Do You Speak Meme? A Dynamic Digital Language for the InformationSociety.

The popularity of social media has made meme culture more popular than ever. As a result, memes have become a digital language that extends beyond digital culture within information societies. Unfortunately, recent studies have not examined diverse factors of meme communication in interactive contexts. This study investigates how memes are used for interactive forum-based communication as cybersecurity groups interact in cyberspace. More specifically, we examine synchronous meme communication between hackers and cyber defender groups from the 2022 Southeast Collegiate Cyber Defense Qualification Competition. We adopt the theoretical lens of information domains to examine interactive meme communication scripts in forum-based interactions. Collective identity and characteristics representing each information society tend to appear in synchronous meme communication between these two groups. This study also identifies unique information representation systems endemic to cyber security society. Moreover, this study interestingly finds that memes describing individual participants’ emotions and attitudes are actively used in synchronous communication. These memes reflect individuals’ emotions, and also describe the attitudes of the participants such as looking down at the opposite team. This phenomenon has rarely been observed in previous studies about meme communication in asynchronous situations.