Date of Award

5-2025

Degree Type

Report

Degree Name

Master of Science (MS)

Department

English

Committee Chair(s)

Lynne S. McNeill (Committee Chair)

Committee

Lynne S. McNeill

Committee

Afsane Rezaeisahraei

Committee

Jeffrey Tolbert

Committee

Catherine Tosenberger

Abstract

Floptok is an online meme-sharing community or subculture that began to take shape in 2021, united by a particular sensibility and set of memetic materials. To outsiders, Floptok is seen as a loud, brash, and often abrasive community whose memes, characterized by low-quality audio and video, often feature “icons”—a range of invented characters and real people—and audio of pop songs heavily edited to feature hypersexual lyrics from the rapper CupcakKe, as well as portions of the 2019 Chinese pop song “Yěhuāxiāng.” This thesis built on scholarship in digital and young people’s folklore in an ethnographic case study of Floptok’s humor and group dynamics in the highly algorithmically mediated online space that is TikTok.

The first section following a review of relevant literature considered Floptok’s tradition of “kidnapping” videos. In the standard format, these videos incorporate text of a commenter asking to be kidnapped or challenging the creator’s kidnapping abilities by claiming to be in an inaccessible location as the foundation of a vernacular animation of a Chinese beauty influencer named Xjiemomo capturing the commenter’s profile picture in a bag and carrying that bag into the basement of some dilapidated house. These videos and their relationships to real and fake bot accounts demonstrated that engagement with legend material can turn towards humor and exaggeration.

Extending this exaggeration, the second section connected Floptok to the concept, sensibility, or (per Susan Sontag) “mode of aestheticism” that is Camp to explain the playful subversion and transgression at the heart of Floptok’s content. From video memes of funeral director Deborah Ali-Williams to CupcakKe Remixes to the community-built lore of Floptok’s imagined island nation, Floptropica, this section argued that the affordances of TikTok enable Flops to center Camp in their community in a way that is not possible offline.

From this examination, I considered the digital mechanisms by which Floptok creates boundaries for community membership and self-corrects its narratives in an imagined community where members are anonymous and unknowable. Together, this thesis showed that, through humor and sensibility, folk groups can maintain cohesion even in depersonalized and meta-referential online spaces like TikTok.

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