Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language

by Gretchen McCulloch

In 2017, an article for the news site Mic reported on a trend in prestigious US college admissions: students were making and sharing memes on college-specific Facebook groups, as a way of bonding with fellow students or making friends before arriving at school. Some prospective students even assessed the quality of a college’s memes in deciding whether to go there. As the then eighteen-year-old Brandon Epstein, founder of MIT Memes for Intellectual Beings and Spicy Memelords, put it, “We’re the ones that have been most immersed in meme culture. When last year’s freshmen became freshmen, memes weren’t the cultural monolith they are now. Considering that memes really rose to mainstream prominence during the time when we were in high school, I think there’s a bigger focus on memes for people my age.” At first glance, this looks contradictory. How is it that we have a college student in 2014 claiming that memes are dead and, three meme-filled years later, a different college freshman claiming that the students only a year older don’t truly understand memes?