Look I chuckle at a couple myself but boy… Every single meme I see I feel myself growing dumber out of the sheer opportunity cost, and they are everywhere on the internet overtaking everything out of how unnatural they are at hijacking your attention to the point that even if you want to ignore them they will pop up in your feed and your senses will be more drawn to that stupid sensationalistic image with a couple key words and miss the other more thought provoking posts if they aren’t already hidden in the recesses of algorithms that are having a stroke everytime a meme is posted.
I feel like I am in the minority in sharing this hatred for memes, I figured maybe here somebody else is less than impressed by them and their attention hijacking. I feel like the quality of online discourse has devolved drastically because of them and they are making it harder and harder to find quality content online that is consistently engaging.
Do you love memes? Do you hate them like me? Are you more in the middle? Let me know your thoughts on memes and how they are affecting us. I know I want an adblocker for memes instead of popups, a memeblocker if you will, memes are like ads, but worse.
You are not alone in minority opinions. Lately I have expressed my dislike of the “Barbie” movie, “This is Spinal Tap” and “Citizen Kane”. All almost universally loved movies. I think all three are near the worst , unfunny, unentertaining films I have ever seen. I am baffled by their popularity.
So you just rock on my meme hating friend.
lol
I dont personally hate memes, but I join you in the ranks of the fringe haters.
Usually memes don’t interest me, unless it’s something that fits very well into a situation it can be funny, but yeah, I find they are massively over used for my taste.
I like memes as in memetics. I think that’s neat. It helps you dissect memes and disregard the unhelpful ones. I’ve said it before but Richard Brodie has a book called Virus of the Mind. It’s a good starting point.
I find them fascinating from a linguistic standpoint. Often, just the image is enough to convey a thought that would require whole paragraphs if they were written out. For example, if I replied to a person with just this
I get what you are saying and your presentation doesn’t trigger the issue I am talking about, it’s not the fact that memes leverage your empathy to convey meaning in a more concise manner that I have a problem with. The issue is when those images are coupled with catchy statements in big bold characters. I can feel the stimulus literally take a toll on my mental health, one or two I can handle but the moment I start scrolling in a place where people post memes, like quora, I can feel the strain on my brain grow and while my attention is grabbed by the screen a part of me is begging me to stop what I’m doing sooner rather than later and I can feel just how unhealthy the whole thing is for me. It’s just too much stimulation to get a minor point across without any way to pace myself and it’s not organic, it completely derails me into a random overstimulation about something generally unimportant and over the top. All of that needs to be massively recalibrated down and reconnected properly to its own context before being integrated and that’s where the strain comes in, no other information is so dense and completely unrelated to the context in which you found it. If we are talking about something and you post a meme that relates to it, it’s whatever, but if I just scroll and 30 different memes pop up that are in themselves surprises and I have a hard time ignoring them, well now I am overstimulated by a bunch of useless unrelated stuff that’s leveraging all sorts of pathways which were never intended to handle something so unimportant. Everything is backwards when it comes to memes in the wild, I don’t like them one bit, especially if they are in places like my feed, that’s where I hate them the most. The fact that the emotions they are used to trigger in the reader boil down to “eheh, ahah, uhuh, ihih, ohoh” 99% of the time just makes me question what’s the point? The answer is that there is no point, memes exist for the lols and the lols just aren’t that important to deserve such overstimulation spread all over the internet eclipsing all other forms of communication and dialogue.
I am glad to see people seem to be taking them more in stride though, maybe it’s more of an issue for me than an objective problem.
you could always get a browser extension that hides images. That would hide the memes, and you wouldn’t have to look at them anymore.
I do know what you mean about them being eye-catching in places with endless scrolling feeds. I stopped using sites that have algorithm-based content because I got an abundance of ads designed to make me angry enough to interact with the ad. I didn’t like having to manage my own reaction to them every five posts, so I deleted everything. That made life a lot better for me all around.
