The access to social media is available to many different people. While in ‘natural habitat’ one would be able to interact with fellow students, coworkers and family, the Internet space facilitates these boundaries to be extended further and enables us to reach or be reached by almost anyone. All internet users have come across some kind of humorous combination of an image or a video with a caption, which with time has earned its own genre name – meme. Memes have become a universal yet divisive form of digital communication in the shared space for particular groups of people. However, those images and jokes can be interpreted in different ways showing the contrasts in life values, humor and online social conduct seen among the generations of users.
In the digital world, trends and algorithms are shaping society’s humor and are influencing other aspects of their lives. The value of the meme can be seen in its virality, meaning the more attention it gets the better it is. The leading social media platforms like Facebook, TikTok, X (Twitter) or Reddit are not only the dealers of meme based humor, but also have developed to use them as satire and be a critique of social or political events, shaping the sense of belonging and building the meme culture and its importance.
Representatives of the Boomers, Millennials, Gen Z, Gen Alpha generations are engaging with the digital world everyday and with each other all the time. Since their age and upbringing are different, their views, opinions and humor will also vary. We associate Gen Alpha, who grew up with modern technology, with ‘brainrot’ jokes and digital content, where the visual aspects and ‘intelligence’ of the joke is not important. All is about being blatant, pointless, easy to remember and repeat. On the other side of the spectrum there are boomers, who did not grow up with any technology that would be comparable to current trending platforms. The content generated by them is usually not visually pleasing, as many of them still may struggle with using a smartphone properly, but the meme video that has a play-on-words joke is deeply appreciated and gains recognition. It shows how these approaches function in contrast. They emphasize visual or textual aspects and the content being ironic as opposed to sincere (they really think that ‘I hate my wife’ jokes are funny). Having grown up with (some) technology, Millenials and Gen Zs tend to operate on a nostalgia driven humor or just in the middle of the spectrum with absurd memes used as ‘copying mechanisms’. Again, in contrast to Boomers who used to write letters and read newspapers are more used to direct forms of communication, where joke is a joke and information is information. This contrast can possibly lead to miscommunications between those generations and cause outrage in responses and comment sections.
Therefore we can observe memes working as tools for encoding and dealing out the values and attitudes about the world surrounding us. It is interesting to see how such a minor aspect of the digital world is truly worth taking a look at. It is a highly functioning phenomenon and its development enables witnessing the divisions as well as connections in the society. While the humor changes with each generation, people’s desire to connect through shared experiences is constant. Memes are therefore a sort of cultural mirror reflecting the current trends and cultural events, and the generational divisions.
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