Are memes hijacking the internet culture?
A statistical analysis on the evolution of memes and their influence
Somewhere around the world, a person has liked, shared, reacted to a meme by the time you finish reading this sentence. Isn’t that crazy?
Yes! Memes, Memes, Memes. They are literally everywhere. Almost every day, 1 million memes are mentioned in a post on any form of social media. Imagine that!
Memes have become an involuntary part of the internet, just like breathing to us.
But how did this all start? How did memes even gain so much popularity? Who invented memes?
The Origin of Memes
Even before languages were fully developed, humans were pretty quirky with their expressions, which they conveyed via drawings— found in caves usually. Most of the drawings in the below pic depict some form of comedic evidence in some kid born 2000 years ago, scribbling away his thoughts much like we do on the margins of a notebook.
As human civilization gradually developed, our thought processes evolved, and our urge to express art underwent many abstract transitions. Along these lines of progress, the drawing styles saw some changes too.
From paper posters to caricatures, we witnessed the birth of a new style of art, that is, comedic mockery and humor — memes, in the second half of the 20th century. Around the same time, the introduction of computer and the internet led to a new form of digital art. Doodles and caricatures were now pics, gifs, videos and text-based memes.
The word meme was coined by British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene (1976) as a concept for discussion of evolutionary principles in explaining the spread of ideas and cultural phenomena.
But the explosive use of memes and their relevancy only got in play during the early 2000s with the rise of social media platforms and forums like MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, 4chan, etc. In short, the internet gave birth to the meme culture.
Are memes the new language?
With a shifting change in the ratio of visual learners to auditory learners from 1.25:1 (traditional era) to 2.17:1 (modern era), it has become quite obvious that memes have indeed become the blessing in disguise for the visual learners of the 21st century.
They ended up turning into a language of their own. It was either conveying emotions through pictures or making cultural references. Memes have been deemed to be a better mode of expression, especially to those who love using innuendos when its political matters of the world or redefining humor as we know it.
A study using data from Zeitgeist’s monthly survey, reveals that memes resonate more with the gen Z than the baby boomers. The older generation are 7 times less likely to use memes when compared to the younger generation. In fact, the Gen Z find it easier to express their emotions through memes.
Nowadays, teenagers are increasingly using memes to express their reactions instead of text or speech. This trend has escalated into a significant issue as memes are being used to express a wider range of emotions other than humor. This shift has and can lead to substantial communication gaps.
Can memes be a better educational tool?
Nowadays, random stills of pictures or videos have become a new mode to better understand academia, as suggested by a study on the suggestions of memes as a new mode for learning. Almost 50% of the participants strongly agreed on the use of memes for better academic engagement. But their maturity cannot be deemed fit to know what’s correct or incorrect.
Although, it’s quite unrealistic, to be honest. There’s not a single chance that we’ll ever see a meme being used to teach us calculus or biology. Any academician would experiment with this mode of content but would never be serious about it, hopefully.
Are memes a profitable marketing tool?
In the last decade, memes have only grown to become the best choice of companies to market their products. The old companies are forced to adapt after the use of memes to increase or maintain their brand value. With the ever-growing reach of memes coupled with the relevance found among the younger audience, this mode of marketing has proved to be cheaper, more profitable, and engaging tool.
The common ground found in the cultural awareness as well as references made by the Gen Z have helped companies to stay relevant in the market. The graph below shows how well the marketing memes resonate (like/dislike) with the younger generations.
But can this replace traditional adverts made by agencies targeting the older audience, who are in fact, the customers who actually buy products and are earning?
Yes and No.
The entertainment industry has proven its beneficial to promote their content on social media platforms through memes. Companies like Netflix and Amazon Prime have exploited this relevance of memes found in the younger generation (who also majorly contribute to their viewership and profits). This surely does save them from going broke and staying woke. Hurray!
But this form of promotion would barely work for traditional businesses and companies who are into stock, heavy machinery, consultancy, etc.
Memes are a smarter way to promote, but they aren’t relevant to all.
Surprisingly Elon Musk, uses memes a lot in his posts these days to stay relevant and express himself without worrying about the legal consequences.
Maybe the CEOs of Silicon Valley must take note of it and stop hiring brain dead marketing executives who solely base themselves as a culture chant robot trying to spit out terms like “Skibdi Toilet Rizz” for some internet clout. In my opinion, clowns are no less in supply right now.
How influential are memes in a political sense?
When a source of influence is particularly powerful, politicians and their campaign teams are inevitably drawn to it. They utilize every available tool that can increase their vote count. But are they really succeeding with this strategy to attract the younger audience with memes mocking the existing government policies?
Not really, “political memes only constitute to cynicism, polarization and anger towards the hypocrisy of opposition parties”, as mentioned in the study conducted on the relationship between memes and politics by Audrey Halversen and others.
But they don’t rake in votes of any sort from the meme users, rather they are just another form of banter and entertainment for the general audience. A data bank on “social media influence by politics” published by Zeitgeist reveals that most of the political meme content on various social media platforms have found more relevance with the Gen Z and millennials compared to the older generations as shown in the graph below.
This shows that the older generation won’t budge on their political views by merely looking at a meme on Facebook, or any other platform (considering the fact that it’s unlikely they even use it.)
Nevertheless, there’s no way we are electing someone (who represents a posse craving for some political clout) based on their meme relevancy.
Have memes managed to influence our perception yet?
Our perception of humor or any emotion is expressed with our tone of speech, our facial expressions, gestures, etc. Similarly, a meme can be used to express any response or emotion, altered by texts and templates.
Now, if you’ve come across a meme, you’d notice that the template for memes is generally repetitive in nature. A template — showing some trendy phenomenon in the world, or some famous movie scene/average TikTok clips, etc. — basically portrays something funny and is applicable to express any scenario.
To get a better understanding, below are two memes using the same template (a still from the TV show - The Office) used to convey two different situations, which some may find relevant based on some factors like age, experience, generation, awareness, etc.
The pic to the left talks about a situation which most of us might’ve encountered in our school life and would even find it funny. But the pic to the right is a rather specific scenario which only a few people would be able to relate with.
Humor, in general, is binary — it may or may not be funny. For example, a kid falling down the stairs might be funny to some and shocking to others.
But does AI find it funny? Can it make memes for us?
Not really, unless it reaches the point of singularity where it has surpassed the human intelligence and actually learnt to feel emotions. Although researchers have tried various text-image recognition and processing technologies, it is difficult for AI (Artificial Intelligence) to decipher what exactly we mean when we create a meme.
It is the innate ability that we humans carry, i.e., to understand a comic reference without any explanation — A comedic beehive mind, that makes us unique. No AI can replicate that!
The two memes below were generated using prompts and AI. The difference between the two is quite noticeable — the left pic was based on an AI using simple prompts and pre-defined meanings assigned to pictures whereas the pic on the right was based on an AI solely based on its capability to imitate the creativity and meaning behind the words in the prompt.
But there’s layers to comedy, just like the buildup jokes made at a typical stand-up comedy show. So, the AI breaks down once a few complexities are added to the prompts. It fails to understand the depth of humor.
Maybe this is an AI’s kryptonite —the inability to decipher humor.
To answer the question — Maybe, memes are constantly evolving and changing our (especially the younger generation) perception towards humor and the internet culture. I guess, we’ll have to wait and see.
But it does manage to make people randomly famous and get themselves a pass to the Meme Hall of Fame. The most recent one being the “Hawk Tuah” girl who was made instantly famous for her accent and hilarious spitting act in an Instagram reel.
Here’s our meme of the month (June’2024) —
Anyhow, the meme phenomenon is as random as the hawk tuah girl!
Until then,
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I’d like to acknowledge a few writers —
and for their posts on the evolutionary trends in culture, that inspired me to write this post.Thank you, Cya!