2020 Meme Culture, its hardly a clearly defined culture, it’s a vibrant and superb culture but lacks a clear foundation to really summarise it all. The humour behind today’s meme culture might seem like an abstract masterpiece or societal ‘drivel’ made for no reason whatsoever, depending on who you are. But I think that there is something truly astonishing about our current meme culture and how memes altogether have developed to represent our own human psyche and how we interpret and express our views on our own world as a whole.

To really understand the changes that occurred within meme culture that brought it to its current, complex state we must first off start off with the infancy of modern meme culture, all the way back into the 2000s, the Wild West days of the internet. The 2000s was a time where everyone really started to dwell into the new frontier known as the internet, taken aback by the vastness and freedom of this new frontier. The most important bit about this new frontier known as the internet however, was the newfound global communication of the World Wide Web. This is where we see the spark of modern meme culture taking form with its first baby steps. These first baby steps in meme culture would take the form of more structured and literal memes (i.e: Derp, shoop da woop, the rickroll, Rage comics etc). Whilst over the years as the internet grew into greater use and more people started getting into it so did the memes and whilst some of the old memes of the 2000s died out, some persisted (the rick roll for example) and some evolved (rage comics to Wojaks and chads). It is during the 2010s where we start seeing meme culture to mature, and over that decade it not only grew to become more abstract and sometimes bizarre at times (bass boosts), it also grew to reflect us as the common people.

The Meme Culture of today has grown to become a fast-paced collective mouth piece of our interpretations and opinions of the world around us. A continuously changing medium between us the people, the surfers of the internet; communicating our ideas, our emotions, our thoughts, our doubts, every single aspect of our minds, all towards a medium to express ourselves to the entire world. A great tool for self-expression and something that will continue to evolve drastically so long as the internet continues to exist.

Memes are not only important as a mouth piece for every individual as self-expression but it is also important as a reflection of a populace, an evolutionary reflection of ourselves at that.