“This uncertainty about what is going to happen, and how severe this trend is. “These memes, the way that people are communicating, could be a reflection of the general feeling that people are having,” he said. In a 2020 phone interview, Saleem Alhabash, who studies memes and social media at Michigan State University’s media psychology department, told me memes are as valid a response as any other to overwhelming events beyond our control.
#BEST GAY MEMES INSTAGRAM CRACK#
And it’s human to crack jokes as a way of relieving some of your very real anxiety. It doesn’t take a huge feat of empathy, after all, to recognize that even though you may not be the person impacted by a crisis today, you could be impacted by it or a similar crisis later on. It’s a sign we’re still human.- AICN Podcast Day! February 24, 2022 We may be irony-poisoned on here, but you can’t stop gallows humor when it’s something this huge and bleak and we’re all individually powerless. I’m already seeing the scolding tweets about WWIII jokes. Take Ukraine’s official Twitter account, which has spent the previous months sharing darkly humorous memes about its political plight, even engaging in something like political shitposting - only to pivot following the invasion and use a very meme-like political cartoon of Hitler and Putin to remind us.
This lack of distance also leads to deeply paradoxical reckonings with what it means to meme through a war. While it’s natural for many people to continue treating those hubs as their personal space to post whatever they want, they’re likely to get an increased amount of backlash from others on the platform for performing their social activity as though it’s business as usual. The days when you could self-isolate from the political conversations around you simply by retreating to your preferred social media haven are long gone. War is already occurring, and that leads the act of meme-making in a time of crisis to feel much, much different.įor starters, most major social media platforms have become increasingly political in recent years, as various political crises have engulfed communities from Instagram to TikTok to fandom Twitter. We’ve been here before.īut unlike previous instances when “WWIII” memes took over the internet, this round of social media discourse has been tinged with grim reality. The memes themselves were utterly predictable. Can’t believe we’re gonna tweet through this war- Zara Rahim February 24, 2022