Memes

Hakuna Matata |
Researcher | Part-time Photographer | Coffee Lover
🔵📷☕️

Ok this is a great rendition of this meta (which I hope concludes shortly)

Between Ghibli and bowls of ice water I’ve been thinking about the attention span of memes and the compression of virality timelines a lot this week. 

I’ve come to the conclusion that the next generation will reject memes and that they will become a boomer passé.

Sharing my interests will make more people want to follow me.

They are useless as social currency if they explode and die within weeks, and soon to be days, instead of months, and previously years. It’s now just another THING that is accelerating to a point where the original purpose is no longer served.

Memes were the language of the internet because they were not only fun, but also useful as an indicator that you belonged to a specific space and hooked into the zeitgeist.

I can see there being a point in the attention span of memes where the r value is so high that the meme exhausts all possible audiences before they have a chance to mutate, which then leaves us immune to it. Much like the death of a virus, that will be the death of the meme.

I’m really interested in where the next generation takes the meme medium. Once upon a time it was via spoken language, then written, then images, now it feels like a compression of images and video. It’s one of those things where I am sure that is will be a brand new thing.

I could see memes taking a new form or medium. Will be interesting to see if attention span reduction is a never ending loop or if it’s reversed at some point

this is... insightful to the point of feeling obvious now that I've heard it

probably gonna reconfigure my worldview, ngl