This shouldn't take long.
The scope, breadth, depth, and potential beauty of the English language cannot be overstated. We are capable of using it convey intense sadness or pain, immense joy, or extreme excitement and/or fear.
According to Wikipedia, which borrowed this information from the source: The word "meme" was coined by Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book 'The Selfish Gene' as an attempt to explain the way cultural information spreads.
The Internet isn't very old, in the big scheme of things. Internet memes in their modern form
began to appear about ten years ago, approximately. At the time, they seemed pretty funny, because they were *new.* They were really no different than they are now: A still image picture of a very well-known TV or movie shot, with bold text overlaid, making some smarmy comment of some sort. It was quickly appropriated by basically half of Facebook in order to have someone smarter than you-- and more capable of the Internet's version of eloquence (admittedly a pretty low bar)-- make your pithy points and commentary for you, in order to make you look good by comparison for having enough taste (allegedly) to share something coinciding so clearly with your version of common sense.
Herein lay the problem: People began quickly to use them for political stances and such, and we still do so with startling regularity.
Rather than have to actually think for ourselves about a particular problem, or how the nuance of how an important current event brought a political or newsworthy situation to bear, we instead devolved into attempting to describe it as quickly as possible in as few words as possible.
People! Doing stuff like that is what led to a dolled-up Internet troll winning America's highest office.
Rather than provide each other with substance, we have allowed ourselves to devolve into nothing more than a constant game of one-upsmanship and never-ending attempts to make other people look stupid-- again, by using words and images that 99% of the time aren't even our own. Is that doing anyone any favors? Are we getting smarter? Is Frye from Futurama really going to provide anyone some kind of deep perspective whoaaaa about something? No. USE YOUR WORDS, AND USE THEM WELL.
Granted, I'm mostly speaking about memes and their impact on our politics and societal matters in America, not memes that are just there for entertainment and talk about trivial frivolities. Still, the line is so blurred that it may as well not exist.
Do you own best, in this ongoing thing called life, to think critically and constructively about important issues, and debate them accordingly. Ideally in person, since in person, memes don't exist.
Thanks for reading.
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