Communing with the virtual
I would consider myself to be a part of a certain Instagram community. It is the meme community. Many users on Instagram and twitter take part in these “memes”. A meme is a humorous image, video, piece of text, etc., that is copied (often with slight variations) and spread rapidly by Internet users. Often someone will be hungry for some social media validation, and will create a funny picture or joke to get some retweets, likes, or followers. If one of these users gets lucky, or has a good sense of humor (or sometimes and edgy sense of humor) the joke they created will go viral. This is when I consider a joke to be a meme. At this point, the meme will get hundreds of thousands of retweets, and sometime more new memes will branch off from it. These friendly and humorous memes are well accepted. However, after a week or two, twitter or Instagram will be so overloaded with the meme that it has been ruined and no longer holds the comedic value it did when it first emerged. People tend to encourage new memes, but after a while it is discouraged to create new versions of a certain meme. If you look deeper into the meme community, you will start to get into the ironic memes. This is when people take an old overused meme and use it again “ironically” and it may blow up again. Some meme creators are on so many layers of irony now that it takes knowledge of several past memes to understand one of their new memes. At the end of the ironic meme community, you will reach the dark void of memes: edgy memes. These memes will probably be mildly offensive and very mean spirited. Aside from that, there are also meme hybrids that will take some topic (such as a tv show) and apply the concept of a meme to that topic. Overall, the meme community has decent values when you only skim the surface. People are friendly, entertaining to others, and give others credit when it is deserved. Below the surface, you will find people that are usually unaccepting to newly popular memes and tend to discourage. The community of edgy memes has the worst values of them all, often using offensive topics or racist stereotypes ironically (still racist) to gain validation for their content. The meme community plays a big role in our current generation and will continue to be relevant as long as social media is still around.