I’m not going to embarrass myself and call myself a memester or anything of the like. In fact, the very act of writing a piece of formal writing about memes feels cringey and as though I am somehow outdating myself, but I feel like it warrants acknowledgment. I have so many friends, often guys, who share amongst themselves jokes that to me more than border on obscene. And if pressed on the issue of how something so morally infringing can be funny, the explanation is that it is ironic.
I am a huge fan of irony, don’t get me wrong. It is the biggest reason I started watching the Bachelor. How could one possibly believe love can be found through such a fabricated dating show that plays so much into gender roles and emotional manipulation? I spend each week yelling at the screen, but despite knowing the reason I chose to start watching it was to make fun of it, sometimes I get caught up in it. The same goes for so-called edgy memes.
One of my guy friends from home, although a Biden voter, called me the other day to talk about how suspicious it was that Joe Biden got one hundred thousand votes in Michigan in one night. I was confused, having not heard this at all.
This falsity comes from a typo on one election tracking site DecisionDeskHQ. It was then shared by many conservative social media accounts including Trump. What form were most of these posts shared in? Memes.
They spread across the internet. Most likely coming across my friend’s edgy feed and lodging into his mind. He did not mean any harm by it, but it is a bit troubling that he fell for this thinking without a doubt. Fell for the “irony” of his chosen form of humor.
I do the same. We all do it. Hell, my last article for HerCampus was about how I wasn’t in a relationship after six weeks, which, if that doesn’t show how I haven’t fallen into the headspace of the media I claim to consume in a space of irony, I don’t know what would. I just think we need to be more aware of it, and that maybe some things are too dangerous to be consumed even in the name of irony.