As a minor language nerd, I would like to posit a 2.5, if you will: memery as a dialect and individual memes as bespoke words.
Like, consider this sequence of emoji: 🌍 🧑🚀 🔫 🧑🚀
Chances are, you’re familiar enough with memes that you can infer the meaning of an English sentence which has nothing to do with the actual representational meaning of those emoji independently. By placing them in this specific context, I have communicated a meaning beyond their intended representation.
By a similar token, different specific memes under the same genre (e.g. Gigachad) may be equated with synonyms, and different contexts may call for different “words” (i.e. individual memes).
I pray Lord Apollo is kind enough to me for that to make sense because Hypnos is buzzing 'round my head and it’s getting hard to think
I suppose its the same speed but in my case it felt less awkward to fetch ^ image above than to search “meme where a black guy is facing the viewer and pointing to his car radio in a car”
And in anon’s case its way more efficient then googling “naked gigachad image, black and white, bearded short hair big pecs” and hoping the right one will come up.
It’s not always easy to find the exact meme I have in mind, there have been a couple times that I gave up on internet searching for one because it just wasn’t showing up. I also prefer scrolling through a bunch of memes that I’ve already vetted as good rather than the sea of meme trash the internet holds.
Yeah but how is digging through a folder of memes any faster than simply googling the image you want?
Have you seen Google lately?
I try not to
Every time I can’t find an old internet thing lament not having a meme folder. 😭 Who knew the internet would just forget about stuff.
Adding to what others have said, so much internet has been purged in recent years that the meme might very well be lost media.
I dont archive memes but I think its 2-part
As a minor language nerd, I would like to posit a 2.5, if you will: memery as a dialect and individual memes as bespoke words.
Like, consider this sequence of emoji: 🌍 🧑🚀 🔫 🧑🚀
Chances are, you’re familiar enough with memes that you can infer the meaning of an English sentence which has nothing to do with the actual representational meaning of those emoji independently. By placing them in this specific context, I have communicated a meaning beyond their intended representation.
By a similar token, different specific memes under the same genre (e.g. Gigachad) may be equated with synonyms, and different contexts may call for different “words” (i.e. individual memes).
I pray Lord Apollo is kind enough to me for that to make sense because Hypnos is buzzing 'round my head and it’s getting hard to think
I suppose its the same speed but in my case it felt less awkward to fetch ^ image above than to search “meme where a black guy is facing the viewer and pointing to his car radio in a car”
And in anon’s case its way more efficient then googling “naked gigachad image, black and white, bearded short hair big pecs” and hoping the right one will come up.
So I suppose it’s a specificity problem
It’s not always easy to find the exact meme I have in mind, there have been a couple times that I gave up on internet searching for one because it just wasn’t showing up. I also prefer scrolling through a bunch of memes that I’ve already vetted as good rather than the sea of meme trash the internet holds.
Google sucks these days, it’s way faster.