Emotional Heuristics on the Internet

Memes have incredible staying power as cultural staples that “become firmly embedded in the vernacular of the Internet”. They capture a “compelling ‘found’ slice of life” that embodies our human responses. Memes influence the heuristics we use in judging people and react to situations and have become a developed response to interpersonal situations. They have even grown to substitute the expression of emotions, with memes, Facebook stickers, and emojis increasingly replacing direct discourse. This has changed our emotional responses to situations and conversations, making me sometimes feel unable to adequately equivocate my emotions in person when I know of an incredibly pertinent Facebook sticker that captures exactly how I feel. Through the proliferation of online image trends, I have started thinking of my own emotions visually rather than verbally, which makes my sense of self even more reliant on virtual worlds.

I was intrigued by the vastly different responses that Goldenberger and Boston had to memes based on how exploited they felt. Goldenberger was amused by the ludicrousness of the Erhmagerd meme and didn’t feel targeted by it, since she was playing a fictional character, but Blake Boston recognized many of the qualities of the meme and inferences people made in himself, because it was an authentic picture that he uploaded to MySpace that was meant to portray his real self. The Ermahgerd girl is relatable and reminds people of awkward adolescent phases, but Scumbag Steve is actively antagonized as an unmotivated and untrustworthy outsider. Scumbag Steve has also assumed a larger importance and encountered more extreme negative permutations as it has come to represent “the wrong side of public opinion” and indicate a dissenting viewpoint. It’s generalizability has also made Boston more likely to suffer from hate speech due to associations with public enemies and deplorable actions. I was impressed by how positively both victims were able to recover from the exploitation of their images and the longevity of these trends, finding ways to make gains despite being antagonized.