Memology!

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What is a meme? No question has really startled scholars more; no idea has ever been the subject of as many conspiracy theories or vigorous debates. We’re not going to sit here and claim that we quite fully understand them; we understand that your intelligence level is too high for that. What we do know; however, is that the two biggest and most reliable search websites in the world, Google and Wikipedia, both agree that roughly 80 percent of memes’ emergence into the mainstream is owed to what scientists are experimentally calling “the Internet”. The two search giants also agree that there’s a direct correlation between the success of a meme and the amount of laughs it generates. This is where the consensus ends, though. We won’t go into details to spare you the ugliness involved in the seemingly unending ideological war of attrition between the two parties.

What’s more important to us, and should also be to you, is the tangible impact that memes are now having on the life of the average Joe. To put it more succinctly, we’re here to wake you up to the destructive impact that memes are having on our lives. No, really. Rolling your eyes won’t make them go away. It’s time for us to admit once and for all that memes are no longer a laughing matter and that they need to be taken seriously for a change. We will have failed the coming generations if we don’t. After all, in our lifetimes, we’ve witnessed memes growing from an innocent, benign tool of generating laughs to becoming the cause of many a fight and a rallying cry of political campaigns around the world.  They’re here to stay and to change our world in more averse ways than one.

Take for instance, the beloved Pepe the Frog memes. What roughly started off as the perfect representation of the awkwardness within all of us has now been transformed into an international sensation that’s being consistently used by white supremacists. No one really knows how that linkage came about; although, some underground political experts around the world have hypothesized that Donald Trump’s retweet of that beloved frog might have incomprehensibly led it to having such a clearly unintended message. In all cases, Pepe has now become one of the most deplorable and predictably divisive figures on the Internet. Its active presence isn’t without opposition. People throughout the United States, long considered the standard-bearer in how to confront hate in all of its forms, have admirably risen together against Pepe. CNN, for instance, has named the controversial frog among its top five most important figures in the 2016 elections. Similarly, The New York Times has predicted that costumes mimicking the frog will become among the most worn attires this Halloween. Needless to say, memes in the US, and beyond, are no longer a laughing matter.

Across the Atlantic, Europe has unorthodoxly followed America’s strategy in starting to take memes a lot more seriously. In fact, many countries in the continent, including all Scandinavian ones, have illegalized the usage of memes until further information is available on their impact on society. In Great Britain, for example, the House of Commons might be passing legislation that allows only one meme-producing social media page to exist, ‘the culturally significant’ Classical Art Memes Facebook page, with all other pages being ‘frozen’ pending further investigation.

Here in the Middle East, on the other hand, we’re still mostly treating memes the same way that we always have, solely as elements of laughter. We’re not necessarily at fault for that, but we’d be remiss if we don’t wake up and start to follow the Western Hemisphere’s path in understanding the tangible impact that memes have on our society. Recent signs have shown that we’re indeed very capable of such nuanced reading into one of the social sciences’ biggest undefined curiosities.

 

Some elements of this article might’ve been fictitious or exaggerated.