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Memes made the world a worse place.
Can you please elaborate?
The Pepe-ification of US political discourse.
In my time, longcat was long and we LIKED it!
You managed to beautifully elaborate on my multi-paragraph reply with just a couple of words lol
One day I'd love to get really into it (because I've thought way too much about it) but the gist of my argument is: memes are the death of originality.
It's low effort garbage that infiltrated every corner of the internet. Original internet comedy gets less traction than unoriginal memes so it took over. Of course, this doesn't apply to all comedy.
But YOU aren't funny for editing the text on a funny picture. It's a guise of cleverness. It's hard to find a thread without someone lifting another person's joke nowadays, it feels like everything needs to be a reference.
And aside from the meme itself, meme culture is a cancer. The memes must be spread. It was on Instagram now it's everywhere. Meme "communities" are just new buckets for people to dump the memes they downloaded in. And there's 100,000 identical buckets already. It's pre-AI slop
And don't get me started on screenshot as memes. Everyone hates advertising unless they're promoting someone else's milquetoast social media profile, I guess.
I think you'd get a lot of good from reading a bit about memetics and conceiving of "memes" as transmissible ideas vs captioned pics online
I'm well-versed and I don't think the classical definition applies to memes as we know them now. I think it stopped being applicable with the rise of social media when the goal of sharing them changed. And with it, the goal of making them.
Memes have become a substitute for discourse. Using the internet nowadays often feels like I'm back in middle school talking to the kid who couldn't go more than 2 sentences without quoting the Simpsons.
Yo, you went to school with Brock, too!?
I think it's a perspective you can apply or not, and one I still find useful. Our goals and intentions aside they're contagious little bits of information that want to spread, and what makes them good at doing so is interesting to think about. As a conceptual unit of discourse, I have a hard time seeing them as a potential substitute for it. Quotation as substitute for thought is another story, but a far older story than this (or perhaps any) medium
So let's say I'm on board with the idea that modern memes are units of information and not just a cancer...
...nothing changes. They're still shit that made the world a worse place. No-thought garbage flooding everyone's attention. Waste of bandwidth and brainpower
That doesn't seem like a very pleasant or productive perspective, but if it's the one you want to apply go for it. Good luck out there friend
Most humor diminishes with repetition for me but if you're able to laugh at the same jokes over and over and over, more power to you.