Gaurav Ojha
These days, one is likely to see different memes on social media with a dramatically funny tagline attached to an image or animation that is completely out of context to its original representation. Just scroll through different social networking sites after any important event, and you will see how things get interpreted, misinterpreted, misinformed, and muddled up in memes.
Inside a meme, everything is just a joke; even if we want to take things seriously, we don’t care. We don’t want to analyze memes for their truth value, credibility, relevance, history, or social context; if they are entertaining, exciting, funny, and interesting, memes are just fine for social media users. However, it is important to critically evaluate the memes circulated on different social media sites to distinguish between what is real, credible, entertaining, misinformation, and fake.
Evolutionary biologist and author Richard Dawkins describes memes as cultural ideas that express, spread, and repeat themselves across society. For the millions of social media users, abusers, and followers, memes carry forward cultural ideas and standards of our thinking that we collectively ascribe to all those exciting things happening around us. Memes represent the collective consciousness of any society—our assumptions, presumptions, and ignorance.
The message of memes as a medium for confirmation bias
Moreover, memes give us a false sense of confirmation regarding ideas and opinions we have already accepted. The messages crafted for a meme resemble and match our prejudices, ignorance, unjustified opinions, outdated cultural ideas, superstitions, and biases. Hence, we find them so interesting that we can’t resist sharing them.
Memes help us confirm our assumption that as we stand before this messed up, corrupt, unfair, and uncaring system, all we can do is observe a meme, satisfy our need for entertainment, humor, shallow criticisms, and senseless curiosity, and find some enjoyment among those socio-political situations and events we think are beyond our control.
For example, ideas disseminated through memes make us feel that corrupt, uninspiring, and careless politicians are a part of our collective destiny. As a result, most people in Nepal easily ascribe to negative comments, fake news, and conspiracy theories about politicians. Hence, with the messages circulated through memes, we keep on confirming our ideas without reality-checking, seeking evidence, exploring information sources, and evaluating subtle differences among politicians themselves.
Memes are reactive thinking.
Due to our reactive thinking, we end up confirming social biases, ignorance, chauvinistic judgments, and anti-feminist expressions circulated through memes that need to be challenged and critically evaluated. Therefore, memes have also become a medium for the replication of harmful and dangerous ideas that create social disharmony and undermine social progress and tolerance. Besides, as we lazily enjoy memes, we often ignore the fact that most of the socio-political memes have been manufactured for the vested interests of different social groups and political parties. Memes are also used to manipulate our thinking and gain consent.
Postmodern Aesthetics
Furthermore, memes are artistic expressions of postmodern society, where everything is just a mere interpretation, relativism, copy/pasting, and subjective expression, without any standard for truth, objective reality, or standard value judgment. Everything and every other thing can be reduced to memes; from politicians, artists, students, Tiktok celebrities, serious philosophers, and scientists to even bridges, roads, stones, hills, and trees, all have found their undignified space in different memes.
Shakespeare indeed has lots of memes, as has Albert Einstein, and they have only become a face for the memes without ideas of their own, and this is indeed how we like to understand them from the perspective we are comfortable with. We don’t care for real Shakespeare; many people of this generation may have only heard of him without having read any of his works, but his memes are popular for what is never said.
With memes, we don’t care for original sources or authentic content; all we need is entertainment as a coping mechanism in this already messed-up existence, where life is utterly uncertain, complex, and unpredictable, and the world is too difficult to make any sense of and understand.
The difference between real and entertaining
However, we tend to forget the difference between what is crucial and things that are utterly trivial, in between real
and fake, while enjoying memes. Inside memes, everything gets reduced to just a matter of presentation, and we end up tolerating abusive, undermining, shameful, and rather offensive contents in the memes. Therefore, even as we enjoy memes, it is important to keep our critical thinking faculties active and open.
Memes are here to inform us that everything is a joke. We know how you like to think; therefore, sit back and enjoy the memes. But let us realize that simply sharing and liking memes is not the way to recover, progress, change, or transform; memes are only for that moment; they won’t resolve anything and take you somewhere.
(Gaurav Ojha is a writer, researcher, and educator at different educational institutions.)
