What does this meme?
According to a survey conducted by Common Sense Media in 2015, teenagers spend nearly nine hours per day on social media platforms. Thus, they have become one of the most important vehicles to propagate the ongoing pop culture. In this scenario, it is but obvious to consider the fact that memes leave a huge impact on the psyche of the impressionable minds of these teenagers that like, view or create them!
Apart from being means of expression and modes of entertainment, the viral qualities of a meme also give it the power to influence by taking advantage of a phenomenon social psychologists call “the herd mentality”. Pop culture mostly succumbs to the bandwagon effect where people forward memes under the influence of other social media influencers without putting much of their thought process into it. Thus people, who want to impose their ideologies on the world, use memes to influence the naïve brains of the youth. Memes have the potential to change as well as form opinions without using any radical measures. The youth easily form their mentality according to the thoughts expressed in memes, unknowingly falling in the trap of the influencer. Their political opinions have started emerging based on the views that are being proliferated in the viral media. Not to name any, but we all know of particular politicians that have now fallen prey into the clutches of this casual but influential medium, thus being reduced to mere cartoons to be laughed at.
Social Media is mostly accessed by youngsters which are the emerging vote banks of parties. Many parties purposefully make memes that seek to ridicule their rival parties in order to harness vote from these newly formed vote banks. Every Trump or Rahul Gandhi statement is considered as meme-worthy by social media users which impacted their popularity among the masses too.
Thus, what we see is just the tip of the iceberg. There are many implications which these small casual pictures have that may not come to our notice ever, but do impact our psyche. So, the next time, before you type a simple ‘lol’ on a meme, ponder over the intent behind its proliferation!
