What is it about?
What is the connection between humour, memes, and technology culture? How do the jokes that programmers share bond them together at hackathons, but also create a space that excludes women? Through an ethnography of seven programming competitions or hackathons, this paper argues how the joking about virginity and geeks fuels the misogyny of technology culture.
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Photo by Shuvro Mojumder on Unsplash
Why is it important?
I show how trivial Internet slang, jokes and making fun of masculinity in memes seem inclusive, but work to exclude women and demonise femininity. I also unpicked the line between irony and earnestness in joking about Incels.
Perspectives
I never intended to write this article. I hadn't expected to see memes and jokes being such an important part of forming bonds and friendships at hackathons. It was interesting to be able to ask people directly, in real-time, what their interpretation of the memes they were sharing.
Sian Brooke
London School of Economics and Political Science
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Nice Guys, Virgins, and Incels: Gender in Remixing and Sharing Memes at Hackathons, April 2022, ACM (Association for Computing Machinery),
DOI: 10.1145/3491102.3517627.
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