Memes pack more information and context into less content.
We're basically going through a mini printing press style communications revolution right now.
Before (say 1999) you had print which was cheap and audiovisual which was expensive/time consuming. Now thanks to tech audiovisual content is something the masses can use to communicate and it's affecting culture greatly.
'Images' can communicate some things, like emotions, in a better way.
But 'memes' are things which are pushed onto situation that probably call for more nuance i.e. 80% of the 'Karen' memes I see are not actually 'Karen' memes.
But they don't necessarily communicate 'more' information, and more often than not, they're just used to put an emotive 'playround' spin on something. If the issue is important, words are almost always a better choice.
Irrespective of what happened, a GIF response to something semi-serious I think is bad form. If people aspire to assume responsibility for some important thing ... like processing payments ... then they can assume responsibility for making basic, conscientious communications.
I almost agree. I think it's not information and context that's being packed, it's emotional load.
As any writer or poet knows, words are handles to emotions. Choose a slightly different word, and your readers will tend to feel very differently after reading a line containing, otherwise, the same information. It's a wetware equivalent of RPC API.
Memes are this, but taken up to 11. They transmit a much more complex and powerful emotional payload, in readily digestible form.
Like in this case, I could write a whole paragraph listing the kind of emotions that little GIF communicated. Calm distancing, depreciation, disrespect, feeling safe, ... Written out as words, it wouldn't fit in a Tweet, and wouldn't be as powerful a message.
Almost. Tamarians were using references to shared cultural stories. Many, but not all, memes work like that. This meme is of a different kind - it packs emotional payload mostly directly, with only a reference to a simple activity and related concept (popcorn + Internet drama).
Put another way, if you consider a story to be a collection of handles (in programming sense, like a pointer) to concepts and emotions, then Tamarians communicate by speaking handles to stories. That's one level of indirection extra over this meme, which itself is a (simple) story - a collection of handles to concepts and emotions.
We're basically going through a mini printing press style communications revolution right now.
Before (say 1999) you had print which was cheap and audiovisual which was expensive/time consuming. Now thanks to tech audiovisual content is something the masses can use to communicate and it's affecting culture greatly.