Key terms:
Meme: an image, video, piece of text, etc., typically humorous in nature, that is copied and spread rapidly by internet users, often with slight variations.
Memeification: the practice of designing memes and infographics for online consumption that condense complex issues into an easily read format for delivering information through effective, contagious messages.
Hot-take: a piece of commentary, typically produced quickly in response to a recent event, whose primary purpose is to attract attention.
Dissociation: the action of disconnecting or separating or the state of being disconnected. In psychiatry: separation of normally related mental processes, resulting in one group functioning independently from the rest, leading in extreme cases to disorders such as Dissociative Identity Disorder.
Self-regulation: the conscious and non-conscious processes that enable.
individuals to guide their thoughts, feelings, and behaviours purposefully (Kelley et al., 2019).
Procrastination: the act or habit of putting off or delaying, especially something requiring immediate attention, despite being worse off for the delay. (Steel 2007)
Scrolling: the action of moving displayed text or graphics up, down, or across on a computer screen in order to view different parts of them.
Displacement-activity: an animal or human activity that seems inappropriate, such as head-scratching when confused, considered to arise unconsciously when a conflict between antagonistic urges cannot be resolved.
Scrolling is now a massive part of my displacement-activity/ procrastination behaviour. As a younger person, I used to procrastinate doing my school work by devouring YA sci-fi fantasy novels at an alarming rate. Now, I am conscious that I am taking part in a similar activity, except that I am absorbing information by reading small-scale essays and infographics via social media.
As it happens, I was procrastinating, scrolling through Facebook, when I saw the above. It was posted by a group I follow called the Autistic Women and Non-Binary Network. The post stopped me in my tracks, interrupting the supposedly ‘mindless’ scrolling activity I was engaged in. This Tweet from a complete stranger resonated deeply with me. Had my habits as a child been an example of my need to dissociate which had gone unrecognised until now? If so, then what is the relationship between dissociation and procrastination?
A pinch of salt
Obviously I am aware that the majority of the thoughts, opinions and commentary online must be taken with a pinch, if not a tablespoon, of salt. There is a tendency on social media to present what is colloquially known as ‘hot-takes’ as fact while giving little evidence to how you arrived at that conclusion or citing sources. There is also a trend towards the ‘memeification’ of complex topics, such as psychology, (e.g. 10 signs your partner is a narcissist) in an attempt to be helpful and give people information in easy to digest chunks. However, this often leads to users diagnosing themselves and one another with behaviours they are only aware of via infographics and memes they have seen on social media – not through clinical means. This Tweet could be an example of both those phenomena at work.
This is partially due to the psychology behind memes or information presented on the internet as a whole. In an article for Psychology Today, Ira Hyman details several reasons for why memes are so widely believed by internet users, even when there is no verifiable evidence that the memes are factual. In the main, it appears that the act of adding text to an image makes both appear more accurate than if they were presented separately. This is known as the ‘truthiness effect’ (Newman, Garry, Bernstein, Kantner, & Lindsay, 2012). Coupled with repeatedly viewing the same meme – or type of meme – while scrolling through news feeds, the brain becomes subconsciously conditioned to accept the veracity of the format. Essentially, repetition and good use of photoshop can make any statement, even a false one, seem more legitimate than actual facts.
“When I encounter a meme, I don’t always bother to check if the statement attached to the cute puppy photo is true. I see it and I scan onward. Then I see it again and again. I don’t realize how often I’ve seen it. But the idea is easier to process and may feel true.”
Ira Hyman, The Menace of Memes. Psychology Today 2019.
Particularly with reference to controversial opinions or even new and interesting takes on a previously well-established phenomenon, making a meme or a Twitter thread on it instantly creates a feeling of familiarity and legitimacy that long-form articles and books are challenged to compete with. Use of language is also a factor here, presenting ideas as statements of facts rather than theories will instantly garner more attention and feel more true to others. We need look no further for evidence of this than Trumpian rhetoric over the last 4 years.
However, it could also be argued that:
- An opinion being controversial does not make it untrue.
- It is hard to give sources in a post of 140 characters or less.
- Disseminating useful information to people in bite-sized portions with attention-grabbing phrasing can be an important step in provoking the curious into doing their own research.
- If the information is an opinion, regardless of how it is phrased or presented, that opinion could be the result of a large degree of self-reflection and analysis. It should not be dismissed simply because it is not presented academically.
- Social media posts resulting from self-reflection and analysis could be a form of autoethnographic research in the correct context.
- For those who feel that the post rings true for them, it been helpful and possibly validated or explained a behaviour that has been a mystery up till that point.
All of this has lead me to question: can memes and Twitter threads be a useful support or provocation for deeper research on a topic? Particularly when that topic relates to a situation or pattern of behaviour which varies from person to person, eg. procrastination?
Dissociation and Self-regulation
In his work How Can Self-Regulation Enhance Our Understanding of Trauma and Dissociation? Julian Ford notes that:
Dissociation can be understood as the result of an involuntary shift from modes of self-regulation that facilitate biopsychosocial development to threat-related defensive modes (Ford, 2009).
From How Can Self-Regulation Enhance Our Understanding of Trauma and Dissociation? Julian Ford PhD (Routledge 2012)
It is my understanding, that dissociation occurs when a person’s ability to self-regulate is either interrupted or overloaded in some capacity. According to the charity Mind, “many people may experience dissociation (dissociate) during their life” and the experiences of people who do dissociate vary from person to person. Dissociation can be a choice: as part of meditation, religious ceremony or cultural ritual, a way of self-regulating or calming down or a response to a traumatic event or abuse.
Examples of mild, common dissociation include daydreaming, highway hypnosis or “getting lost” in a book or movie, all of which involve “losing touch” with awareness of one’s immediate surroundings.
American Psychiatric Association via the Sidran Institute for Traumatic Stress & Advocacy. Bold highlight my own.
If getting lost in a book or some other form of media is a common form of mild dissociation, it could be argued that my procrastination behaviour as a teen reading books and my current scrolling habits, are both forms of dissociation that many people experience, particularly when they are avoiding a task that triggers deep-seated emotional fears or anxieties or that feels unmanageable and scary. The act of procrastinating is frequently defined as putting off or delaying an activity despite the anticipation of negative consequences if the activity is not done. For many, the act of procrastinating involves doing a completely different and unrelated (but necessary) task that feels more manageable than the one they are avoiding. A personal example would be me choosing to fold laundry or having a sudden urge to clean the kitchen when I am well aware I have a deadline for a project looming close on the horizon. However, I would not necessarily categorise this behaviour solely as procrastination. In my opinion, the combined action of putting off till tomorrow what we can do today, and the decision to do a completely unrelated and less nerve-wracking task in order to self-regulate emotionally amounts to what is commonly known as displacement activity (see key terms above).
Procrastination and Self-regulation
Taking all this into consideration, the question then becomes what is the relationship between self-regulation and procrastination behaviours? One of the most useful texts I found on this topic is Iselin Fridén’s thesis Procrastination as a Form of Self-Regulation Failure (University of Skovde, 2020). Fridén categorises self-regulation behaviours as having three essential components. Awareness of:
- the intended state that is desired. For example, a chronic procrastinator wanting to complete an assignment on time with minimal stress.
- monitoring, the ability to compare one’s actions and trajectory in the present and anticipate how those actions might affect their intentions or goals in the future. E.g. a chronic procrastinator choosing to scroll through Instagram despite their goal or intended state of completing an assignment on time with minimal stress.
- regulation itself. The ability to understand how one’s mental, physical or emotional state may impact their ability to monitor their behaviour and acting accordingly to regulate or change factors. An example of this would be a procrastinator being well aware that fatigue affects their ability to concentrate and that they have a deadline approaching, but staying up late binge-watching shows on Netflix despite this knowledge.
It follows then that self-regulation or the dysfunction of self-regulation is closely related to modalities of executive function, in that they both pertain to behaviour that involves the setting of long-term goals and working towards them. Fridén notes that the specific executive functions relating to self- regulation are:
- Inhibition – the ability to control one’s behaviour and override a strong temptation to do something if it interferes with a long term goal.
- Updating – (aka working memory) the ability to keep information in mind and work with it despite distractions or other factors demanding attention.
- Shifting – (aka cognitive flexibility) the ability to switch between tasks and perspectives and maintain focus.
In this way, executive functions actively work to maintain and uphold self-regulation. However, for some people either one or both of these ‘circuits’ in the brain have been interrupted, leading to procrastination behaviours, mild dissociation and displacement activity. In many cases, procrastination behaviours are exacerbated by fatigue, burn out and traumatic situations such as the pandemic.
Validity
This blog started with a Twitter post that lead me to question whether memes could be a valid form of research, at least as a provocation for deeper research and understanding of a very complex subject matter in a short space of time. I am aware that there is a large degree of confirmation bias involved here. I am researching this topic, and so what ‘rings true’ for me or the Tweets and memes I choose to study and use as evidence for my research will largely be relational to my interest. Further to this, if I recognise the veracity of a post I see online, it is likely that I will be able to find some piece of secondary research to back up my use of it (this blog being an example) simply because of the nature of search engines and the contextual or de-contextual nature of quotes being what they are. However, I am not convinced that confirmation bias is always a bad thing, this is how communities are formed and how people find supportive environments that enable them to understand their specific circumstances. An example of this could be Black Twitter or Disabled Twitter. For me as a researcher studying procrastination in education, finding threads like the ones below which convey the first-hand experience of a person with ADHD struggling to cope with the pressures of learning structures that have been designed for neurotypical people is extremely helpful. Not only does it give me a better understanding of how I can modify my teaching to better accommodate students who are neurodiverse, but it also provides a different perspective on procrastination behaviours outside of a purely academic context. In this instance, Twitter threads and memes like the ones below could be seen as a form of autoethnographic research (Schroeder 2017), providing a perspective on procrastination that is person-centred and allows for a greater understanding of what procrastinators experience beyond a medicalised, academic, ableist lens.
Perspectives on productivity and procrastination from neurodiverse folks
Memes about procrastination
Bibliography
Hyman, I., (2019). The Menace of Memes. [online] Psychology Today. Available at: <https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/mental-mishaps/201910/the-menace-memes>
Fridén, I., (2020) Procrastination as a Form of Self-Regulation Failure. Dissertation. [online] Available at:
<https://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:1446687/FULLTEXT01.pdf>
Julian D. Ford PhD (2013) How Can Self-Regulation Enhance Our Understanding of Trauma and Dissociation?, Journal of Trauma & Dissociation, 14:3, 237 – 250, DOI: 10.1080/15299732.2013.769398 Available at: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/15299732.2013.769398?scroll=top&needAccess=true
Wang, P., (2018). What Are Dissociative Disorders?. [online] Psychiatry.org. Available at: <https://www.psychiatry.org/patients-families/dissociative-disorders/what-are-dissociative-disorders#:~:text=Dissociative%20disorders%20involve%20problems%20with,every%20area%20of%20mental%20functioning.>
Steel, P. (2007). The nature of procrastination: A meta-analytic and theoretical review of
quintessential self-regulatory failure. Psychological Bulletin, 133(1), 65–94.
doi:10.1037/0033-2909.133.1.65
Kelley, N. J., Gallucci, A., Riva, P., Romero Lauro, L. J., & Schmeichel, B. J. (2019).
‘Stimulating self-regulation: A review of non-invasive brain stimulation studies
of goal-directed behaviour’. Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience, 12(337), 1–20.
doi:10.3389/fnbeh.2018.00337
Schroeder, R. (2017) ‘Evaluative Criteria for Autoethnographic Research: Who’s to Judge?’ in The Self as Subject: Autoethnographic Research into Identity, Culture, and Academic Librarianship. Deitering, A.M., R. Schroeder & R. Stoddart (Eds.). ACRL Publications, Chicago, IL. Chapter 15.