TO MEMES.
If you have had a casual conversation with me that lasted at least 5 minutes, you know I love memes. No matter how you pronounce these amazing little widget’s name (meeeeeeme, mem me, etc) you most likely have at least heard of them. To me, memes are the future. How did I learn Donald Trump had won the election? First news of it I saw was on instagram, via meme. They take less time to create than a news article, and communicate important things via humor – which in turn can create different perspectives and ways that news is received.
I’ve written two essays on the importance and effectiveness of humor, and to sum it up: humor works (usually). So memes are especially important to communication, and I believe this claim will only become more and more true as time goes on. Humans my age spend more time on social media than any news cite, so memes get news across to them faster and more often.
Below I will attempt to critique and explain memes in order to prove my point.
Source: Buzzfeed
This meme exhibits how us, youngins, saw 2016 (it came up when I searched for “memes that sum up 2016”). To us, it was a year of sudden negative reflecting. We saw our worst (the beginning of the election… how many millions of people cared about a gorilla that got shot…. etc). This humorous post, that anyone can relate to because who hasn’t opened their front camera seeing a sight full of double chins, sums up a year through emotions. Often you will see plenty of memes during the olympics regarding specific athlete’s expressions to problems going on in their country — patterns like these only real meme-lovers can notice!
Source: Buzzfeed
How social media has changed our life… now we know almost everything about everyone before we even meet them. To me, this is a negative, and I hate social media because of the real-life affecting aspect of it… maybe it should be for only memes and news! In fact, some of the highest followed instragrams aren’t even celebrities, but meme generators that get millions of likes!
Source: Instagram
Often memes actually relate to real life to – and in a way put serious things into perspective for “normal” people to understand. Above is a meme I found a few months ago, that I relate to and often show friends if they ever ask about anxiety. In no way are memes a form of research, but I believe in the future we can start to illustrate research in a visually interesting way, such as through a meme. Note: it does take strategies that we have discussed for the “authors” of these memes to create them and distribute them – and in a way I hope my children are looking through archives of memes when I am old and frail!
Lastly, I belong to a hilarious group where genius and hilarious kids post memes that relate to real life … at Berkley. I still pretend I understand occasionally and join in throwing them a like every once in a while; however, to me this Facebook group – with more than 100,000 members (and more waiting!)- is an exclusive group that proves how important memes are in communicating!
Source: UC Berkley Memes for Edgy Teens Facebook Group
Quick add note on April 28th: Look at this connection via meme – a post on Facebook, referencing a commercial about kendall jenner that caused controversy around the black lives matter movement through a snapchat screenshot mocking the berkley conflict about the coutler speech.
Source: UCBPET