The document discusses how humor promotes community building and the exchange of ideas online, allowing for fluid constructions of identity and creativity. It examines how different forms of humor online signal perceived spaces and how shared humor suggests shared group values. The document also questions how digital experiences are changing humor, how online humor aids in constructing multiple identities, and how anonymity can paradoxically increase a sense of belonging to a group.

1. “THAT’S WHAT SHE SAID”
Online Humor, Performance, and Collaboration
Megan K. Mize

2. HUMOR & ONLINE
COMMUNITIES
• Promotes community building
• Encourages the exchange of ideas
• Decreases fear of judgment
• Allows creation of multiple spaces
• Permits fluid constructions of identity
• Enables Creativity and Productivity

3. DIGITAL SPACES
Different Forms of Humor Signal Perceived Spaces

4. CONSTRUCTION OF
GROUP IDENTITY
Shared Humor Suggests Shared Values

5. BEYOND LOLCATS
Collaborative Humor Emerges During Online Composition
Even Within Academia

6. LITERATURE AND THEORY
• Ron and Suzanne Scollon: Sociolinguistic “face” as “The negotiated public image,
mutually granted each other by participants in a communicative event” (45).
• Paul Willis: Participatory culture as one in which, “people creatively respond to a plethora of
electronic signals and cultural commodities in ways that surprise their makers, finding meanings and
identities never meant to be there…”
• Gregg Camfield: “humor opens positive cognitive possibilities…even creating new neural
pathways, open spaces for learning.”
• Katherine Hayles: “Current evidence suggests that we are now in a new phase of the
dance between epigenetic changes in brain function and the evolution of new reading and writing
modalities on the Web.”
• Cathy Davidson: “As long as we focus on the object we know, we will miss the new one
we need to see. The process of unlearning in order to relearn demands a new concept of
knowledge not as thing but as a process, not as a noun but as a verb.”

7. QUESTIONS
How is the digital experience changing humor?
How does online humor aid in the construction of multiple identities for a single
individual?
How might the anonymity of some sites actually increase that sense of belonging?

8. QUESTIONS
• Are the stakes then higher for
academics who must identify
themselves? Does humor offer a
safeguard for potential missteps in
the performance?
• How might humor in digital spaces
function as a valuable cultural tool,
not simply in terms of critique and
subversion, but in terms of
productivity?
• Is online humor a homogenizing
force?