Why the Meme Culture Is the Way It Is
It’s the summer of 2011. I’ve just returned home from school and hopped on to my computer. Logged in to my newly created Facebook account and typed in the word “Memes” in the search bar. It brought a bunch a of suggestions of pages that I frequently visited. I picked one of them and started enjoying this newer form of humor that reminded me of comics but in a different way. ‘Twas as if you needed to be wiser about pop culture and that particular meme template to understand the joke. I loved it. And I wasn’t the only one.
One of the many reasons why this meme culture witnessed a renaissance in the 2010s is because it gave the newer generations ways to express themselves. It’s true that humour is a subjective matter and criticizing concurrent events through satire has existed for years. But this new trend spread like wildfire among all generations because of its ambiguity.
You can make a harmless joke about trivial things and make it 100 times funnier using the troll face while someone else can make a precarious post criticizing a popular politician using the very same “art”.
Yes, I called it art. Cause as art is subjective to interpretations, memes are too. You can express different meanings using the same bunch of characters and it might bring a belly full of laugh to some people while some might take offense.
Not to mention, the toils and hard work searching for the next popular meme character or next template. It made people creative and gave them a chance to actively be a part of something on social media instead of just scrolling down with a poker face.
It wasn’t surprising that something as popular as the meme culture would eventually face evolution. The scopes of it were boundless since it’s a new language of expression to millions of people. Eventually, we witnessed a dark form of it.
Remember how 2020 was welcomed by a political tension between Iran and The United States? There were talks about war even rumours about it being nuclear. Some enthusiastic meme artists, fueled up by the dense comments of Donald Trump jumped on the bandwagon of creating what they called ‘Dark Memes’ about killing innocents with a nuclear bomb pressing the red button and being drafted to Iran based on your COD stats. Couple of months later, calling the Coronavirus a ‘Boomer Remover’ became a thing as it was mostly taking lives of senior citizens.
I could go on and on about 2020. In May, while millions of people took a stand against racism, some of them completely overlooked their racial abuse on the Chinese for the spread of Coronavirus. This particular incident is capable of being a meme itself!
On being asked about this, many teens deemed this as a form of coping mechanism for all the stress and unpredictability. They found ‘comfort’ in making ‘harmless’ jokes regarding matters that were ruining lives. Now is this the new normal? Or am I being a buzzkill?
Turns out I’m not cause I myself being an avid football fan, used to actively participate in what some would say, ‘Aggressive Trolling’, just for some banters (staying within limits of course). So, in my opinion, twisted sense of morality or even worse, no sense of morality comes to question here.
All it takes is just a single post to go viral in this modern age of the Internet and it can give some a celebrity like attention and fame. Although its temporary and the audience will jump ships the moment they find another hotcake, it leaves one with the notion that the reason behind them not being relevant anymore is the lack of humor in their creations.
Thus, begins the quest to regain the lost fame or even the hour of glory for some as they desperately search for validation from random netizens often at the cost of basic human conscience.
However, it is true that memes are also used to highlight the atrocities of wars, carelessness about Coronavirus which I admit are actually moving and hilarious; templates shouldn’t come out of the misery centering other’s personal issues regardless of their identity or social status. A screenshot of a simple comment shared for laughs and reacts is enough to put someone in a mental breakdown.
In my humble opinion, lives of people are not pop culture tidbits to be devoured and repackaged for likes and shares. There is a risk of being called a snowflake followed by divine instructions to avoid, but I fervently pray and hope that the multifarious world of memes evolve in much grander ways than this Schadenfreude .
