COLLEGE STUDENT SOCIAL MEDIA USAGE Claudia Cabral 8
my positionality as a Generation-Z college student would be the proximity and depth of access I
have towards understanding the issues of higher education via the internet (Turner 2015) through
my own lived experience and studies. I also have the privilege of being “meme”-literate and able
to understand the cultural and thematic usage of memes in present-day society. For example,
there are certain meme “templates” that already come with an assumed message, theme,
sentiment, and/or origin that certain other generations without such exposure might not have the
initial depth of understanding without additional research. In the spots where I did not have as
much depth of understanding, I referred to KnowYourMeme.com (Literally Media Ltd. 2021), a
popular crowd-sourced meme encyclopedia, to fill in the gaps.
Due to my positionality as a white, European, politically progressive, female who has
been situated in several Western-centric educational institutions from pre-kindergarten through
college, I am at risk of potential cultural biases (Sarniak 2015). My own racial/ethnic, political,
gender/sexual, national, educational, etc. identities have the potential to influence how I interpret
qualitative data. I am also subject to the halo effect (Sarniak 2015) due to the potential for data to
be interpreted in a positive, negative, or neutral light depending on which how holistically I
choose to view it from. I will not only challenge myself to conduct my data analyses through
multiple cultural lenses, but I will also take note of arguments that positively, negatively, and/or
neutrally represent a certain sentiment towards any of the tags in my selective coding phase, as
they arise. By including this in my research process, I am attempting to provide as much of an
objective metric to produce and evaluate my results.
There are ethical challenges in conducting Facebook research. An article called “Time,
Tastes, and Ties (T3)” (Lewis et al. 2008) was reviewed (Zimmer 2010) to highlight some
important issues regarding how easily identifiable Facebook users can be, especially college
students, leading to a debate on what constitutes social media research as “public” and users as
human research subjects, especially in the “observational research” I am conducting (Moreno et
al. 2013:709). Even if I were to make confidential any personally-identifying information, such
as a ZM4SQ member’s self-reported name, location, college/university, etc., one could easily
look up them up using direct quotes from Facebook captions or group member comments in the
ZM4SQ Facebook group. Luckily, the admins of the ZM4SQ Facebook group have provided
eight guidelines that must be agreed to before getting accepted into the group—one of which
alerts members that this is a “public group” and thus, “any sensitive content, especially of an