Nowadays on sites like Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram, and even Facebook, memes have dominated popular culture. They feed the ways in which we interact with each other and generate a sense of shared community across cultures.
I remember in 2011 sharing the iconic Charlie Sheen “Winning” video with my friend. I remember how that quote swept across my school; you could barely go a day without hearing some 12 year old bellow “WINNING!” at the top of their lungs. I also remember when internet memes took the form of unmotivational posters, or Fist Pump Baby taking the internet by storm. Other internet users probably remember the popularity of Rage Comics, which spawned the iconic Troll Face and Forever Alone Guy.
These memes all lasted for long periods of time. I remember hearing people quote Sheen for months. Maybe even well into 2012. Ridiculously Photogenic Guy seemed to be a fairly popular meme for quite some time, too. But in recent times, the once-stagnant nature of memes seems to have changed.
Nowadays, memes have taken a more bizarrest, somewhat postmodern approach in their structure. Just a few weeks ago, memes about Netflix movies Bird Box and Black Mirror: Bandersnatch were all over my Twitter feed. I could barely scroll past five or so posts without seeing thousands of the jokes. Some of them weren’t even pertaining to the content within those movies.
This meme simply uses Sandra Bullock’s character as its grounding image. Bandersnatch memes focused on the illusion of free will (something else I’ve noticed in today’s meme culture; memes have become far more self aware and self-deprecating) and tended to be darker in nature than Bird Box memes did, even though both could be classified as horror films.
These movies, both of which became available on Netflix in late December, quickly dominated the internet scene.
And now, mere weeks later, they’re gone.
I can scroll through my feeds across my social media platforms without seeing Sandra Bullock’s visage plastered everywhere, or a joke about Stefan’s diminishing mental state (At the time of writing this, I have only seen Bandersnatch). Bandersnatch and Bird Box, as highly acclaimed as they seemed to be just a week ago, have vanished from the public eye.
So, what is the dominating meme right now?
Right now, for whatever reason on my social media, it’s Sasuke being choked. Usually by someone completely unrelated to the Naruto franchise.
I have no doubts that in a few weeks this meme will be completely forgotten for the next new thing. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It’s just interesting that in the early 2010s, memes could last for months, sometimes even years before being deemed irrelevant. But today, there are only a few memes being utilized at one time that seem to dominate our cultural scene before being discarded.
There is a meme timeline available here if you’re so inclined to check it out. What’s fascinating is that in 2018 and 2017, there is at least one meme per month. Sometimes there’s more than one. But when you click on older years like 2012 there are only two memes for the whole year. Grumpy Cat and Makayla Maroney’s “Not Impressed” face.
Why this change?
First off, what internet users have considered a “meme” has undoubtedly changed over the years. If you asked me in 2011 what a meme was, I would have probably responded with Rage Comics and Nyan Cat. The popular format for memes used to be an image juxtaposed with two lines of text; top text and bottom text (the phrase “bottom text” is nowadays a meme in of itself, highlighting how postmodern these memes have become). As time passed, the formatting for memes became more lenient. If someone asked me what a meme is today, I would probably say, “an image or video from pop culture that can be repurposed to appeal to different groups and niches.”
Second off, many internet users who were familiar with memes in the early 2010s were likely on the younger side, myself included. So today’s meme creators probably didn’t even know how to make their own memes at the time, nor did they know that they even could. We relied on pre-existing formats for our memes. I saw kids using meme generators with the aforementioned “top text” “bottom text” format, and other kids making their very own Rage Comics. Today, to make a meme, all you need is an image and a funny idea. If you’re really feeling creative, you can throw a cool filter on there and add some text. As easy as this sounds, even in the early 2010s effects like these were harder to achieve. Sometimes they were locked behind a paywall. Free art programs weren’t nearly as powerful as they are today. Cameras used to be ridiculously expensive, but now, someone just has to catch a funny candid of their friend on their phone for it to become a meme. Editing software usually comes with the camera app on people’s smartphones, but there’s no shortage of both free and $1.99 editing apps available for download. Accessibility to creativity is more affluent than it used to be.
We also didn’t consume different types of media at the rate at which we do today. Blockbuster and later Redbox, were necessary for consuming movies, and each one only had a finite number of movies that didn’t rotate as frequently as Netflix and Hulu’s selection does today. Furthermore, the Redbox by your own house may not have had the same movies as the one by your friend’s. Therefore, generating a joke through an image or a video that was reliant on understanding the same piece of media was much harder to achieve. Bird Box and Bandersnatch memes were so successful because they were available at the same time to millions of people across the world.
On top of this once-limited access to media, time limits on computers and phones may have been enforced. My parents tried numerous times to impose a time limit of 2 hours of screen time a day. Friends reported the same thing. Today children are rarely seen without phones. Please note that I’m not trying to criticize the ubiquitous nature of screens in modern society; I am just making suggestions as to why meme culture is so fast-paced nowadays.
I’ve already mentioned how Bandersnatch and Bird Box memes have vanished in the public eye. This phenomenon can be explained in a relatively simple way: people are social beings who want to fit in with each other. We achieve this through gathering shared meaning around something in a process called symbolic interactionism. These meanings are consistently reassigned to new objects. In a global community on places like Twitter and Tumblr, it is harder for users to connect to others with their own country-based cultural values. An American will get confused when an English person calls “fries” “chips.” In this way, memes sort of form a bridge across the world. The American might not understand what the Swede means when they talk about fika but they will feel connected to that person when they see them make a joke using the Shocked Pikachu face.
The heightened speed at which memes are traded out today can be assumed because the meme has lost its shared cultural value. With new media available at our fingertips every single day, some new source can assume its position as the bridge between cultures and overtake the meme world. The Russian meme of Woosh Cat is one such example of how memes can be used to bring culture together. Even though the original template was in a language foreign to most English speakers, the meme did become popular on English-speaking social media for a period of time. In this way, memes provide a framework for people of varying backgrounds to interact.
A meme rises to the forefront of social media because it accumulates cross-cultural meaning, letting us interact with our global citizens. The meaning then becomes understood by all parties and loses its significance as new media rises. As this new media rises amongst our peers, new memes come to light as they adopt a new shared significant meaning. I do not think this is something to be alarmed of. Other articles claim that attention spans are suffering and eventually people will be unable to focus on anything. While it may be true that attention speeds are shortening over time, I do not think that attributing this to meme culture is a fair response. Human existences are centered around culture and sharing our lives with each other; memes are just a new way to do that. And that is something to be celebrated, no matter how fast or how slow the trade-off seems to be.
