In the Shade of the Meme Tree
Before the internet inundated us with everything everywhere all at once, our primary information network was rooted in telephones — first voice calls, then text messages, then photographs. This spanned from sharing general information (things going on around town, national news) to sharing hot personal deets (spotting someone’s ex in town, pretending to be sick to cancel plans).
For the latter share, this meant that delivering a scoop of sweet, sweet gossip inevitably led to you laying belly-down on your bed, phone pressed against your ear, legs kicking with glee. The person you told would then make a similar juicy call, the next person would do the same, and onward the branches would grow, widening as the news spread, while you sat wrapped in a cozy blanket, gazing smugly into the distance.
We still get to hold the seeds of our personal tea, deciding where to sow them and watching (sometimes in panicked horror) as they grow, but we now rely on the internet for all other news. While some may bemoan the loss of personal connection that comes with being a leaf among leaves in a phone tree, I think that the internet gives us bountiful opportunities to connect in new ways, one of the best ways being through memes.
Hear me out! A meme’s life begins as a non-event, as it sprouts into the world unnoticed. But then, it catches someone’s eye. Something about this little piece of media holds infinite dimensions of relatability, and it is plucked from its sleepy little hole in the dirt and re-planted into a digital greenhouse where it is watered and fertilized and trimmed and grafted by the entire world wide web. While it’s in its season it is shared millions of times, with endless new twists. Users across the globe become connected by this one recognizable image, sharing it as-is with their friends or pruning it with their own spin before sending it along. When a meme’s season ends (and some never end), it is added to the rich, dynamic compost that nourishes evergreen nostalgia. Bringing up an old meme provides an opportunity to instantly relate with new people, giving memes the power to connect us in a way that general phone sharing never could!
We once thought trees stood independently, responsible only for themselves and affecting only those organisms that they directly interacted with. Before the internet, we saw ourselves in a similar light. But just as we now know that trees are tapped into each other through underground networks of mycelium, so too do we know that the internet has (digitally) amalgamated us across the planet (maybe soon the universe?), and with every meme instantly linking everyone who has ever interacted with it, I would venture to say that we are now more connected than ever. But that’s just my opinion, and I’m just a worm.
