Memes have had a meteoric rise in the last couple of years, evolving from smile-inducing snippets to an entire language of their own. What good is a social media scrolling session if every third picture isn’t a relatable post by one of the many meme pages you follow? One that makes you tag your friends just to say, “OMG, SAME!”?
Gen Z thrives on visual mediums, and memes are a perfect example of it. Because while pictures do speak a thousand words, memes can say a million with the addition of just a line or two. Whether it’s post-breakup memes you send your BFF, or succinct replies to dumb statements made on Whatsapp group chats, it’s the GIF that keeps on giving. They’ve also become the most relatable marketing tool—did you even care about Bird Box before you saw the viral memes that claimed Sandra Bullock looked like Michael Jackson? They come in all shapes, sizes and formats, but what makes them relatable is their ability to analyse a situation it dissects via viral images.
Videos by VICE
Gen Z is expected to be happier and more hopeful than the generations preceding them. But their affinity towards interactive experiences and easy access to information online translates into a sort of humourous helplessness of knowing you may be the world’s only hope, but also a kind of ‘yeeting’ away from the issue. This pragmatic sentiment of ‘feeling like shit has hit the roof but you may as well laugh it all away’ is probably what made the halfway wholesome Sui Dhaga and downright dank Sacred Games memes so popular in India. So what makes Gen Z memes stand out from the rest?
A sense of self-awareness and emotional detachment
21-year-old Anuj Nakade’s daily routine includes shitposting, deciphering memes on chat forums, and researching the true meme-ing of life. He feels more self-aware than self-centred, thanks to the ample time he, and the mostly unemployed generation he belongs to, has on his/their hands, an unsure economy, and an overload of information online—all of which have come to define the memes generated and shared by him and his peers.
“We favour irony and sarcasm in our memes, but even when they are nihilistic, we aren’t too emotionally involved in them when we share them.” Citing examples of cringey Tik Tok videos that have now gone viral as memes, the Crab Rave meme format and the ‘N word’ meme being paired with pictures of Narendra Modi, Nakade feels that Indian meme-rs prefer weird, dark and edgy posts, seeing them more as catharsis than as relatable sentiments. This detachment towards the content they create and consume is probably a result of their eight second attention spans, while their tendency to be selective about what to share on social media makes them gravitate towards stuff that stands out. That’s probably why weird shit like Will Smith’s rewind, T-posing and PewDiePie’s ‘Meme Reviews’ are more relatable than the derp face and bad luck Brian in recent times.
The exclusivity factor
“Mainstream stuff is recycled to be relatable to the general public, so I prefer edgy memes over them,” says Karan Shah, an aspiring comedian who prefers such memes because he feels it brings a sense of exclusivity over the normie memes shared by most people.
“I also think Instagram has played a big role in meme culture. I used to see memes on Facebook and wasn’t that into them, but Instagram made edgier things more accessible,” attributing an insider status to the visual-based social media. Considering Instagram is Indian Gen Z’s most preferred form of social media, it’s no surprise that older generations probably won’t understand or laugh at a lot of the shit they scroll through due to their use of specific slang, cryptic nature and enhanced sense of individuality. Do you even yeet bro?
“The younger crowd keeps the context more obscure and the focus is on the receiver,” says Shubhi Dixit, a micro content creator with a massive interest in understanding meme culture for marketing purposes. “The visual and the accompanying text will be inarticulate at expressing the message, but that’s how the younger folks create a filter to ensure a loyal [and limited] following” continues Dixit. “This could also mean that adults in their late 20s are often more judgemental about the younger folks, so the young adults want to maintain some ambiguity and keep their humour private.”
The regularly evolving formats
“I think our generation is really into absurdist memes that may not make sense to many people,” says Hima Mishra, a 21-year-old student of Political Science who finds memes that ridicule socio-political happenings most relatable.
As meme formats continue their evolution with every passing second from the disarming ‘weird flex, but ok’ to ‘don’t say it’ twitter threads to the current #10yearchallenge craze, memes are made and consumed for different reasons. “Earlier, if there was a trending meme, other pages would tend to copy it, but now, not only do we have more meme pages, but each page serves their own kind of memes that are actually famous on their own and not just collectively being shared by the audience,” says Anukriti Singh, a 19-year-old Hyderabad-based student who prefers sharing dark humour memes. Whether it’s something wholesome like Bongo cat or strange like the Sprite Cranberry compilation, the fact that memes are not confined to any specific format gives them the space to grow and change based on trending topics that reflect the zeitgeist of the times.
“Nowadays we can see a lot of expressionism in memes and that’s a great thing. A change I really appreciate is that they educate people about a lot of things, put a broader perspective out there for people to see and understand in a glance. I sometimes even get my news in the form of memes,” states Mishra, who feels that it is ultimately Gen Z’s appreciation of memes as a form of art that makes them dedicate more time to creating, consuming and deciphering them, regardless of how strange and/or frivolous it might seem to anyone older.
Follow Shamani Joshi on Twitter.
