As an anthropologist and researcher who studies Internet culture, Dr. Crystal Abidin is in the enviable position of looking at memes for work. That’s because memes aren’t just for the lolz, they also can “activate a call to arms,” “seed decision-swinging discourses,” and “slide under the authoritative radar through subversive frivolity,” as she writes in a 2020 paper.

Currently a professor of Internet Studies at Curtin University in Perth, Australia, Dr. Crystal (she asks the public to call her that, following the convention of Malay names) has built a career out of this marriage of high and low. She takes seriously what we put out on the blogosphere and social media (a “visual vernacular”), and extrapolates from that how we form identities and create communities. 

Dr. Crystal has published six books and has five more on the way on topics including TikTok youth culture and influencers. She also often speaks on panels, is interviewed by the press, and organizes events. Part of her productivity comes, she says, from having been a professionally trained musician in the past—before becoming an academic, she was a percussionist in orchestras. 

I caught up with Dr. Crystal to talk about her creative process, how she collaborates, how art fuels her professionally and personally, and the naming system she uses in Google Docs. Our conversation has been edited for clarity. 

Anjie: How do you get ideas for what to work on?

Dr. Crystal: I have a ton of notebooks: one notebook that's maybe something to do with all my work on influencers, one for all my work that [will end up as] long-form books, one for my work as a creative practitioner when I want to set up exhibitions and online events. So, my ideation is continuous from whatever I'm already doing; the pipeline is clear for me for what I want to work on next.

A lot of my ideas come to me when I am idle. Whether on a bus, car or plane, I have my ideation notebook with me. For a tech researcher, I'm actually really low-fi: paper and pen.

From there, I might want to then find links across all these ideas. For some ideas, I need to assess whether I'm the best researcher to do this project. For others, I need to think about how to fold in collaborators. I also get ideas from collaborative generation. When someone approaches me or I approach them, or we come across interesting people and decide to pool our sources together, combine forces and work on something that's at the nexus of both our strengths.

Anjie: How do you translate complicated concepts to a general audience?

Dr. Crystal: A trademark in all my books is graphics. I work with a dedicated group of illustrator research assistants who have been with me for up to six years now. They help me get my ideas down in visual form. The thing I always say is, “I need my theories and academic ideas to make sense to a 60-year-old grandpa doing tai chi in the park.” I need him to understand why I'm doing this and why he should care, even if he may not be interested in internet culture. These visual graphics are there so that people can understand a complex academic theory. 

Anjie: What’s your process when you're working with illustrators?

Dr. Crystal: I’ll give them the complex academic version of it and ask them how we can visually translate that. I might say, “Here's the concept in my brain. If I was a stranger, these are the elements I would think of. Does it match your ideation?” In other cases I'm very clear on exactly what I want, I give them a kindergartener's version of a sketch and they translate that into a more sophisticated version. 

I've literally given some of my illustrator RAs Spotify playlists to say, “When people go through this website about this project, I want them to feel like this song when you're floating in the cloud.” They get the aesthetic, the ambience, and I rely on their expertise to translate that into an image or a sketch.

The most important thing to acknowledge is that, while they're learning to speak my language, I'm learning to speak their process. I'm learning along the way how that industry works and how we are able to feed into each other's work.

Anjie: You are an extremely productive researcher. How are you able to produce so much?

Dr. Crystal: Structurally, my job is designed for me to focus on research full-time. In my current position, I'm a hundred percent full-time researcher. And secondly, I'm a planning type of person, so my calendar looks a bit like a jigsaw. Planning, I think, is a discipline that has come from my days as a musician. If you missed one week of practice, you might undo months and months of work. 

I also think the most important thing that helps my productivity is knowing when to let go. When projects are at a dead end, where collaborations are not working out, personalities or working patterns may not be compatible, you need to be able to know which opportunities you're happy to give up. Knowing which deadlines can be pushed out, which projects can be extended, which burning idea can wait a little bit. All of that also helps the process of focusing on what needs to be done.

Anjie: What software are you using to organize all your work?

Dr. Crystal: My only online system is Outlook's calendar because my institute insists on it. My “software” lives in the way I label and sub-divide various folders across various hard drives. 

Anjie: What does that look like when you collaborate with other researchers?

Dr. Crystal: Working across intercultural communities and groups, I find that sometimes, the basic is even asking, “Are you an email person? A Slack person?” If you're a verbal person, “Are you a Zoom person or a phone person?” Then of course, there are all these considerations around platform access and firewalls, because I do work with a lot of people who live in Asia-Pacific with these contingencies.

We then have to work out how we communicate. Sometimes, it's a matter of tone with cultural differences or even accents. These are important to me, because my collaborators are really truly international.

Only after then do we start to talk about workflow, pipelines, deadlines, how frequently we want to check in. Even very small things, like labeling all the Google Documents with the date of the last update first and then our last names and the name of the project. These are things I really address from the start so we don't waste any time with data loss and so everything is trackable.

I also tell them—especially my junior collaborators who are PhD students—that this is a discipline they need to practice. Because I've got 50 of these folders, [and] I would not be able to continue my workflow if I had 50 different conventions. 

Anjie: What else is helpful when working with different collaborators?

Dr. Crystal: Cultural relativism is very important—knowing that people celebrate different holidays, value cultural breaks differently, or have different personal preferences overall.

Another thing that's very important for me is work-life balance. Not everyone I know has work-life balance. But their urgency is not my emergency. I need to be very confident with my work ethos and my workflow so I do not feel pressured into fake emergencies. For example, tomorrow, I'm going to be spending 10 hours on the beach with friends. It's in my calendar, because I don't want my brain to think about anything else.

Anjie: Is there anything else you do to get inspired?

Dr. Crystal: I read a lot of fiction, a lot of poetry, and I believe that triggers different parts of my brain. Sometimes in planning for a project or a piece, I spend a lot of time, say, reading architectural magazines, watching documentaries, going to art galleries and learning about different types of cultures.

I think being provoked with different formats outside of my field allows me to break out of this confined box that we make for ourselves when we are so insular and only think about our own communities. 

Anjie: It seems like you have an incredibly interdisciplinary mode of working and being creative.

Dr. Crystal: I try. Maybe it's also to placate that child inside me who's no longer pursuing the route of a professional musician. My father always jokes that it's built into every Asian migrant or diaspora where you grow up away from home, you learn to be in two places at once. I do feel like inside my body, there is still a musician inside me, a creative inside me. Sometimes, it just leaks out into my work, to the extent that I just make it part of my process.