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MEME GRAMMAR
One of the most important social changes brought by the advent of the internet and the popularization of computers and smart devices in the twenty-first century was the access platforms that allow the formation of communities. Individuals concerned about similar topics that were separated by geographical and social limitations, are gathered in forums, groups and other digital communities. This access to communities of like-minded people brought many advantages: the concentration of information surrounding the most specific themes, since that in the right digital place, anybody surfing the web can find a vast amount of videos, books and infographics curated by a community that may also offer help, insight and solidarity to their peers. From hobbies, to politics and pop culture, the spontaneous and decentralized formation of online groups changed drastically the way human beings interact with each other. A teenager needing some help with their homework, a person with a visual disability needing help buying red roses for valentine’s day, a retired person interested in wine and beer making, all can reach to kind strangers on the internet that will connect them to the information they need, and those strangers might even become lifelong friends or significant others, thanks to the simple fact that people with similar ideas and interests gathered online. But there are not only advantages brought by this availability of thousands of agreeable people writing and posting on the world wide web. In the same way that a community can be built online around harmless topics such as gardening and videogames, digital communities give power to the formation of dangerous groups , such as political extremists, science deniers and conspiracy theorists. Facts that were almost universally accepted in the twentieth century such as heliocentrism or the efficiency and safety of vaccines, are more contested than ever before in digital platforms occupied by denialist groups. Internet communities are also by individuals gathered by racism, misogyny, and LGBTQIA+phobia. Each of these groups from the ones that debate white-supremacy to the ones that only share air fryer recipes , all have their unique way of communicating in the most diverse languages. Anybody who has been in a community, online or offline, that is dedicated to one specific purpose can tell how it takes little time for this community to start using a particular vocabulary. Christians often use words such as tribulation, secular, and blessed, gamers may say BRB (be right back) , FTW (for the Win) or F(a meme that is said in order to pay respects when someone dies in game or fails in real life), and Marxists use jargon such as bourgeoisie and revisionism. These expressions, unique to each community, often come from objects and concepts that aren’t used by outsiders, but with time these jargons can evolve into complex expressions and forms of communication. With memes it is no different from offline communities, except for the speed and intensity in the process of creating this unique lingos. In the same way that a radical Marxist and an evangelical Christian wouldn’t master each other’s niche vocabulary at first sight, it is unwise to expect understanding the memes and inside jokes of all digital communities. Even with the highest level of meme literacy development, it is impossible to understand every meme that exists. What can be done, is learning the fundamental nature and structure of an internet meme, in such a way that when faced with a highly specific niche meme, the only job to be done is to research the inside dialect of the community responsible for producing such a meme. This chapter will explore and explain the grammar of memes, how to understand their visual and verbal components, and introduce the reader to their history and evolution throughout the first two decades of the twenty-first century.
An internet meme can be vaguely defined as a composition of imagetic and verbal language ( even though it can lack one of the two and still be considered a meme) that circulates in a viral way on the internet. The first, and maybe most important part of a meme is the image. Image, in this situation can be understood as a visual representation of something real or imaginary. The images in memes can be static or moving, colorful or in grayscale, simple or complex. In a radically different way to other forms of art, the objects and characters featured in the image, don’t necessarily relate to the textual message in the composition. An internet meme can show a popular cartoon character such as SpongeBob Square Pants, and be about the new economic policies in Egypt. A meme can have a dog with a sad face as the main image, but describe situations unique to humans. But still, a meme may be composed of a picture of an important politician and be about that same politician.
This meme depicts Donald Trump.
it is about Donald Trump, making fun of the way he pronounces the word "huge"
This meme depicts SpongeBob.
But it is about something else completely, It's a Christian meme about the difficulty often found in interpreting the book of revelation, in the Bible.
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The explanation to this initially confusing and apparently unpredictable pattern is the tendency of memes to be made out of templates.
There are many images, generally images that portray exaggerated reactions and expressions featuring the most diverse characters and objects. This images containing funny and intense situations, might have the most diverse origins: a screenshot from a a popular tv show, a stock photo, a selfie by a regular person posted on social media, illustrations and diagrams in academic textbooks, the cover of a music album, all this images may and will be appropriated and edited by internet users that will proceed to make memes with and about them. When an image becomes a template, it will be combined with text, many times , depending on what the author wants to express. One very famous example of a template, is a combination of two still frames from a music video by American singer Drake, in which he smiles pointing at something in the upper half, and makes an intense gesture of rejection in the bottom.
The vast majority of the memes made with templates have nothing to do with Drake himself. His face and his gestures are seen by meme creators as if they were an empty vessel that they can feel with their emotions and opinions. The most superficial meaning of this template featuring Drake can be understood as : I like the thing to which Drake is pointing and smiling, and dislike the thing to which he makes a strong denying gesture. There are a huge number of templates that serve the same function: the one with a man looking back at a woman on the street, the car drifting intensely in a crossway, and all of the variations featuring a strong and handsome character talking to a weak and ugly counterpart.
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Generally , if the character or object presented in the meme doesn’t seem to relate directly to the message or the joke (like SpongeBob being interested in Theology), it is because they actually don’t relate to it directly , but have been used as a template, as a vessel for the author’s intentions and opinions, that after seeing so many iterations with so many memes using this one template, that they might have found relation between that character or object and their selves. If the character or objective shown in the image seems to relate to the audio or text edited upon it, there is a high probability that this meme was made to satirize or comment about this character or object in question. There is no exact way to obtain an absolute comprehension of a meme, and arguably of any work of art that has ever been made. Meme literacy is not about identification of patterns, but about the flexibility to see the potential meanings of each pattern observed. The mindset acquired by making , editing and curating memes is indispensable for the development of meme literacy, for that reason, the webpage Meme Studies offers a series of exercises to enhance the users creative thinking and enable the creation of complex connections through the making and editing of memes.
The second component of memes , present in a big part of them, is verbal language. The combination of text and image gives the internet meme a capacity that could be described as hypersynthesis. Ideas that are usually hard to explain with only text or only image, can be carefully combined into pieces that contrast an immense rhetorical power with a shallowness characteristic to almost all forms of content with such a fast and easy consumption. The widespread availability of smartphones and social media allows any user that just saw a video, or a news headline to combine this image with very short texts, about any topic that started to trend a few hours before, giving every internet user the power to give sharp opinions on trending topics in a very synthetic way that may dialogue with an image that amplify the text’s meaning . Generally the text or voice input existent in internet memes is short, There is usually only one page, that is mostly made out of parts of an image that the author wants to cover. Text in memes to be effective needs to be short and direct. This is often satirized in some communities that put large texts in many pages of memes, as a subversive and ironic take on the medium, but the general rule for memes with verbal language is that it has to be short and potent. The structure of text in early and traditional memes follows a pattern very similar to that of jokes: there is description of the context followed by a punchline, or bottom text. The first part, usually informs or misleads the reader, and this context generally is built in partnership with the image. The actual joke, the gag, the part that subverts the expectation generated by the initial part, is often referred to as bottom text, a reference to meme making websites, that gives to the author an image or template and two textboxes to be filled, they come, by default with the phrases top text and bottom text, respectively. Cases of other media than a single static image with text over it, such as comic strips or videos, the punchline is also delivered towards the end of the meme. Gifs and other forms of displaying short videos such as reels or tik tok® videos that feature a loop, in which the video immediately replays after it’s end, often use this resource as a joke too. Not all memes follow this structure, since many memes don’t even aim to be funny. As any other media, the internet meme can be explored and developed in many genres with many intentions that differ from humor. This is often misunderstood because of the ironic nature and tradition of memes, but there are entire communities dedicated to creating and distributing memes made intentionally unfunny such as the Swiss Facebook® page "Memes which are so deep and dank that they return to normal", whose curators were kind enough to answer an interview for his research project.
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The combination of verbal language and image in memes, added to the potential of infinite remixing and reposting, generates many unique interactions that can be understood in the most diverse ways. A very important part of acquiring and improving meme literacy comes from enabling connections between the viewer’s reality and the online abstractions that represent them . In the same way as traditional idioms, there is no centralized institution or hegemony that may determine an absolute meaning for a term or image, the meme language is, like any other language, organic, alive and collectively built by the people who communicate using it.
