More Than Memes the Eye

As the internet constantly evolves from one thing to another, there has been an uprise in one specific form of communication. From the traditional emojis that first started appearing since the early age of AOL, young adults have been constantly pushing the boundaries and finding new ways to communicate through the internet. The latest fad being memes.

What are memes? Memes in a sense can be traced back to 1996 when people would sit around in cubicles and email “I hate Monday” photos to other co-workers. Memes then started to take off when social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Snapchat became the primary way to share digital content. For a meme to be considered valid, a photo is used with a message that can have some reference to something everyone in a community can relate to. The communities that memes usually reach out is vast, as there is not one specific community it is created for. Memes can target young, old, male, female, any community that has some type of commonality that everyone can relate to.

What is fascinating is how silly images or screenshots can be used by so many different communities for different purposes just by changing the message on it. Another intriguing part about memes is that all have a lifespan that extends usually for less than a month. In some cases, memes come back as a mashup between another newer meme at the time. The way memes are created can often depend on what current event is occurring during that month.

During December 2019, one of the biggest memes had to do with the North Korean leader Kim Jong Un sending a “present” over to the United States. The internet created memes that showed in a comedic way how the United States was about to get into World War III. Some even created meme videos where they created a similarity between getting drafted into the war and getting drafted in the NBA.

Dr. Abnet, who specializes in Pop Culture at California State University, Fullerton, has researched the use of memes in society.

“The reason why [memes] just keep on getting spread around is, in some way, it’s become a new form of communication,” Dr. Abnet said. “Similar to how people can get news updates from Instagram or even Twitter, memes in a way inform the viewer about events that are happening in the world. Take, for example, last year near the Super Bowl. At the time, the creator of the SpongeBob show passed away, and people wanted the Super Bowl to have some form of tribute for him. The way fans got their voice to be heard wasn’t through petitions but memes. They continuously uploaded thousands of SpongeBob memes on the internet about SpongeBob and, behold, the Super Bowl had a tribute.”

The society also uses memes to create a form of communication about regular occurrences, such as traffic on the 91 freeway, Starbucks not getting the right number of shots of espresso, or even something as simple as forgetting to put your alarm on.

“Culturally, memes also create a reassurance to society to let the viewer know that there are other people who experience what they go through or went through,” said Dr. Abnet. “It’s a way so that people don’t feel like an outsider, especially now where a mass majority has anxiety and social problems. These photos are meant to be seen and acknowledged as, ‘hey that happened to me last week,’ they’re just relatable for people to understand.”

Just a couple of years ago, the highlight of technology was the extra feature of being able to send emojis through text on your iPhone. Instead, now, memes are becoming another part of society. Something might have happened during your day-to-day life and now when you go onto Facebook or Twitter you see a meme that you can easily relate to. Sometimes you will even see something that reminds you of your friend and you have the urgency to send the meme to them. It’s all part of communication.

But memes aren’t always positive.

“One thing to look at with memes is how it permits racism to continue to flourish,” Dr. Abnet said. “Memes are allowing and giving the impression that some meme statements are true. Take for example the current situation with coronavirus. There are thousands of memes that target the Chinese community because of the virus having originated in China. Now what you are seeing online is the continuous use of memes attacking people from the general region. In a way, memes are creating fear that people should avoid anyone from China because they might have the virus.”

Ultimately, there is a wide range of uses for memes. They can be used to commiserate, express social anxiety, share daily experiences, target a specific community, or simply for comedic purposes. There isn’t an exact guideline that memes need to follow, anyone is at liberty to create a meme. The creation of memes takes a matter of seconds and they are quickly spread across social media platforms. With Twitter, for example, having the ability to see what is trending around the community, country, or even world, anyone can generate a meme on an event that is occurring. If the event becomes something of interest, the meme that is the most viewed and passed on will become the “meme face” of that event.

What is most interesting is how certain memes rise to the top and become so widely recognizable and shared. There is no one winning formula and context can be everything. But once a specific image or message is recognizable, it usually takes on a life all its own. There is usually a shelf-life for how long they can be used but the most memorable memes seem to transcend any single event and have multiple meanings. All that really matters is that memes have become part of our collective lexicon of expression and they’re worth paying more attention to.