Briefly Touching on a Positive Aspect of Meme Culture

Memes have been online forever really, even before I was a deep-diving internet spelunker. The popularity of Rage Comics and other silly memes like Bad Luck Brian really skyrocketed when I was around 15-16 years old. The popularity of those specific memes has obviously declined, but the meme culture still lives on even today. At all corners of popular social media, there are screenshots upon screenshots of funny images with goofy captions. The internet is saturated with these things.

I, for one, got pretty burnt out of memes. I don't mind that other people enjoy them, heck, I'd be lying if I said I didn't get a little serotonin hit each time I ran across a particularly good one. But I find that the oversaturation of memes makes engagement online very dull, so many jokes recycled over and over again... It gets pretty old after a while. I also find that I felt.... Dumber? I don't know how to describe it other than that. I felt like I couldn't read anymore, I felt like I had a shorter attention span, I felt like I couldn't get much a laugh out at something if it wasn't a neatly packaged image and caption... That's bonkers to me. It's part of why I left the book of face and hardly participate in the other mainstream social media, aside from Tumblr.

Onto the one thing I can genuinely be thankful for when it comes to meme culture... Reaction images. As an adult autistic, who has had difficultly explaining their emotions their whole entire life, I find reaction images extremely useful. I do very poorly when it comes to this aspect of communication because my childhood consisted of... Less than optimal parenting. I was basically trained not to emote unless it was a positive feeling, this coupled with the autism, I was left very confused about emotions.

Reaction images, however, gave me a decent communication tool to help other people understand my tone and emotion during a conversation. I still use them today, even though the concept is pretty much outdated. When I am having a feeling, I have an arsenal of gifs to use to help put the feeling into an emoting human face, then I can use it to show people who don't understand what I'm feeling and why I'm reacting the way I am.

So thanks meme culture, your contributions are minimal, but I can't fully hate you for giving me such a useful communication tool.