How Memes are shaping conversations
Priti Setia
Vice President| Corporate Communications Strategist| Brand & Reputation | Executive Comms | Digital and Integrated Marketing #Amazon #Pearson# Honeywell #HP #Samsung #Autodesk #Adobe #Dassault Systemes #Nokia #Telegram
Another day, another storm, another meme. That seems to be the social media trend these days. If you’re active online, you mostly have come across viral memes with different hilarious topics. The latest that seems to have caught people’s attention is the ‘Gonna tell my kids…’ meme. Given the phrase, this is most likely a millennial or early Gen Z trend. This meme is about humorously rewriting history by offering an alternative perspective.
Memes, today, empower people to add their own take. ‘Gonna tell my kids’ does this in the best possible way. The idea is to take a known personality and replace or confuse their identity with a similar looking person. The meme blew up immediately and people started giving space to their imaginations. One creative meme was putting up a picture of Iron Man (aka Robert Downey Jr) and captioning it as ‘Gonna tell my kids this was Elon Musk’. You can see why people have taken a liking to it.
One of the earliest video games that I played was Atari, which is a dead name in today’s world of PS4s. My version of this playful meme would be to post an image of an Atari console and say ‘Gonna tell my kids this was PS4’. As a millennial or Gen X, you will reminiscence your earlier days and as a future generation you will see the growth in video games since then. Either way, it’s promoting healthy conversations of the changing world.
Even though we’ve heard that images are more powerful than words, these viral memes amplify that adage. Over the last few months, several memes have caught on causing extensive social media conversations. A few months ago, it was the Ok Boomer meme where Millennials would use the phrase as a retort to older generations’ establishment attitude and criticism of Millennials. And of course, you’ve seen the hilarious cat meme with Cameron Diaz where she is seen yelling at a cat.
Memes are great conversation starters as well as ice-breakers. Though short-lived, they have the power to bring together different cultures and people.