Dearest Gentle Reader,
Would it be ridiculous to ask, have you come across any memes in the last week or so? Did you find it funny or reminiscent? And have you shared it with someone?
Since you are reading this essay online, there is a high possibility that, consciously or unconsciously, you are a part of the large meme-consuming crowd. According to a report published in Business Standard, Indian smartphone users spend thirty minutes of their day consuming and sharing memes.
Memes have become a regular dose of satire; infotainment, which takes a crisp informational story and transforms it into just an image, a GIF clubbed as a several-second video. Memes are cultural products. They are socially embedded small packets of information.
As consumers of memes on an everyday basis, one can say with certainty that they can be both exhilarating and exhausting simultaneously. Exhilarating because they induce happy feelings in us. Exhausting because of the sheer dump of information shared on social media. And, there is also no doubt that they can be entirely absurd.
The term ‘meme’ was coined by acclaimed evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in his famous book The Selfish Gene in 1976. Meme, he claimed, is a social gene that takes part in the imitation and evolution of culture. Dawkins wanted to understand why certain behaviours, unreasonable from a social evolutionary perspective, existed in different human societies. Ideas that seem contradictory to human evolution and survival tend to both survive and thrive.
And for Dawkins, just as Darwinian evolutionary theory, ideas as human genes compete through human interactions. And some ideas emerge victorious, while others are forgotten as quickly as they find their place in history. This process, in ‘Dawkinsean’ sense, is a ‘natural selection’ but for ideas. However, Memetics, as the field came to emerge, has since been refuted as pseudoscience.
Modern Internet memes have become a cognitive sensation. They are now made for entertainment, promotion, and marketing, but also for self-expression, even social and political commentary. They can be made by merging different images and reproducing video content with texts or commentary.
This repackaged information relies on expansion mainly through humour. But it is not just humour. Memes can appeal to people through other emotions, too. People utilise memes to sell their products, to convince others into hating/disliking a certain section of society, to wage wars and bring peace, and even to propagate religious and cultural aspects of a society. But these are all well-known.
However, what is not very well-known is how memes elicit interpersonal intimacy: how memes become the agents of interpersonal intimacy (i.e., love and other drugs!).
Why do people on Instagram or, say, even WhatsApp, share memes with their (prospective) partners? What makes memes so powerful? Why are people so enamoured by memes?
The basic premise of meme circulation is its ability to evoke momentary emotive reactions. People send memes back and forth to elicit such reactions. They are momentary—but memorable.
A caveat: this is not to say that memes are only sent to elicit intimate partnerships, they exist between friends, family, and those-who-are-far-off-and-forgotten-and-want-to-remind-them-that-they-exist-and-you-value-them.
Memes, in general, become agents to connect people living far from each other. They establish a certain familiarity, nostalgia, reminiscence, etc. But they are a quick ice-breaker. If you want to speak with someone on Instagram, you send them a meme. And that is how common they are. With new acquaintances, a meme is a pavement to build ground—or, say, some millennials call it: break the ice.
And therefore, meme intimacy. The term ‘meme intimacy’, for me, refers to the ways in which memes themselves become agents of social relations. Although in a narrower sense of the term, intimacy is about familiarity and close associations, memes shift this intimacy to the unknown at times.
For example, a coworker only known through meetings and sharing a cubicle on the same floor may not seem an intimate acquaintance. But, say, you start talking on Instagram, and you both share memes with one another. And now, a sense of meme intimacy persists.
Intimacy demands a sense of familiarity, and to love and to care requires a sense of self-disclosure about this closeness. Each time we share a meme—assuming it represents what we are feeling right now—we disclose a part of us to them with or without our knowledge.
Intimacy is the conformity about knowing the other, and being known by them. It inhabits a space in our shared understanding about what they mean to us and we to them. It is like Spotify: we predominantly listen to the songs Spotify suggests, and Spotify curates songs for you to listen to based on what you listen to.
Memes, then, are like favourite songs or lyrics of a song that quiet you down when you deeply desire something that is unfamiliar or intensely meaningful in its bullshitness. Please see that it is not a surrender of the self to something else. It is just something that exists, and what we need at that moment. It is rather a quiet moment of holding a hand and feeling accepted.
Since humans are social animals. Aristotle, remember? Humans depend on each other for social existence. They fall in love, fall out of it, fall in love again, and fall out of it again, and so on. But, in these every-once-in-a-while happenings, memes tend to draw us close to others. Memes reduce a certain sense of loneliness and isolation that has emerged even more with social media.
I share memes with my brothers, sisters, girlfriends, boyfriends and with many more. I have friends who share memes with me on the roll. It is those memes that keep me connected to and with them.
Memes touch people in a strange way. It is not that we sit and think too much about what effect a meme has on us. And that is perhaps why, dear reader, you have me writing this essay. Because I sat through and thought about what effects the meme has on us. I am guilty of sending memes and receiving memes.
It is possible, after a long day of work, that you just want to chuckle at something. And you wish someone sent you a funny video or something. And there you go, you open your social media, and there is a barrage of memes. One after another—all funny, and some not-so-funny. It is also possible that you are out of words to express something, dear reader, so memes come to your rescue.
Memes make it easier for introverts to connect with others at a different level (and this can work only until they ask you out for a coffee!). And, on the go, you can send them while on a train, or as you read a book, or as you stand in a queue, or as you sip your coffee.
In a strange way, meme intimacy has allowed us to discover people for who they are and what they tend to become. And just as I finished writing this essay, a meme drops in on my dashboard, stating: ‘this reminds me of you’.
 | A guest post by
|