I've been having a few thoughts about memes. I don't consider myself a politcal person, but I also don't consider memes to be a political issue. It seems funny to have to say this, because the line seems to be blurred nowadays.
Now I will say before anything else that I absolutely love memes, despite being what the internet would call a normie. Or at least what I would figure you'd call a normie. I go on 4chan, 8chan, I even surf the darknet now and then, so I'm not new to the internet. I watch pewdiepie, cinnamontoastken, markiplier, etc. For all general purposes, I'm your typical YouTuber, or at least your typical person.
Now I have absolutely no problem with the spread of memes. It's the thing that now and then makes me laugh, sometimes I'll send a meme to my friends. Sure, I don't live the 'meme life', but I don't have the mental capabilities to create these hilarious things on my own.
Now the issues I'm going to address have been brought up time after time, and for some reason I feel compelled to put in my 2 cents. I'm not old, I'm just about to be 25. But my brothers are young - they love memes, live memes, and constantly spout them over and over regardless of the actual content of the meme.
For the most part, you would think that these are the people that are the problem, but in a way claiming this would be like saying that the people that live and breathe call of duty are violent people. I've met people whose main gaming medium is COD. They're nice people, and honestly in most cases, if COD wasn't such a popular game, you'd have never guessed that they would even participate.
But the problem comes from people with mental issues that take inspiration from video games and take it to heart, or decide to recreate the ficticious scenes that they've witnessed.
At its core, this is the problem that I have with memes. People have a way of bringing toxicity to communities. We've all seen it - Rick and Morty, My Little Pony, the furry fandom, name any fandom and you'll find that over time they've become a sort of, with the lack of a better phrase, cancer.
With the growth in accessibility to memes, coming from something innocent that was posted now and then on sites like icanhascheeseburger, memes now touch upon more serious topics. Nazis, death, any historical event that had any kind of terrible outcome. These, among a multitude of either random or pointless internet icons (ie the ugandan knuckles), are the main source of memes.
Now you would think that with all of these controversial topics being brought up in memes would be the problem, but it's not. It really comes from the idea that the people creating these memes and that live what I refer to as, "The Meme Life", understand the sort of tongue-in-cheek type of humor that comes with these. As much as they would have you believe they honestly promote the kind of hate and such that is shown in these memes, they're regular people and just like making funny jokes - especially at the cost of others.
There's a sort of understanding, or at least I've seen in my years on the internet, that these people are not bad people. They don't hate others the way these memes would have you believe, and it's really just a culture of internet users that find a way to entertain themselves, albeit a very dark way to do so.
The problem exists with the people that often partake of these memes, not fully understanding the joke.
For instance, if you retweet or otherwise repost the meme, "Hitler did nothing wrong", you may not understand that the people that created this meme, while neo nazis DO exist, find it humorous. The people that spread these things, if they aren't your typical internet user and aren't versed in this kind of sarcasm, they find it funny that people think like this.
So in a way, by spreading these jokes and believing that the people that spread this 'hate' actually subscribe to whatever ideaology is portayed begin to, themselves, start to spread things with similar beliefs.
In a way, this in itself is harmless. But with these post becoming more and more familiar, we have grown to see things such as the phrase given before, "Hitler did nothing wrong" as a funny phrase. With humor comes acceptance, and with acceptance comes what we call, "a dead meme".
Dead memes are simply those which aren't funny anymore. But my theory is that these dead memes are those that have ingrained themselves so much into society, that other 'normies' or normal people, are now circulating the ideas in an unironic way, and therefore 'kill the joke'. So the typical memer would go and find a new joke that is fresh, because the joke made before has hit the general populace, and now is saturated on the internet.
But THIS is the problem. Dead memes. Those that either old people, children, single moms with nothing to do on their facebook, all begin circulating these beliefs. And in a way, the normies start to become what the memers were originally making fun of, because they're unironically circulating this hate, defending the hate, and looking for the next bit of hate to spread via the latest 'meme'.
It's an epidemic, and in a way I suppose I'm saying that normies really shouldn't partake of memes. It should be left to the professionals, again for lack of a better term. The circulation of memes by those that don't understand the humor that comes with them, and the general commentary on the society we as a community live in, are the ones that are spreading both hate and intolerance in our communities.
I know a lot of people are going to absolutely disagree with my ideals, and for that purose I am leaving the comments open, as a lot of people that discuss controversial things are always shielding themselves from criticism. If you have something to input on these ideas, please let me know. I could absolutely have things wrong, and these ideas are simply my own. It's what I've observed over the years and having lived in a time where memes were just a small obscure part of the internet that you could laugh at when you had the time to now where memes essentially rule the online communities and a small portion of reality.
