Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Ohio University, 2021, Communication Studies (Communication)

Depression memes represent attunements toward suffering in post-modernity, which is characterized by a heightened awareness to symptoms of depression as inherent elements of daily living. Internet memers comment “mood” on markers of suffering loosely correlated with depression symptoms but largely inferring the inherent heaviness of post-modern life. Theories of ambient rhetoric (Rickert, 2013) suggest that rhetorical texts are the “scaffolding” that constitute the realities in which we live. This dissertation delves into two major components of ambient rhetoric (affect theory and circulation theory) to support a broader project linking depression memes as ambient, ambivalent building blocks of contemporary mental health discourses. Ambivalence (Phillips & Milner, 2017) refers to the mixed quality of internet feelings. Utilizing a sample of depression memes from Reddit, along with a variety of other rhetorical texts, I make a case for depression memes as the ambient “scaffolding” (Rickert, 2013) that supports post-modern existence.

Committee: Roger Aden (Committee Chair); Prashant Rajan (Committee Member); Benjamin Bates (Committee Member); Ryan Shepherd (Committee Member) Subjects: Communication; Rhetoric