From Shia LaBeouf to Shiba Inus, memes seem to have become an integral part of our way of communicating. But what exactly is a meme, you may ask? It is defined as a cultural item in the form of an image, video, phrase etc., normally transmitted by repetition and replication, that is spread via the Internet and often altered in a creative or humorous way.
Still confused? Perhaps you've seen some variation of this "Doge" meme surfacing on your social media platforms. This is the Internet, kids.
But the concept of memes goes so much further than a humorous image. Don't get me wrong, I love a good laugh, but memes reveal a whole new wave of communication that no other generation has ever witnessed. We can use these memes to communicate globally across all sorts of societies and ethnic regions. We break cultural boundaries and instead form one cohesive media culture. Even so, it seems at times we only use memes to prolong some issues that exist in our society.
With that said, I am going to lay out some of the ways we use memes to influence our communication as well as the way memes seem to shape the constructs of our socializing.
1. Drawing Attention to the Meaningless
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We all remember "The Dress." This was a meme which surfaced in early February of 2015 that caused heated debate over whether the color of the dress was black and blue or white and gold (obviously it's black and gold). Whether or not the topic was of any importance, it brought people from all over the world to into the conversation. It allowed us to use social media to spark an international debate which attracted the attention of not only celebrity talk-show hosts like Ellen Degeneres but also major news outlets such as The Washington Post. However, this is a reoccurring phenomenon.
It seems memes' popularity skyrocket so quickly over something as meaningless as a dress or a boy in white Vans and draw our focus as a society away from more important issues. It just seems that the constructs of our socializing tend to centralize itself around more harmless issues, just presenting a result of the functions of memes.
2. Coining New Terms
We all have heard the term "Netflix and Chill," and we know what it's alluding to (wink, wink), but how often do we think about how this one term has shaped the way we communicate? How often has this term come into the conversation? It's almost comical at how memes can so easily change our dialect.
And it's not just "Netflix and Chill" that came out of nowhere and became a part of how we talk. There are also other phrases such as "bae" or "twerking" that find their way into our speech and leave us nearly confused as to how these strange words became the vernacular. Either way, it seems notable that memes, with their popular influence, have a way of reconstructing our very own communication tactics and conversational patterns.
3. Out with the Old and in with the New
The biggest role memes seem to play in our global culture nowadays is their ability to provoke the constant need for "the next big thing." Often times, memes circulate and are completely used up within a 24-hour period. With the nearly steady flow of memes, it seems our culture is becoming one which needs constantly needs a new or improved topic of conversation. We must constantly be consuming media. We use something up until it no longer brings us entertainment and then onto the next thing. This is causing a huge change in the dynamics of digital media and is causing what we call "information overload," which simply means the exposure to or provision of too much information or data. We have too much circulating in the digital world, and memes are a part of that.
Overall, I love memes. My point is not to bash memes or what they bring to the internet, but rather to point out some interesting points regarding how media-- memes being a large part of that in our social media world today-- shape our social constructs and our means of communication. But by all memes (heh, heh), continue to participate in all the good fun that are memes!
