The Downside of Memes

I’ve never been one to turn down a funny meme. I’m not exactly somebody who stays glued to the front page of Reddit, but I’ve always laughed when a good meme came my way. Now that I’ve read this week’s articles, however, and the more that I think about it, the ‘meme’ actually seems representative of everything ‘wrong’ with the Internet. Rife with the appropriation of others’ intellectual property and the classic Internet pastime of laughing at others while hiding behind digital anonymity, memes seem more hurtful than helpful. I had never before thought about the people behind famous memes, and that’s why the Ermahgerddon and the Scumbag Steve articles were so fascinating to me. While memes seem like harmless fun and are usually not linked to the original subject’s actual life, they have very real effects nonetheless. Rather than laughing with these people, we tend to be laughing at them (think Numa Numa dance, Chocolate Rain, Double Rainbow guy, or Jessi Slaughter from earlier this semester).

Moreover, memes create a space for more harmful and problematic methods of teasing. For example, there are people that deal with rhotacism (the speech disorder that results in the disfigured “R” sound made fun of in the Ehrmagerd meme) on a daily basis. How much fun must it be to have the entirety of the Internet laughing at something that may have an already-heavy impact on your life? These memes tend to breed on unsavory sites like Reddit and 4chan, and create yet another digital space for ableism, racism, sexism, homophobia, etc. Even those memes simply rooted in a silly picture of a cat or dog are often grounded in the theft of others’ digital property. All in all, memes seem to show a carelessness towards the privacy, feelings, thoughts, and property of others and seem to be another representation of the anti-sociality so many have come to expect from the Internet.