meme

                 I was glad not to take the PSAT yesterday, but I realized today that one thing I will miss about it is the memes. It’s a little sad to suddenly, after two years of being included, find yourself on the outside of such a massive inside joke. It makes me wonder if this is what it’s like to become an adult and watch the young whippersnappers’ pop culture get more and more unintelligible. It also made me think about memes more generally. When I was younger, I used to be one of those infuriatingly self-righteous people who refused to ever use internet slang and corrected people on their grammar at every opportunity. I thought internet memes were at best pointless and juvenile and, at worst, intellectually damaging. But today I have a different view.

                 I think memes and, more generally, internet slang, have started to serve a really interesting cultural purpose. When talking with friends, a meme reference is often useful to convey a specific meaning that any other word wouldn’t quite do justice. It’s rarely just a single word or meme you’re referencing, but instead a complex web of other related memes, variants on the original meme, and context -- current events, subtle slang connotations, or even the meme’s source -- too. Far from ruining correct English like many people seem to fear, memes have only enriched it, by allowing people to communicate subtle meanings and ideas that they otherwise wouldn’t have been able to. In the same way that English adopts words from other languages that make the language more vivid, words from youth internet slang also make words and language more vivid as well.

                 Although many adults like to bemoan the state of the youth because of the internet, in reality, it seems like it is a positive force to connect people. An inside joke in the pre-internet days might have been shared among only one group of friends, but now nearly every teenager in America can laugh at the same vine reference. The PSAT meme phenomenon is an especially poignant example of this. The PSAT isn’t objectively that funny; instead, what makes the memes so hilarious is the fact that they only make sense if you’ve taken the PSAT, so there’s an inherently select group who can actually understand what’s going on. With the internet meme culture in general, it’s the same dynamic that makes it so appealing and funny. To truly understand the implications of a single meme, you have to have a somewhat complex understanding of the history of memes and events leading up to it, and as a result the group of people who really understand meme culture is limited to those who grew up with it: young millennials and Gen-Z teenagers. As a result meme culture creates jokes that almost any other teenager will immediately understand, but most adults will be completely confused by.