Meme Culture by Katya Lien
What can galvanize and motivate more than 53,000,000 people from across the globe to come together, cooperate, and spread the word to work towards one common goal? (Aside from the fight against COVD-19, of course.) An Instagram picture of an egg. If that’s not the best, most emblematic, and somehow poetic representation of meme culture, I don’t know what is.
Remember back in 2019 when the Instagram Egg sought to make a picture of an egg, just a plain old egg, the most liked picture on Instagram? The leading contender for most-liked-image on Instagram at the time was a photo of Kylie Jenner coming in hot at 18.6 million likes. Within ten days of announcing its goal, the egg eclipsed Kylie by millions of likes. As it stands today, the Instagram Egg is more than 30 million likes ahead of its runner up. If that’s not a landslide victory, I know what is. I mean, I double-tapped the egg and, odds are, you did too.
It’s kind of hilarious. Silly. Stupid. Pointless. Whatever you want to call it. But in a world full of very, very real doom and gloom, Memes offer a sort of escape. Our generation is terribly aware of climate change and the impact it will have on our futures and those of our future families. We’ve inherited a suffering planet. We’ve lived through being unable—and scared--to go to school because of a global pandemic and mass shootings. We’ve lived through one of the most politically fraught times in modern American history. We’ve lived through the #MeToo movement. You could say that so many of us, just teenagers and early twenty-somethings, have been around the freaking block. And in a time when our real lives are intensely affected by these overwhelming and close-to-home issues, we need a break. We need a laugh. We need an inside joke for our generation. And that’s what memes have to offer.
One could say that this kind of galvanization is useless and dumb. But I kind of think that’s the beauty of it. That’s not to say that it would be really impactful and meaningful to get that many people to come together to work on the important things like climate change, racism, and sexism. In fact, we have fought those things. We’ve walked out of classes for climate strikes, engaged in social distancing, stormed the streets for Black Lives Matter and the Women’s March. And we haven’t let it get to us--instead, we’ve lived out our values with meaning and impact. So, coming together around something silly, uplifting, and funny for funny’s sake isn’t devoid of meaning. It’s necessary. And it’s our thing.
From The Egg, to stock photos, Salt Bae, Damn Daniel, Suhh Dude, Karen or Baby Yoda, we get it. And we don’t have to explain ourselves. This one’s for us. Memes rule.