Clue sleuthing is another way of detecting contract cheating, which entails examining an assignment based on the depth and quality of answers as well as the instructions being followed in terms of an assignment. This is due to the fact that ghostwriters often do not follow the instructions for an assignment and provide vague and superficial content in their writing. The use of stylometry software (such as JStylo and JGAAP) is also being evaluated to analyze its efficacy in detecting contract cheating.

Simulacrum

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulacrum

A simulacrum (plural: simulacra from Latin: simulacrum, which means "likeness, similarity") is a representation or imitation of a person or thing. The word was first recorded in the English language in the late 16th century, used to describe a representation, such as a statue or a painting, especially of a god. By the late 19th century, it had gathered a secondary association of inferiority: an image without the substance or qualities of the original. Literary critic Fredric Jameson offers photorealism as an example of artistic simulacrum, in which a painting is created by copying a photograph that is itself a copy of the real thing. Other art forms that play with simulacra include trompe-l'œil, pop art, Italian neorealism, and French New Wave.

Philosophy

Simulacra have long been of interest to philosophers. In his Sophist, Plato speaks of two kinds of image-making. The first is a faithful reproduction, attempted to copy precisely the original. The second is intentionally distorted in order to make the copy appear correct to viewers. He gives the example of Greek statuary, which was crafted larger on the top than on the bottom so that viewers on the ground would see it correctly. If they could view it in scale, they would realize it was malformed. This example from the visual arts serves as a metaphor for the philosophical arts and the tendency of some philosophers to distort the truth so that it appears accurate unless viewed from the proper angle.

Nietzsche addresses the concept of simulacrum (but does not use the term) in the Twilight of the Idols, suggesting that most philosophers, by ignoring the reliable input of their senses and resorting to the constructs of language and reason, arrive at a distorted copy of reality.

Postmodernist French social theorist Jean Baudrillard argues that a simulacrum is not a copy of the real, but becomes truth in its own right: the hyperreal. According to Baudrillard, what the simulacrum copies either had no original or no longer has an original, since a simulacrum signifies something it is not, and therefore leaves the original unable to be located. Where Plato saw two types of representation—faithful and intentionally distorted (simulacrum)—Baudrillard sees four: (1) basic reflection of reality; (2) perversion of reality; (3) pretence of reality (where there is no model); and (4) simulacrum, which "bears no relation to any reality whatsoever". In Baudrillard's concept, like Nietzsche's, simulacra are perceived as negative, but another modern philosopher who addressed the topic, Gilles Deleuze, takes a different view, seeing simulacra as the avenue by which an accepted ideal or "privileged position" could be "challenged and overturned". Deleuze defines simulacra as "those systems in which different relates to different by means of difference itself. What is essential is that we find in these systems no prior identity, no internal resemblance".

Alain Badiou, in speaking with reference to Nazism about Evil, writes, "fidelity to a simulacrum, unlike fidelity to an event, regulates its break with the situation not by the universality of the void, but by the closed particularity of an abstract set ... (the 'Germans' or the 'Aryans')".

Recreation

Recreational simulacra include reenactments of historical events or replicas of landmarks, such as Colonial Williamsburg and the Eiffel Tower, and constructions of fictional or cultural ideas, such as Fantasyland at The Walt Disney Company's Magic Kingdom. The various Disney parks have been regarded as the ultimate recreational simulacra by some philosophers, with Baudrillard noting that Walt Disney World Resort is a copy of a copy, or "a simulacrum to the second power". In 1975, Italian author Umberto Eco argued that at Disney's parks, "we not only enjoy a perfect imitation, we also enjoy the conviction that imitation has reached its apex and afterwards reality will always be inferior to it".

Examining the impact of Disney's simulacrum of national parks, Disney's Wilderness Lodge, environmentalist Jennifer Cypher and anthropologist Eric Higgs expressed worry that "the boundary between artificiality and reality will become so thin that the artificial will become the centre of moral value". Eco also refers to commentary on watching sports as sports to the power of three, or sports cubed. First, there are the players who participate in the sport (the real), then the onlookers merely witnessing it, and finally the commentary on the act of witnessing the sport. Visual artist Paul McCarthy has created entire installations based on Pirates of the Caribbean and theme park simulacra, with videos playing inside the installation.

Caricature

An interesting example of simulacrum is caricature. When an artist produces a line drawing that closely approximates the facial features of a real person, the subject of the sketch cannot be easily identified by a random observer; it can be taken for a likeness of any individual. However, a caricaturist exaggerates prominent facial features, and a viewer will pick up on these features and be able to identify the subject, even though the caricature bears far less actual resemblance to the subject.

Iconography

Beer (1999: p. 11) employs the term "simulacrum" to denote the formation of a sign or iconographic image, whether iconic or aniconic, in the landscape or greater field of Thangka art and Tantric Buddhist iconography. For example, an iconographic representation of a cloud formation sheltering a deity in a thanka or covering the auspice of a sacred mountain in the natural environment may be discerned as a simulacrum of an "auspicious canopy" (Sanskrit: Chhatra) of the Ashtamangala. Perceptions of religious imagery in natural phenomena approach a cultural universal and may be proffered as evidence of the natural creative spiritual engagement of the experienced environment endemic to the human psychology.

Word usage

The Latinised plural simulacra is interchangeable with the anglicised version simulacrums.

Simulacrum as artificial beings

Simulacra often appear in speculative fiction. Examples of simulacra in the sense of artificial or supernaturally or scientifically created artificial life forms include:

Also, the illusions of absent loved ones created by an alien life form in Stanislaw Lem's Solaris can be considered simulacra.

 

Internet meme

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

An Internet meme, more commonly known simply as a meme (/mm/ MEEM), is a type of idea, behaviour, or style (meme) that is spread via the Internet, often through social media platforms and especially for humorous purposes. Memes can spread from person to person via social networks, blogs, direct email, or news sources. They may relate to various existing Internet cultures or subcultures, often created or spread on various websites. One hallmark of Internet memes is the appropriation of a part of broader culture, for instance by giving words and phrases intentional misspellings (such as lolcats) or using incorrect grammar (such as doge). In particular, many memes utilize popular culture (especially in image macros of other media), which sometimes can lead to issues with copyright.

Instant communication on the Internet facilitates word of mouth transmission, resulting in fads and sensations that tend to grow rapidly. An example of such a fad is that of planking (lying down in public places); posting a photo of someone planking online brings attention to the fad and allows it to reach many people in little time. The internet also facilitates the rapid evolution of memes. “Dank” memes have emerged as a new form of image-macros, and many modern memes take on inclusion of surreal, nonsensical, and non-sequitur themes.

Colloquially, the terms meme and Internet meme may refer to pieces of media that are designed in the format of true Internet memes, but which are not themselves intended to spread or evolve, and which have recently become umbrella terms referring to any piece of quickly-consumed comedic or relatable content. What is considered a meme may vary across different communities on the Internet and is subject to change over time: traditionally, memes consisted of a combination of image macros and a concept or catchphrase, but the concept has since become broader and more multi-faceted, evolving to include more elaborate structures such as challenges, GIFs, videos, and viral sensations.

Characteristics

There are two central attributes of Internet memes: creative reproduction of materials and intertextuality. Creative reproduction refers to "parodies, remixes, or mashups," and include notable examples such as "Hitler's Downfall Parodies", and "Nyan Cat", among others. Intertextuality may be demonstrated through memes that combine different cultures; for example, a meme may combine United States politician Mitt Romney's assertion of the phrase "binders full of women" from a 2012 US presidential debate with the Korean pop song "Gangnam style" by overlaying the politician's quote onto a frame from Psy's music video where paper blows around him. The intertextuality in the example gives new meaning to the paper blowing around Psy, the meme indexes intertextual practices in political and cultural discourses of two nations.

The spread of Internet memes has been described as occurring via two mechanisms: mimicry and remix. Remix occurs when the original meme is altered in some way, while mimicry occurs when the meme is recreated in a different fashion to the original. The results in the study of Online Memes, Affinities, and Cultural Production, show that the internet directly adds some longevity in a meme's lifespan.

There is no single format that memes must follow. Photographs of people or animals, especially stock photos, can be turned into memes by superimposing text, such as in Overly Attached Girlfriend. Rage comics are a subcategory of memes which depict a series of human emotions and conclude with a satirical punchline; the sources for these memes often come from webcomics. Other memes are purely viral sensations such as in Keyboard Cat.

Evolution and propagation

Typical format for image macros.

An Internet meme may stay the same or may evolve over time, by chance or through commentary, imitations, parody, or by incorporating news accounts about itself. Internet memes can evolve and spread extremely rapidly, sometimes reaching worldwide popularity within a few days. Consequently, an internet meme can also rapidly become 'unfashionable', losing its humorous qualities to certain audiences, often even most prevalently by its creator(s). Internet memes usually are formed from some social interaction, pop culture reference, or situations people often find themselves in. Their rapid growth and impact has caught the attention of both researchers and industry. Academically, researchers model how they evolve and predict which memes will survive and spread throughout the Web. Commercially, they are used in viral marketing where they are an inexpensive form of mass advertising.

One empirical approach studied meme characteristics and behavior independently from the networks in which they propagated, and reached a set of conclusions concerning successful meme propagation. For example, the study asserted that Internet memes not only compete for viewer attention generally resulting in a shorter life, but also, through user creativity, memes can collaborate with each other and achieve greater survival. Also, paradoxically, an individual meme that experiences a popularity peak significantly higher than its average popularity is not generally expected to survive unless it is unique, whereas a meme with no such popularity peak keeps being used together with other memes and thus has greater survivability.

Multiple opposing studies on media psychology and communication have aimed to characterize and analyze the concept and representations in order to make it accessible for the academic research. Thus, Internet memes can be regarded as a unit of information which replicates via the Internet. This unit can replicate or mutate. This mutation instead of being generational follows more a viral pattern, giving the Internet memes generally a short life. Other theoretical problems with the Internet memes are their behavior, their type of change, and their teleology.

Internet memes have been examined by Dancygier and Vandelanotte in 2017 for aspects of cognitive linguistic and construction grammar. The authors analyzed some selective popular image macros like, Said no one ever, One does not simply, But that's none of my business, and Good Girl Gina to draw attention to the constructionally, multimodality, viewpoint and intersubjectivity of these memes. They further argued that with the combination of text and images, the Internet memes can add to the functioning linguistic construction frame as well as create new linguistic constructions.

Writing for The Washington Post in 2013, Dominic Basulto asserted that with the growth of the Internet and the practices of the marketing and advertising industries, memes have come to transmit fewer snippets of human culture that could survive for centuries as originally envisioned by Dawkins, and instead transmit banality at the expense of big ideas.

History

Origins and early memes

An example of an image macro, a common type of Internet meme in the 2000s.

The word meme was coined by Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene as an attempt to explain how ideas replicate, mutate, and evolve (memetics). The concept of the Internet meme was first proposed by Mike Godwin in the June 1993 issue of Wired. In 2013, Dawkins characterized an Internet meme as being a meme deliberately altered by human creativity—distinguished from biological genes and his own pre-Internet concept of a meme, which involved mutation by random change and spreading through accurate replication as in Darwinian selection. Dawkins explained that Internet memes are thus a "hijacking of the original idea", the very idea of a meme having mutated and evolved in this new direction. Furthermore, Internet memes carry an additional property that ordinary memes do not: Internet memes leave a footprint in the media through which they propagate (for example, social networks) that renders them traceable and analyzable.

Internet memes grew as a concept in the mid-1990s. At the time, memes were just short clips that were shared between people in Usenet forums. As the Internet evolved, so did memes. When YouTube was released in 2005, video memes became popular. Around this time, rickrolling became popular and the link to this video was sent around via email or other messaging sites. Video sharing also created memes such as "Turn Down for What" and the "Harlem Shake". As social media websites such as Twitter and Facebook started appearing, it was now easy to share GIFs and image macros to a large audience. Meme generator websites were created to let users create their own memes out of existing templates. Memes during this time could remain popular for a long time, from a few months to a decade, which contrasts with the fast lifespan of modern memes. Over the years, many memes have originated on the 4chan website, which have been described as "the cradle of memes, trolling and alterculture"; major memes popularized by that site include lolcats as well as the pedobear.

Early in the Internet's history, memes were primarily spread via email or Usenet discussion communities. Messageboards and newsgroups were also popular because they allowed a simple method for people to share information or memes with a diverse population of Internet users in a short period. They encourage communication between people, and thus between meme sets, that do not normally come in contact. Furthermore, they actively promote meme-sharing within the messageboard or newsgroup population by asking for feedback, comments, opinions, etc. This format is what gave rise to early Internet memes, like the Hampster Dance. Another factor in the increased meme transmission observed over the Internet is its interactive nature. Print matter, radio, and television are all essentially passive experiences requiring the reader, listener, or viewer to perform all necessary cognitive processing; in contrast, the social nature of the Internet allows phenomena to propagate more readily. Many phenomena are also spread via web search engines, Internet forums, social networking services, social news sites, and video hosting services. Much of the Internet's ability to spread information is assisted from results found through search engines, which can allow users to find memes even with obscure information.

The earlier forms of image based memes include the demotivator, image macro, photoshopped image, LOLCats, advice animal, and comic. The Demotivator image includes a black background with white, capitalized text, often in Times New Roman. The objective of using this format was to parodize inspirational and motivational posters, where the name "demotivator" is derived from. Image macro consists of an image with white Impact font within a black border. The text/context of the meme is at the top and bottom of the image itself. The photoshopped image is closely related to the macro image, but often is created without the use of text, mostly edited with another image. Advice animals contain a photoshopped image of an animal's head on top of a rainbow/color wheel background. It includes the image macro of the top and bottom text with Impact font. LOLCats incorporate the design of image macro and advice animals, but instead of just the cat's head, it is the entire picture unedited with top and bottom text, often with the usage of Internet slang. Comics follow a typical newspaper comic strip format; there are a variety of different ways to create one, as multiple images and texts can be used to create the overall meme. Rage comics such as Trollface were often used to create comic memes.

Modern memes

Modern Internet meme on the subject of Wikipedia and pages breaking when certain characters are removed. Internet memes sometimes represent everyday problems.

Modern memes can generally be described as more visually (rather than contextually) humorous, absurd, niche, diverse and self-referential than earlier forms. As a result, they are less intuitive and are less likely to be fully understood by a wider audience. By the mid-2010s, they began to arise first in the form of "dank" memes, a sub-genre of memes usually involving meme formats in a different way to the image macros that were in large use before. The term "dank", which means "a cold, damp place", was later adapted by marijuana smokers to refer to high-quality marijuana, and then became an ironic term for a type of meme, also becoming synonymous for "cool". This term originally meant a meme that was significantly different from the norm but is now used mainly to differentiate these modern types of memes from other, older types such as image macros. Dank memes can also refer to those which are "exceptionally unique or odd". They have been described as "Internet in-jokes" that are "so played out that they become funny again" or are "so nonsensical that they are hilarious". A highly prevalent meme at the beginning of this era was the 'montage parody'. These were videos which sought to ironically exaggerate the visual effects used by video game content creators; some elements of these memes have carried on for years after their initial popularity.

The formats are usually from popular television shows, movies, or video games and users then add humorous text and images over it. The culture surrounding memes, especially dank memes, grew to the point of the creation of many subcultures surrounding them. For instance, a "meme market", satirizing on the kind of talks and stocks found normally on Wall Street, was created in September 2016. Originally started on Reddit as r/MemeEconomy, people would only jokingly "buy" or "sell" shares in a meme to indicate how popular a meme was thought to be. The market is seen as a way to show how people assign value to commonplace and otherwise valueless things such as memes.

One example of a dank meme is "Who Killed Hannibal", which is made of two frames from a 2013 episode of The Eric Andre Show. The meme features the host Andre shooting his co-host Buress in the first frame and then lamenting that his co-host has been shot in the next, with Andre often depicted blaming someone else for the shot. This was then adapted to other situations, such as baby boomers blaming millennials for problems that they allegedly caused.

Dank memes also stem from interesting real-life images that are shared or remixed many times. So-called "moth" memes (often stylized as "möth") came about after a Reddit user posted a close up picture of a moth that they had found outside their window onto the r/creepy subreddit. The image became popular and began to be used in memes; according to Chris Grinter, a lepidopterist from the California Academy of Sciences, moth memes gained recognition because of the inexplicability surrounding moths' attraction to lamps.

Irony and absurdism

Example of a "deep-fried" meme without any context. Surrealist and nonsensical themes are typical of modern memes

Many modern memes stem from nonsense or otherwise unrelated phrases that are repeated and placed onto other formats. One example of this is "they did surgery on a grape," from a video of a da Vinci Surgical System performing test surgery on a grape. People sharing the post tended to add the same caption to it ("they did surgery on a grape"), and eventually created a satirical image with several layers of captions on it. Memes such as this one continue to propagate as people start to include the phrase in different, otherwise unrelated memes.

The increasing trend towards irony in meme culture has resulted in absurdist memes not unlike postmodern art. Many Internet memes have several layers of meaning built off of other memes, not being understandable unless the viewer has seen all previous memes. "Deep-fried" memes, memes that have been distorted and run through several filters, are often strange to one not familiar with them. An example of these memes is the "E" meme, a picture of Markiplier photoshopped onto Lord Farquaad from the film Shrek, photoshopped into a scene from Mark Zuckerberg's hearing in Congress. "Surreal" memes are based on the idea of increasing layers of irony so that they are not understandable by popular culture or corporations. This strange irony was discussed in the Washington Post article "Why is millennial humor so weird?" to show the disconnect from how millennials and other generations conceive of humor; the article itself also became a meme where people photoshopped examples of deep-fried and surreal memes onto the article to make fun of the point of the article and the abstraction of meme culture.

Short-form video

After the success of the application Vine, a format of memes emerged in the form of short videos and scripted sketches. Vine, in spite of its closure in early 2017, has still retained relevance through uploads of viral vines in compilations onto other sharing social media sites such as Twitter and YouTube. Since Vine's shutdown, the service TikTok has been described as a better version of Vine and many comparisons have been made between the two platforms; also based on the upload of short-form videos, TikTok, however, allows videos and memes up to a minute in length rather than six seconds.

The short-form videos created on sites like Vine and TikTok found use in being posted on other social media sites, such as Twitter, as a form of reacting and responding to other posts. These videos become replicated into other contexts and often become part of Internet culture. An example of a TikTok meme is the cosplay by Nyannyancosplay juxtaposed to the musical track "Mia Khalifa" by iLoveFriday. This meme became known as Hit or Miss. Hit or Miss has been referenced multiple times, including PewDiePie's 2018 Rewind as one of the most influential memes of the year alongside numerous other influential memes of the year. PewDiePie's 2018 rewind video has been viewed over 70 million times and has 8.9 million likes as of April 28, 2020. Hit or Miss has been remixed as well, including by other social media influencers such as Belle Delphine. SirKibbs' YouTube has uploaded a video of Belle Delphine and Kat (Nyannyancosplay) side-by-side comparison and has garnered 2.7 million views as of April 28, 2020.

Marketing

Public relations, advertising, and marketing professionals have embraced Internet memes as a form of viral marketing and guerrilla marketing to create marketing "buzz" for their product or service. The practice of using memes to market products or services is known as memetic marketing. Internet memes are seen as cost-effective, and because they are a (sometimes self-conscious) fad, they are therefore used as a way to create an image of awareness or trendiness. To this end, businesses have taken to attempting two methods of using memes to increase publicity and sales of their company; either creating a meme or attempting to adapt or perpetuate an existing one. Examples of memetic marketing include the FreeCreditReport.com singing ad campaign, the "Nope, Chuck Testa" meme from an advertisement for taxidermist Chuck Testa, Wilford Brimley saying "Diabeetus" from Liberty Medical and the Dumb Ways to Die public announcement ad campaign by Metro Trains Melbourne.

Marketers, for example, use Internet memes to create interest in films that would otherwise not generate positive publicity among critics. The 2006 film Snakes on a Plane generated much publicity via this method. Used in the context of public relations, the term would be more of an advertising buzzword than a proper Internet meme, although there is still an implication that the interest in the content is for purposes of trivia, ephemera, or frivolity rather than straightforward advertising and news.

Brands' use of memes has disadvantages when considering people's perception of a brand. While effective use of a meme can lead to increased sales and attention, seemingly forced, unoriginal, or unfunny usage of memes can negatively impact the brand as a whole. For instance, the fast food company Wendy's began a social media approach in 2017 that heavily featured memes and was initially met with success, resulting in an almost 50% profit growth that year; however, the strategy has also backfired when sharing memes that are controversial or otherwise negatively perceived by consumers.

By context

Politics

As internet memes become a common means of online expression, they become quickly used by those seeking to express political opinions or to actively campaign for (or against) a political entity. In some ways, they can be seen as a modern form of the political cartoon, offering up a way to democratize political commentary.

Elections

Early examples of political memes can be seen from those resulting from the Dean Scream. Another example can be seen from MyDavidCameron.com, a website that allowed users to change the text of a British Conservative election campaign poster featuring David Cameron from the 2010 general election. This website was often used to produce memes that replaced the original slogan with a series of exaggerated claims or sarcastic fake campaign promises along with derision of David Cameron's airbrushed appearance.

Within each subsequent election, and the growing importance of visual communications due to the Internet and social media, memes have become a more important element within political campaigns as fringe communities have shaped broader discourse through the use of Internet memes. For example, Ted Cruz's 2016 Republican presidential bid was damaged by Internet memes that speculated he was the Zodiac Killer.

Another internet meme was created from the 2012 US presidential debate surrounding United States politician Mitt Romney's usage of the phrase "binders full of women". Internet meme creators quickly created "My Binders Full of Women Exploded", referencing the Korean pop song "Gangnam style" by overlaying the politician's quote onto a frame from Psy's music video where paper blows around him. This internet meme specifically indexes the central attribute of intertextuality by blending together pop culture with politics.

There has further been academic research that provides evidence that the use of memes during elections has a role to play in informing the public. In a study of 378 Internet memes posted across Facebook during the 2017 general election, McLoughlin and Southern found memes were a widely shared conduit for basic political information to audiences who often did not seek it out. Indeed, a fifth of all political memes posted during the election referenced a political policy which was part of a political parties mandate, while messages promoting people to vote were shared more than 160,000 times, suggesting memes have a small role to play in increasing voter turnout. Satirical memes that express political opinions are effective in not only informing others but also driving political debate and engagement with politics by offering an easy and even fun way to talk about important issues.

Some political campaigns have begun to explicitly taken advantage of the increasing influence of memes; as part of the 2020 US presidential campaign, Michael Bloomberg sponsored a number of Instagram accounts with over 60 million collective followers to post memes related to the Bloomberg campaign. Similar to criticisms against corporations who use meme marketing, the campaign was faulted for treating meme culture as an advertisement or something that can be bought.

The 2020 Presidential Campaign of Kanye West quickly became a meme, following its announcement on Twitter, with numerous celebrities and influencers endorsing the rapper out of irony. Other personalities began announcing their own satirical presidential campaigns, parodying West.

Social movements

Memes can play a significant role in various forms of activism.

The Occupy Wall Street (OWS) protest movement saw a rise in internet memes after gaining attention on social media. All internet memes that were created and shared during the movement were very important in mediated discussions surrounding the OWS. Typical phrases such as "We Are the 99%" and "This is what democracy looks like", were remixed into memes and subsequently posted in the discussion board of OWS on popular social media sites such as Reddit, Tumblr, and 4chan. Those who actively participated in the movement conversed through these visuals.

Culture

Gender

Internet memes have been used in the context of gender and the LGBT issues on both sides of the issue. For example, the phrase, "I sexually identify as an attack helicopter," is a meme used to mock the concept of non-binary genders. In contrast, memes supporting the LGBT community also exist. Memes about the incel community deal with issues of feminism and toxic masculinity; In this way, they often serve as ways to marginalize or draw attention to social problems depending on the punchline.

Religion

Internet memes have also been used in the context of religion.

Copyright

The eligibility of any memes to get copyright protection depends on the copyright law of the country in which such protection is sought. Some of the most popular formats of memes include cinematographic stills, personal or stock photographs, rage comics, and illustrations meant to be a meme, and the copyright implications differ for each of these different formats. There is precedent both for memes to be in violation of copyright and in other memes having copyrights of their own.

If it is found that the meme has made use of a copyrighted work, such as the movie still or photograph without due permission from the original owner, it would amount to copyright infringement. Rage comics and memes created for the sole purpose of becoming memes would normally be original works of the creator and therefore, the question of infringing other copyright work does not arise. In a cinematographic still, part of the entire end product is taken out of context and presented solely for its face value. The still is generally accompanied by a superimposed text of which conveys a distinctive idea or comment, such as the Boromir meme or "Gru's Plan". This does not mean that all memes made from movie still or photographs are infringing copyright. There are defenses available for such use in various jurisdictions which could exempt the meme from attracting liability for the infringement.

United States

Under United States copyright law, a creation receives copyright protection if it satisfies four conditions under 17 U.S.C. § 102. For a meme to get copyright protection, it would have to satisfy four conditions:

  1. It falls under one of the categories of work which is protected under the law
  2. It is an "expression"
  3. It has a modest amount of creativity
  4. It is "fixed".

Memes can be considered pictorial, graphical or motion picture, and so are subject to copyright law As such, memes are protected under copyright under the same conditions as these mediums, including concepts such as the low threshold of originality for what constitutes creativity (as demonstrated by Feist Publications, Inc., v. Rural Telephone Service Co). Since a meme is essentially a comment, satire, ridicule or expression of an emotion it constitutes the expression of an idea. Memes are contained in the medium of the Internet and so are fixed expressions by 17 U.S.C. § 101.

Fair use

Fair use is a defense under US Copyright Law which protects work that has made using other copyrighted works. The section provides that if a copyrighted work is reproduced "for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching [...], scholarship or research", it would not amount to infringement. Notably, for memes, the use of the term "such as" in the section denotes that the list is not exhaustive but merely illustrative. Furthermore, the factors mentioned in the section are subjective in nature and the weight of each factor varies on a case to case basis.

The four factors are:

  1. The purpose or character of use,
  2. The nature of the copyrighted work,
  3. The amount and substantiality of the portion used, and
  4. Effect on the market.

Many memes are transformative in nature as they have no relation to the original work and the motive behind the communication of the meme is personal, in terms of disseminating humor to the public; such memes, being transformative, would be covered by fair use. However, copying memes that are made for the sole purpose of being memes would not enjoy this protection as there is no transformation—the copying has the same purpose as the original meme which is to communicate humorous or entertaining anecdotes. Purpose and character of use weigh in against memes which have been used for commercial purposes because in those cases, the work has not been created for the communication of humor but for economic gain. For example, Grumpy Cat won $710,001 in a copyright lawsuit against the beverage company Grenade which used the Grumpy Cat image on its roasted coffee line and t-shirts.

The nature of the copyrighted work asks what the differences between the meme and the other material are. This factor applies to many types of memes because the original work is an artistic creation that has been published and thus the latter enjoys protection under copyright which the memes are violating. However, as memes are transformative, this factor does not have much weight.

The amount and substantiality of the portion used tests not only the quantity of the work copied but the quality that is copied as well. Memes copy only a small portion of a complete film, whereas for rage comics and personal photographs, the entire portion has been used to create the meme. Despite this, all categories of memes could fall under fair use because the text that is added to those images adds value, without which it would just be pictures. Moreover, the heart of the work is not affected because the still/picture is taken out of context and portrays something entirely different from what the image originally wanted to depict.

Lastly, the effect on the market offers court analysis on whether the meme would cause harm to the actual market of the original copyright work and also the harm it could cause to the potential market. The target audience for the original work and meme is entirely different as the latter is taken out of the context of the original and created for use and dissemination on social media. Rage comics and memes created for the purpose of being memes are an exception to this because the target audience for both is the same and copied work could infringe on the potential market of the original. Warner Brothers was sued for infringing the Nyan Cat meme by using it its game Scribblenauts.

India

Under Section 2(c) of the Indian Copyright Act, 1957, a meme could be classified as an 'artistic work' which states that an artistic work includes painting, sculpture, drawing (including a diagram, map, chart or plan), an engraving or a photograph, whether or not any such work possesses artistic quality. The section uses the phrase "whether or not possessing artistic quality", the memes that are rage comics or those such as Keyboard Cat would enjoy protection as they are original creations in the form a painting, drawing, photograph or short video clip, despite not having artistic quality. Memes that made from cinematograph still or photographs, the original image in the background for the meme would also be protected as the picture or the still from the series/movie is an 'artistic work'. These memes are a modification of that already existing artistic work with some little amount of creativity and therefore, they would also enjoy copyright protection.

Fair dealing

India follows a fair dealing approach as an exception to copyright infringement under Section 52(1)(a) for the purposes of private or personal use, criticism or review. The analysis requires three steps: the amount and substantiality of dealing, the purpose of copying, and the effect on potential markets.

The amount of sustainability of dealing asks about how much of the original work is used in the meme, or how the meme transforms the original content. A meme makes use to existing copyright work whether it is a cinematograph still, rage comic, personal photograph or a meme made for the purpose of being a meme. However, since a meme is made for comedic purposes, taken out of context of the original work, they are transforming the work and creating a new work.

The purpose of copying factors in the purpose of the meme compared to the purpose of the original work. Under Section 52(1)(a), the purpose is restricted to criticism or review. A meme, as long as it is a parody or a criticism of the original work would be protected under the exception, but once an element of commercialization comes in, they would no longer be exempted and because the purpose no longer falls under the those mentioned in the section . When the Indian comedic group All India Bakchod (AIB) parodied Game of Thrones through a series of memes, the primary purpose was to advertise products of companies that have endorsed the group and thus was not fair dealing.

Memes generally do not have an effect on the potential market for a work. There must be no intention on part of the infringer to compete with the original owner of the work and derive profits from it. Since memes are generally meant for comedic value and have no intention to supplant the market of the original creator, they fall within the ambit of this section.

Stem cell

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia https://en.wikipedia.org/w...