“It’s Like the Fridge Magnet of the Internet”: Platform Aesthetics, Generational Taste, and the Cross-Cultural Valuation of Good Morning Memes

Abstract

This article investigates the values expressed by good morning memes—an understudied subgenre of social media inspiration featuring a “good day” wish—and the criteria that users from different countries and generational groups adopt to evaluate them. Expressed values were detected through a content analysis of 414 memes in English and Italian, while insights about evaluation were derived from 20 semistructured interviews with American and Italian social media users. Analysis revealed cross-cultural divergences in the core values conveyed in the two subsets, with self-efficacy foregrounded by English memes and met with humorous skepticism by Italian memes. Interview data revealed a cross-generational cleavage in the interpretation of the genre based on communicative values, with younger users negatively evaluating the memes as inauthentic due to a lack of creativity and older users appreciating them as genuine attempts to cultivate affiliation between users. Such generational distinctions emerged as crucial to the establishment of a three-way connection between an imagined audience of older users, content types framed as kitsch such as good morning memes, and specific platforms, especially Facebook. The article concludes that such heuristic associations infuse the ways in which people visually imagine social media platforms, coalescing into recognizable platform aesthetics: notions of what platforms look like based on who we believe inhabits them.