Why Do People Love Memes So Much?
There are so many variations of content that run rampant through the internet today, content is the baseline for everything we know on the web and social media. Memes, on the other hand, have sent the internet into a continually looping wormhole of entertainment. Memes are everywhere, all the time, on every platform.
They are universal and have become a culture of their own. Memes have of course been around since before the World Wide Web took over everyone’s lives, back then memes were just given from person to person, instead of shared for an entire audience to see. So, the question we ask ourselves is, why are memes so universally popular, and why can’t people stop themselves from clicking on them?
Memes Connect People and Provide a Sense of Inclusion
There’s an interesting social aspect at play when it comes to memes and their widespread popularity. Memes have the ability to bring a sense of confirmation of social acceptance. Meme culture has created an entire subsect of people who use memes as a form of communication and assessment of social standing and trendy knowledge.
Your ability to acknowledge the meme and understand it, acts as a ticket into a culture where you are automatically accepted and bonded with many other people world-wide, whom you’ve never met. When you engage in the sharing of the meme or commenting on it, you are creating a digital tie to a community in which you feel you have something in common.
There may be times where this feeling could be thought of as a false sense of community and a false sense of connection. On the other hand, existing in the digital world can be cut off and cold, and often even nasty and terrifying. Memes provide a positive link between people, and even though this link may be small, it offers a sense of human connection without actually being physically connected.
Memes Help Us Lighten The Load
Memes are often made surrounding topics that might be complicated to address. Anything from politics, world events, and even social issues are often turned into something humorous, and made into memes. This give people the opportunity to ease their own anxiety and choose to find humour in a possibly tense or triggering situation.
It is also a form of expression. Memes provide the creator an opportunity to express their opinion or feelings on an issue without actually saying too many words or entering into a face to face confrontation. This can be seen as both a positive and negative quality. It gives the person who made the meme a way to hide behind their meme and allow the people commenting, to fight amongst themselves. This is only a positive thing, when someone is actively trying to stay out of confrontation on a triggering issue.
Like playing bingo online for money, memes are a part of the digital age and have made a large imprint on the way in which we interact as a society, and communicate as a whole. They give many people an opportunity to find joy, light, laughter and humour in a non-human interactive platform.
