![]() On a very basic level, they’re connecting to the moment by trying to insert themselves into it. “We seriously need to have a conversation,” one Twitter user wrote in a viral tweet that has since been locked, “about how the overwhelming prevalence of meme culture has made people insensitive to serious tragedies and only see them as an opportunity to make a joke rather than for the reality of the situation and those in it.”īut the memes are also serving an important function for the meme-makers. “So, dealing with it in a laissez-faire kind of way.”Īlhabash’s research indicates that people who share memes often aren’t thinking too deeply about what to post or share, and are “driven to make content based on what we think other people want to see on social media.” This can be a very knee-jerk experience, which doesn’t really lend itself to reflective war memes. Part of the meme response is about “not realizing what war really is and what it means,” Alhabash said. There is definitely an element of privilege and safety behind the impulse to meme instead of staying glued to the news. ![]() If you are not ukrainian currently searching for nearest shelter, how can you joke about ww3 as “coping mechanism”? what are you coping with? i woke up to the sounds of explosions in my city today, is it funny to you?- ⁷ February 24, 2022 So while they might appear humorous or of the seriousness, they can reflect sentiment.”īut the meme discourse quickly forestalled the obvious defense that humor is a coping strategy, with many noting that the people using “humor” to “cope” are the people ( Americans) safely ensconced in their ( privileged suburban) homes, far away from the danger. “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. 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
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