The National Communication Association (for all of its issues) still feels like my academic home. This feeling goes beyond its direct connection to my department (I’m part of the Department of Art & Communication and the program lead for Digital Communication & Content Creation). I am directly involved in four interest divisions (mass communication; game studies; communication and the future; & human communication and technology). The Association also publishes twelve journals across these 70 divisions, caucuses, and sections, promoting the research members produce across the organization. One of those journals, in its infinite wisdom, accepted an article that addresses one of the concerns I had about my own research and the agenda I have set for it over the past two decades.
At the beginning of the year, as I sifted through the papers and presentations I’d done during my time at Ohio Northern, I noticed an emerging theme. It wasn’t a traditional research agenda statement, nor did it come from my evaluations. It was a Facebook post that shaped how I identified the work I was currently doing and had completed. The statement was: “Looking over my notes for next semester made me realize that my research foci for the past year were DIONS (digital communication, Internet culture, online communities, network society, and scalable selves) and multimedia journalism.” At this point, DIONS was a nebulous construction that seemed to fit the keywords from my books, chapters, articles, and presentations in a mostly consistent way. I didn’t have a model or the means to articulate this idea. Therefore, I wanted to craft a paper that would begin to shape this idea. Normally, when I try to build out such a theory, I use case studies.
I tend to like Hayden Coombs’ (2022) conceptualization of the case study as a “bounded system” that allows an investigation of a problem to “gain an understanding of a real-life phenomenon.” It is through a “detailed and nuanced understanding of the case subject” that one can “generate new theories or insights” (para. 1). I often like case studies to connect the abstract understanding of the world that I have concocted in my brain with a single issue to test the validity of such an argument. Discussions with my former students led me to identify a phenomenon that could shape the DIONS Nexus, and it fell within the realm of previous research as memetic celebritism.
I regularly received aura-farming GIFs through the group chats and Facebook pages I belong to. Sharing the GIF featuring Rayyan Arkan Dikha as “The Reaper” in front of his book paralleled a conversation I was having with an alumnus about the nature of memetic songs. That conversation pointed me back to the TikTok video of Dikha with Melly Mike’s “Young Black & Rich” as one type of memetic song. I thought this might be a good phenomenon to use for the DIONS Nexus case study.
I approached the original case study with five groupings of questions, each based on one of the nexus’s five dimensions. For the digital communication practices, I focused on the following four research questions:
- What affordances and limitations affect a platform, person, group, or piece of content’s ability to exchange information and/or interact with others through computer-mediated communication practices?
- What affordances and limitations of a platform or communication technology shape whether a cultural performance can circulate, and to whom?
- What technological practices and sociological procedures govern whether a cultural artifact remains localized or becomes globally visible?
- How do average Internet users encode and decode these information exchanges and social interactions around a phenomenon that goes viral?
For Internet culture and its artifacts, I focused on the following four research questions:
- What conventions translate societal practices into cultural artifacts that community members can share online?
- What cultural interpretive frames determine which meanings of a performance “stick” globally versus which remain locally contained?
- What cultural capital operates within online communities around a viral phenomenon, and who has access to it?
- How does the nature of Internet culture help define and mainstream a phenomenon that goes viral?
For online communities and their membership, I focused on the following four research questions:
- How do community members collectively organize within online spaces to develop shared values, behaviors, attitudes, and rituals that define their community identity?
- What distinct interpretive communities form around a memetic artifact, and how do they read the phenomenon differently?
- How do individuals move between different community readings of the same artifact?
- How do community members adopt and ritualize a phenomenon that becomes a viral artifact?
For the network society and the connections that drive it, I focused on the following four research questions:
- How do platform algorithms and network structures shape who has visibility, influence, and economic opportunity within online spaces?
- How do algorithmic visibility mechanisms determine which performances achieve viral velocity, and whose interests do these mechanisms serve?
- What hub-node structures amplify certain works online, and how do endorsements within and outside the network reshape distribution patterns?
- How does the network society amplify and process a phenomenon that goes viral?
For the scalable self and the celebrities that come from it, I focused on the following four research questions:
- How do people construct scalable versions of themselves online, and what agency do they retain when platform algorithms and audience dynamics partially construct their online identities?
- How does an individual become a scalable version of themselves through platform-mediated extraction?
- How do individuals manage multiple, contradictory scalable selves across different platform communities and audience contexts?
- How do average Internet users transform someone’s identity to the point that the general public can mimic the core elements of a social and/or cultural phenomenon and the people associated with that phenomenon?
Those twenty questions eventually became three research questions used in the Dikha case study, which became “Aura farming with memetic communication: Framing celebritism through memetic layers and the DIONS Nexus of Cyberstudies.”
- What characteristics of celebritism did Dikha acquire through his presence and authority in the original performance context?
- What themes were transmitted, and what disappeared, when Dikha’s performance became memetic?
- What aspects are co-dimensionally connected between digital communication practices, Internet cultural artifacts, online communities’ characteristics, network societal algorithms, and the scalable selves that people become online that account for the successful rise of Dikha in becoming “The Reaper?”
I was most interested in studying the co-dimensional aspects of the research, as I struggled to explain the phenomena that become flashpoints online. Dikha becoming the symbol of aura farming was one of the most obvious ones to explore. However, the more I dug into the case study and received feedback, the more a concern emerged. As a point of scholarly reflection, the question came up of whether I wasn’t exploiting Dikha similarly to Lensa Rams (the TikToker who created the original meme), Travis Kelce (as he was mimicking the dance for his social media audience), Melly Mike (who was using Dikha to promote his music), or even the Indonesian government ministers (who used the meme to build up the visibility of their country). My initial, minor defense was that I wasn’t trying to boost my fame. I felt that digging into the cultural and contextual elements of the original meme would help me better appreciate Dikha and his culture.
This process resulted in my new article, which I will present at the 2026 National Communication Association’s annual conference in New Orleans. I’d be happy to talk to anyone about this article or my latest book, “Writing Multimedia Journalism.”
