We all love to laugh. We love to be entertained. We crave amusement and humor, especially in times of global distress and negativity. A time like the present.
Social media’s meme culture is rampant, like a virus online. Pictures and clips of famous people or short snippets from television shows and movies are edited to produce funny jokes with captions to make you chuckle. Normally, they are harmless and relatable. A ‘haha’, or an ‘LOL’, fills the captions.
To define a meme: it is an image or video that spreads like wildfire across the internet, altering as it goes from person to person. As new trends are born, it adjusts to remain relevant in the constantly changing world of social media and the internet. They birth new inside jokes and niche references. They remark on current social happenings and global news.
They are meant to give us a laugh. But recently, they have taken a dark turn.
The Dark Side of The (Internet) World
Memes started innocently. They were simple little quips, like the six-second Vine videos. However, as we got older, they began to twist into darker and more bleak productions.
Looking at the context, it becomes a little understandable. Our generation was the first one to have a significant online presence. We see everything, we know everything. Every little disaster across the world, every scandal. Climate change, imminent doom on our planet, health insurance, protests and riots, the government, the job market, finances, the economy, whatever’s going on in Europe, the new law in Asia that just doubles the price of everything; anything bad, we see it. Whether we want to or not. And humans aren’t meant for that. We’re not designed for that. We are exposed to more negative things than positive, and that changes our brains and how we think and approach our lives. After a while, we become cynical and dark ourselves, burnt out from seeing everything fall apart.
We want to laugh. We want entertainment that isn’t derived from suffering and brainrot. Something tangible and sincere. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem that our wish will be granted.
The harder things become, the darker the internet gets. We can’t seem to find any positive events, so we use the current state of the world and laugh together in hopes of lightening the mood, so to speak. We have no power over the events that happen, so we find what we can do and focus on that.
Making jokes and funny pictures online is something we can all take pleasure in. It’s better to laugh than to cry, and it’s even better to laugh together.
Meme Desensitization
Desensitization occurs when we view or are exposed to highly shocking material repeatedly, to the point where the violence or sadness we see no longer bothers us. Specifically, when it comes to media, desensitization is when “initial arousal responses to violent stimuli are reduced, thereby changing an individual’s ‘present internal state’” or their reaction times.
Meme culture heightens this phenomenon, spamming images referencing terrible events or pictures depicting extreme violence. What should be scary or worrisome starts to taper out, and it becomes just another thing on the timeline.
Adding a funny caption or editing the lighting and font shouldn’t make it funny, but if you see something enough times, you no longer feel that intense emotion you did the first time.
So it ends up being funny.
We have started to lose empathy towards others. Disasters and harmful events no longer bother us; they’re just new material to use. Our reactions are placated, no longer responding intensely or emotionally. We simply see, swipe, see, swipe. Forever.
Our behavior has changed greatly. We can’t bring ourselves to care about anything because nothing seems out of the ordinary. Internet desensitization has normalized everything, for better or worse. Our repeated exposure to violence and fear has decreased the chance of reaction or concern; any strong emotions are no longer with us.
It’s not necessarily our fault, though. The human mind is not meant to be able to process the constant influx of information we receive now. We only have so much mental energy and emotion to expend. Doomscrolling- or the practice of scrolling excessively on social media platforms, usually only seeing negative media- is patient zero for internet desensitization. The constant scrolling, constant subjection to all the dark and pessimistic photos and productions, we become exhausted. We can’t get angry at everything, or be sympathetic and ready to take to the streets for all the injustices we see before they were in meme-form. We are naturally feeling people, full of complex emotions, too many to properly label. We are not heartless or unfeeling.
But when one is overwhelmed by such negativity and harmful photos and clips, the exposure “can decrease negative affect, because violent stimuli lose their capacity to elicit strong emotions, the more often the stimulus is presented.”
The more we see, the less we feel.
An Evil Touch
Meme culture has encompassed social media. They touch on everything, usually everything that isn’t going well. Bringing light to a catastrophe, or laughing at the end of all we know to be true, is a coping mechanism. Seeing just the facts of every sad event is depressing; no one wants to be depressed. Unfortunately, in our effort to let loose and chuckle collectively, we have been bitten by internet desensitization.
Make sure to give yourself a break when going online. Rest and find other outlets than social media. Be mindful of the media you consume and how you feel about it.
Do you feel desensitized after being online too long? Let us know in the comments below!
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