From your ‘bobr kurwas’ to your ‘hawk tuahs’ and now to your “it was staged”, more and more the global information and news, trivial or significant, are being conveyed through memes. We are truly living in the Harambe timeline, or as I would say to a normal human being in a casual conversation, “we are living in dystopian times”. Let me be perfectly candid, this dictum could never express the sheer madness and nonsensical potential the current state of affairs that we are living through. George Orwell is currently reading the recent chapter of 2024 and is in utter dismay, all while smoking and striking the Matthew Mcconaughey cigarette pose. The world is catching fire and the dog is not as fine as he used to be. Anyway, enough with the melodramatics, let’s move on to the important stuff.
Now, consider that I have been an advocate of the importance of memes for quite some time, but even so, I might have underestimated their significant role in the social shifts our world is undergoing. Once upon a time, I perceived memes as a particular type of entertainment, an art form that combines images and words or thoughts in a sarcastic fashion to convey a message. These images, usually created to obtain laughter, chuckles and vanity upvotes, are representative of the hyper-consumeristic society of our time. Simply put, a meme is born because of a specific event, it circulates and eventually dies out. Some formats may remain for longer periods of time but eventually others pop up and captivate the global attention in the world’s goldfish memory (for about five seconds give or take) before returning to the endless cycle of birth and death.
That being said I still find remarkable that even though memes have started primarily as an entertainment source, they have progressively become more concerned with politics, both local and global. Obviously you have to bear in mind that there are posts that are created for irony, others that have an ideological intent, certain others that are mearly and purposefully shitposting and others still that come from bots (let’s not kid ourselves, the dead internet theory might have some exaggerated numbers, but it still makes some valid points). Even more interesting is how, given all of these nuances and intents at work, memes (and the communities behind them) succeed in giving more information than the actual news agencies. Between newspapers and news programs, the concrete information that any reportage actually conveys is abysmal, inexistent or manipulated with a specific political agenda in mind. This is not to say, by any stretch of the imagination, that memes are not just as easily manipulated, curated or even directly hoaxes, but there is still information in them – especially on sites where people around the world can comment and share a more in-depth view (or just continue the shitposting thread, it can go either way really).
So these are the times we are living in, official news reportages are either fake or inadequate, and memes inform. There is however one substantial problem (well, there are many but let’s just focus on the one): amongst the worlds of news, the incomplete information and misinformation memes can give, they do manage to give a complete spectrum of the various nuances of a single story. It is a case where the infinite stratums of technically incomplete bits of information of a story ultimately gives a full picture, but people are not interested in it. If ‘one’ is capable enough to read through it, understand the evidence provided and maybe even do some research, ‘one’ is also capable of understanding the quote on quote truth of the matter at hand. We are however living in the Harambe timeline which also implies that ‘one’ is not interested in the truth but rather in their version of it. So, instead of having the nuances and the pondering of truths, we just have people going “this must be true because others have said it and it is what I believe as well – also the ones advocating for the contrary are simply fakes”. As a collective we still choose to see the world in binary terms: it’s either true or false, right or wrong, my version of reality or a fake; truthfulness becomes based on personal conviction rather than an informed analysis.
Welp…it was the best of times, it was the worst of times and now it’s the most dystopian of times. But who knows, maybe even this very same article has been generated by algorithms that will eventually create most of the content found on internet and that is already flooding us daily. A doubt a day keeps the dead internet away.