Zachary Walton, associate professor of communication, spent the fall semester on sabbatical studying memes involving trolley problems.
Trolley problems are ethical thought experiments that are used to test moral and ethical intuitions. For Walton’s research, he examined 833 images from Trolly problem memes, a Facebook group, between April of 2016 to November of 2019.
Associate professor of communication Zachary Walton. Photo by Day’Vion Smith
“So [I was] working through them, and I had a framework for analysis to see commonalities or patterns that would emerge,” said Walton.
Walton said a lot went into the process from collecting and categorizing to reading a lot of different ways people study memes. Walton also looked at the memes from different perspectives to find whether there was an overall trend, and if so, what it was.
“Before this, I knew how to analyze individual images, but I didn’t know how to analyze huge collection, so sabbatical gave me the chance to really look at the method for studying really diffuse and numerous artifacts like memes,” said Walton.
Walton said being on sabbatical has also helped him as a teacher.
Walton said he cannot wait to share his research in the classroom. He has already presented his research to the C. Henry Smith Scholars, students named by the university’s Special Studies & Honors Committee.
“I will be using [my research] in many of my media classes because memes have a whole language and life, they’re almost like virtual entities, sorta float around, have a lifespan, spawn mutation,” Walton said.
For the second part of his, research Walton plans to move beyond a Facebook group to different internet communities.
“So I will be looking for trolley problem images on 4chan, which is very different because the trolley problem memes on the Facebook group are much tamer than 4chan,” said Walton. “I hypothesize that you have to attach your real name on Facebook and sites like 4chan it’s anonymous and people can be very sexist or awful in general.”
With his research, Walton hopes to present at conferences and possibly publish scholarly articles.
