Vincent Kinian

It recently dawned on me that Internet culture - or at the very least, Internet humor - has been in a frog-in-boiling-water situation for maybe a decade now. Look at the popular memes/meme formats from the 2000s:

While on a formal level memes owe a lot to advertising (short, quippy, easy to remember, fun, encourages circulation), memes up through the early 2010s primarily owe their humor to the immediate circumstances in which they were used. They might humorously subvert office work that was so widespread, but more often they embraced the apparent novelty of Internet use as an end in itself. The idea of using intellectual property as a format for expressing our thoughts or reproducing and circulating that intellectual property as an end in itself would mostly have been alien to this sort of culture - but it's what present Internet humor has devolved into because that's what benefits the social media platforms that have so thoroughly structured the Internet since then.

As an addendum, I can't help but feel the growing emphasis on immediate emotional reaction - "the vibes", aggressively snappy video editing techniques meant to seize your attention and never let go - relate to this somehow. It certainly isn't a good thing: where's the room for deeper levels of engagement? For serious and sober contemplation of a given issue before us?