How to Tell If a Meme Is Dead
Every meme has a lifespan. Sure, you can share any meme of your choice at any time, but my guess is that if you were to crawl into your meme file cabinet and pull out Laughing SpongeBob or Angry Cat in 2021, you’d do a little work. weak, unexplored game.
In the days after President Joe Biden’s inauguration, a photo of Senator Bernie Sanders sitting alone with tousled hair, an antique winter coat, blue surgical mask and mittens, tied by a Burlington, Vermont schoolteacher, flashed online and became the most popular meme on social media. networks. Bernie is all over the web (and you can put him elsewhere if you like) – hanging out with crustaceans , building New York , in an Edward Hopper painting , messing with actors from Sex and the City. … But, like all previous memes, this Bernie meme will eventually fizzle out and disappear.
Here’s how to know when a meme is waning and how to relieve yourself of embarrassment by sharing a meme that is completely dead.
Most memes are not meant to get off the internet.
Memes, generally speaking, are jokes designed to bring joy to the Internet-savvy crowd. When a meme crosses the network threshold and starts to appear on cable news – or when your parents start adding them to the family text thread – it’s probably a fair assumption that the meme is dead.
While the lifespan and relevance of memes is an imprecise field, there is some perception that a meme filled with life will be heavily used by a group of insiders. How long does a meme retain its niche appeal? One analysis by Joe Wakes for The Outline in 2018 found that memes live on average about four mouths.
And given the fast pace of online conversations, memes are rising and falling at an ever faster pace as the meme economy grows . This is what meme fans regularly discuss and even place bets on on the fictional meme stock exchange, where memes are bought and sold along with their relevance to online discourse.
All of this means that no one knows when a meme’s star will die out, but there is one general rule: memes lose their appeal when they are abused – sort of like a popular song that gets overplayed.
The city dictionary specifies:
Meme that has become inappropriate or unfunny , often due to age, or too little use use.
A dead meme doesn’t have to be old; many people still continue to joke about Shrek, despite the fact that many years have passed since the original thread appeared.
Often a dead meme can be revived, even if it is self-referential or satirical. Otherwise, using a dead meme can be pretty frustrating.
So if you share memes that the Internet has largely forgotten about, you are left in the dust.
Some memes are really long-lasting though.
Bernie still has hope. Some memes, even if they are not exchanged between social platforms on a daily basis and indefinitely, at least remain ingrained in the social fabric even after the joke is at its peak. Drake is one of the meme stars whose place in the meme ecosystem doesn’t seem to be going anywhere. Others, such as Harambe – the gorilla killed by the Cincinnati zoo and botanical garden rangers in 2016 after the three-year-old was pulled out – are not much talked about anymore, but they definitely linger. Because of their strong influence on the evolution of memes and how much of the internet they include in their primes, they end up in a sort of Meme Hall of Fame at the end of their lives.
With that in mind, it’s entirely possible that Bernie’s mitten meme will become some kind of a well-deserved meme in recent days – something we can refer to with jokes and possibly revive if needed again. But then again, if it’s about to expire, like many memes, you can roll your eyes to share it.