A Picture Says 1000 Words
It’s the early aughts, and as you’re downloading your favorite music from Limewire, feeding your Neopet, and updating your Myspace Top 8, the familiar AIM notification sound pings in the background. It’s a meme, from your best friend. You snort from your nose a little bit when you open the gif of an orange cat dancing behind a keyboard with the caption, “Us in band class today.”
Via u/anonymously
Just like that, a joke was made, a connection forged, and a friendship strengthened, all without an in-person interaction. It was then that the meme was born, making captioned images more meaningful, personal, and relatable than ever before, sparking a humorous virality that would scourge the web. With MS Paint locked and loaded on their computer desktop and a whole slew of funny images online, millennials became the first creators, purveyors, and consumers of the modern meme.
Unlike any generation before them, millennials spent much of their youth online, surfing the Internet with ease before they ever memorized their times tables. For millennials, everything was online: Friendships, crushes, entertainment, games, and, of course, memes. Traipsing through an unbridled wilderness of uncensored YouTube, ChatRoulette rooms, and Reddit meme forums all before their teenage years, millennials adapted to a world of visual dialogue. This had them forging meaningful connections with friends online using the social currency that would define their generation: Memes.
“We’ve mastered communication without uttering a single word,” says Vaishali Sehgal, a cultural journalist from Meer. “Memes symbolize our lives; they imitate and reflect our realities.” According to Sehgal, millennials grew up in the early days of the Internet and the rise of social media platforms like Facebook, Reddit, and Twitter, where memes initially gained their popularity. These platforms opened a world of social connection to like-minded individuals and, through these avenues, millennials realized that memes spoke volumes, especially to a middle-child generation that belonged neither here nor there. Stuck between the analog past and the digital future, millennial mememakers created their own language of pithy pictographs, conveying complicated thoughts that were more easily digested in visual format.
Millennial therapist and mental health advocate Theodora Blanchfield, emphasizes the importance of memes to the millennial communicative repertoire. “Memes get trivialized and disparaged, yet, they’re an important social currency and way of communicating. These small, often funny pieces of content are important for their ability to share ideas quickly and succinctly as well as foster a sense of connection and feeling seen.” As a generation that experienced one too many once-in-a-lifetime catastrophes, millennials often fled to the Internet, seeking solace with like-minded peers and communicating with memes. Funny little pictures with silly little captions make Internet-goers feel a sense of community and belonging, striking a cord of familiarity and kinship between meme creators, viewers, and sharers alike.
Via u/ionlycamehereforthechuckles
Millennials face greater financial, social, and psychological difficulties than Americans from previous generations and much of that translates into stress, anxiety, and self-isolation, according to Loren Soeiro, Ph.D., a psychologist with Psychology Today. Memes are like cultural artifacts, or tokens of social opportunity, that give millennials a sense of belonging with others, keeping them societally engaged and using humor to lighten a millennial's mental load, and ultimately, everyone’s mood.
Because with memes, especially viral memes that are circulating social media, universal feelings are validated and expressed without ever facing the fear of rejection. When you’re at a loss for words, struggling to convey your feelings, or simply grasping for a digital connection with someone else, sometimes a Spongebob meme says it better than you ever could.
Via u/knowyourmeme
For some millennials, memes are their only way of remaining plugged into society, viewing the world as they always have through the lens of humorous Internet lore and sharing that humor with kindred spirits.
Homage to Early Meme Hominids
Memes are the social currency of a generation born into the Wild West era of the Internet. With zero adult supervision, unlimited access to the family computer, and the whole world at their fingertips, millennial children in the early 2000s shaped the way the online world communicates. With virality and humor, memes took over the social media landscape, becoming a main avenue for social connection between friends and strangers, conveying universal messages to which everyone could relate, primarily through humor.
Via u/iamonlyhereforsensiblechuckles and u/prettycooltim
Embodying early hominids, memes give modern man the opportunity to carve their own caveman-style hieroglyphs on the wall, sharing their feelings, stories, and emotional takes with society. Leaving their mark on Internetscape through forums, feeds, and posts, millennials have effectively taught humanity the proper way to communicate online, passing along their own memeology to younger generations and bridging the gap between generations through universally understood humor.
Via u/iamonlyhereforsensiblechuckles
Even Gen X and Boomers, who are still relatively new to the Internet compared to younger, digital native generations, have adopted memes as an integral part of online communities. Sharing nostalgia, wholesomeness, dark humor, and funny cat memes fosters the hope that it’s possible to reach out into the void and touch another soul.
By sending memes, people can easily forge online relationships., It was a simpler online time when sending keyboard cat gifs spoke volumes, our AIM statuses were meaningful, and the biggest drama of the week was missing this week’s episode of Spongebob.
Via u/Mstudiosimages