Of Millennials & Memes

I've seen more episodes of Family Guy than I care to admit. The bulk of my Family Guy intake occurred between late middle school and early high school. I assume that age is their target audience, anyways. What got middle school Hunter into Family Guy were the cutaways. For those of you who have never seen an episode (don't worry, you're not missing out on much), a consistent element of their story-telling involves seemingly incoherent & perfectly unrelated side scenes the audience is cued into. For example, "This is lonelier than Alan Rickman's answering machine."

At that age, I remember knowing things kids my own age didn't know. Not like sketchy birds-and-the-bees things, but more along the lines of every Chevy Chase movie & the Crosby, Stills, & Nash discography. In short, nobody got my references. The Family Guy cutaways operate on a level of referentialism I could easily understand. It's the way my mind works. My brain makes connections fairly quickly & effortlessly, such that when my wife asks me to explain, I tire tracing all the threads and collapse into, "I don't know, it made sense to me."

In the world of social media, memes are an inescapable part of the landscape. And at heart, internet memes function as an ever-changing reference, but not to the same effect as a traditional sign or symbol. I see two necessary steps to appreciating an internet meme: (1) knowing the specific type of meme (Is it Kermit drinking tea? The most interesting man in the world? Sarcastic Willy Wonka? Y u no? Obama Llama?), (2) understanding & empathizing with the experience the meme is pointing to. So why are Millennials & Generation Z so obsessed with memes?

To understand a phenomenon, you must begin with the context. For Millennials & Generation Z, the internet is the context. I barely remember a time before the internet. In times past, memes spread concepts & meaning through symbols, behaviors, or images. The internet became a new context unto itself, and with this context came a whole new category of experiences that previous generations will not understand in the same way.

So on the first count, many non-millennials do not get memes because they don't know what they reference. But more than that, I find most memes point to a certain category of humorous experiences found in online interaction. The internet opened the door for nuanced & remarkably context-specific humor. The not only point to a generic type of meme, but they also point to a specific experience attached with the image. This is why you can adapt any meme's caption to fit a particular situation. It has endless iterations, much like the internet in which memes grow. They function, in a sense, like cutaways, little asides which invite you to get in on the fun.

I asked a high school student I know to send me a few of his favorite memes. It was a humbling experience for someone in his mid-twenties. They made me laugh, but I feel a growing gap between the type of humor I appreciate in memes and newer content. But that's ok. I still love learning more about the references. Memes change as often as the internet does. Perhaps the boundless iterations & the ability to succinctly express a specific kind of humor draws an internet-infused generation again & again to memes. And even if you hate internet memes, don't worry. The internet, as always, has a response.