MEME'D THROUGH TRAGEDY
Is it it the lowest form of satire or the most pinpoint?
If there is one thing we can all get behind, it’s a great meme. So many instances throughout the day where after scrolling for what feels like hours on your phone to kill some time, a meme pops up in your feed, and it hits just right. Some templates are more popular than others right now (I’m just a chill guy, Absolute Cinema come to mind first), but they share a universal language everyone seems to understand and that is humour. Memes also have an uncanny ability to be the great online alleviation device when we’re faced with the world’s problems and lack the proper vocab or insight to reflect on them. But is it becoming too easy of a cop out? Are their moments where we need to be asking ourselves more instead of just trying to make the simplest on the nose joke possible? Maybe so.
In that sense, memes now serve a dual purpose in that they can make for an easy laugh to pass the time as well as being the internet’s go-to method of response to a tragedy. Because more often than not, memes are funny. The sheer overload of them in circulation on a daily basis makes for the chances to come across one inevitable, and their staying power might in fact be more prevalent than some of the modern art masterpieces to specific sub-cultures on the internet. All of this might be a long-winded way saying they might be a more effective communication tool than you think they are.
There is one thing and one thing only that allows a meme to become popular and it’s whether or not it’s funny. If the photo or caption chosen fail to produce even a modicum of humour, it is worse than death. Speaking of death, like many of life’s unpleasantries we sometimes find that one of the most effective ways of shaking our dread is through humour, mainly because of the release that it provides. According to an article on Mayo Clinic “Laughter may ease pain by causing the body to produce its own natural painkillers.” Now this can refer to literal pain in your body or the emotional pain on suffering loss. With that in mind it become easy for one to want to latch themselves onto the most readily available source of internet comedy as we scroll along.
Going online in any capacity whether it be to catch up on the day’s news or doom scroll to kill however much time you need, there’s almost a virtual guarantee one will come across a meme and that availability is what makes them so prevalent in reactionary commentary. Memes are the simplest things to circulate online because almost all of the templates are photos, or short videos. This leads to most of our feeds becoming the online version of the wild west, but everyone is trying to figure out what “Crying Jordan” or “George Bush Whisper” might be best to use. It is also not just dumb kids trying to make their friends laugh using memes but also news pundits, TV anchors, athletes, activists and more who will take advantage of the overload. And why shouldn’t they? It cuts the time it would take for a person to come up with anything remotely intelligent in half! That’s the game of what it means to reach an audience online in any capacity these days, delivering the most amount of information, least amount of time, and making it humorous so that it resonates.
So now that connection and recognition have been established it is now time to transfer over into the storage aspect. This is the most critical aspect because as they say, “once it’s online, it’s there forever.” That might be a loaded statement because theoretically for everything that is saved and shared there are also aspects that get dumped and deleted. However, the staying power doesn’t just come from the humour but also the template which can is recycled over and over until nobody really remembers what happened but they know the meme. There’s a brilliant article written by Scott Nover for Business Insider about Gen Z and 9/11 memes where he explains the idea of an event’s context being removed and replaced with a meme stating, “The idea of context collapse is often derided as a negative effect of the modern web, but it's also the engine that's allowed abstract humor to become the memetic language of the internet.” So the very idea of the meme overpowering the tragedy has become the norm, where the reference and impact it leaves carries more weight than the atrocity itself. 9/11 has become more of a punchline than a day of remembrance in some regard also, while every election gets its own set of memes and there seems to be no limit on what can be lessened through them, ranging from the sinking of the Titanic, celebrity deaths, natural/man-made disasters and the list goes on.
So where does that leave us with how we process memes in relation to the horror of our own reality? While they might not be for everyone there is definitely a power that they hold that can’t be ignored. Everyone has their own ways of coping with their problems and most of the time it is through humour, but sometimes that isn’t enough. There shouldn’t be a cap with how memes may get posted in any capacity or any subject matter because that goes against the basic human right of free speech, but maybe they wouldn’t sway into the same bad habits if we took time to address things the way they ought of properly be addressed.