The Potential of Memes as a Critical Medium — Are Memes the Modern Caricatures of Social Media?
Everybody knows them, everybody likes them and everybody uses them: memes. They mainly appear on the internet (on social network platforms like Facebook and Twitter) and oftentimes entertain us because of their funny, simple and yet meaningful nature. While most of them cause people to quietly smile or laugh to themselves and then move on, some actually have the potential (or even intention) to induce the viewers to mediate on a given issue. In most cases these memes critically reflect on and/or challenge concrete situations, like e.g. politicians, political decisions or political events. Recent targets are, for example, the candidates for the post of the American president and here particularly Donald Trump.
From this perspective, memes strongly resemble our traditional caricatures in function and purpose. There is, however, an important difference: Anyone can create them out of any medium at any given time. This means that every person can become a media critic!
…Which in turn could cause problems in terms of quality and quantity. I think that these problems might sort themselves out on their own, though, because viewers can choose which memes they like and want to share and which they rather want to drop. Up until now, I wasn’t aware of this function of memes and I have to say that I really like the idea. What do you think?
Thank you for taking the time to read this!
