Memes and the Millennials

The advent of social media has seen many highs and lows. They were instrumental in many historical events, and at some places even toppled the governments. It has been one of the easiest way of communication between people. It has given the right to speech and expression of views for a common man to a larger audience, which was confined only to a village or town till a decade ago. Today, he can criticize or praise every single government policy, write his own movie reviews that could reach multitude. But for the audience to imbibe your ideas, it has to be crisp and compact. A meme serves this purpose. Social media has led to proliferation of memes, and meme creation has become a hobby for many and full time job for some.

Memes are so powerful in conveying their message to targeted audience. They are more like a video message, conveyed in a single frame with few words. The only disadvantage in communicating through memes is that the receiver should have known the context. A meme created using a frame in tamil movie could be understood only by people in Tamil Nadu, or otherwise he or she should have watched that movie. If the context is known, then you can transpire a lengthy blog message in seconds. The actors of that particular scene deliver your emotion to the receiver, which even a powerful orator cannot communicate through words.

Looking at them, the memes seems to be simple, but creating one is not so. It requires a lot of creativity, understanding of situation and ability to link with two different worlds. You need to possess extensive knowledge in various fields. Among the meme creators, millennials form a huge chunk and most of the contents are centered at Tamil movie scenes and comedies. Myself being a 90’s kid, has grown up watching lot of comedies in tv, as we had enough time to spare during our childhood. It was the time when almost every household had a television box but with very few channels to watch. The probability of all my friends having watched a comedy the previous night is high and next morning in our classrooms, we ruminate those comedy dialogues by sharing it among us. In this way, these things are moved to our primary memory and it comes out spontaneously when needed. As we grow and mature, the habit of sharing comedies has moved to next level of criticizing the unpleasable situations in a very funny but harsh way to express our disagreement. Also, the receiving time of a meme is very less among the millennials when compared to Gen X or baby boomers. In many instances, we end up explaining it to them. Thus, it has become our own tool for communication in our age.

Memes are particularly not appreciable when it is directly poised on a singular, which violates the basic human rights. There was an incident when a movie director was attacked online through memes for more than a week and worst part is that even the others who supported their colleague were also been attacAked. The memes are really a good tool for communication when used for proactive purposes. I feel this millennial meme creators are matured enough in understanding this and will act with responsibility.