Not to spoil the magic behind the scenes, but meme creators have mastered the art of making things so relatable they almost feel personal. After all, the word meme itself refers to a commonality shared by a group. If you peruse the internet, you’ll find meme pages devoted to almost any fandom and topic. Sometimes competing meme pages, where some slight difference has split the fanbase into two warring factions. As the webcomic XKCD once said “Human subcultures are nested fractally. There is no bottom.” In other words, we often set aside the 99% we have in common to battle over the 1% that differs. Now that is a personal attack.
We tend to enjoy content when we believe it’s directly related to us and our experiences. Fortune tellers, horoscope writers, and even personality tests use this concept, often referred to as the Barnum effect, to keep us engaged. The name comes from the famous/infamous American showman and businessman P. T. Barnum. While not exclusive to him, he did utilize the physiology of this effect to keep audiences engaged and entertained. Or distracted, you be the judge.
But wait, there’s more! Meme creators will also rely on meme-like structures to breed familiarity. You have likely encountered hundreds if not thousands of examples of ‘x is the new y,’ without thinking about it. This kind of structure is called a snowclone, referring to the often-cited idea that the Inuit peoples have hundreds of words for snow. This idea is actually misleading but serves its purpose here to explain this phenomenon. And now that you know what it is, you'll never be able to unsee it.
More flexible than a traditional cliche, a snowclone can be bent and adjusted easily, while still maintaining an understandable frame of reference for the reader or viewer. Other more common variants include “the mother of all x,” which is attributed to none other than Saddam Hussein, or at least an Iraqi government Command Council. Others are easier to attribute, such as “to x or not to x?” and the wonderfully old-fashioned “have x, will travel,” for which we can thank the talented Bob Hope.
Memes like this help bridge our common humanity, as most of the ideas are quite relatable and we can see, from the likes, comments, and shares, that others feel similarly. This can be comforting in a world that often does seem polarized and where it can seem difficult to find common ground. Even outside of memes, research suggests that we aren’t as different as we might sometimes feel. Over 82% of respondents indicated similar emotional responses toward the beauty of nature in one study of relatability among groups.
These studies argue that, below the surface, we do share a lot of social connectedness that gets drowned out by specific differences. The aforementioned piece of research focused on nature in particular, but it postulates that it could also show up in everything from hobbies, religion, and even places of birth. To extrapolate these ideas to memes that personally attack you, they can help us see universal or near-universal experiences that are shared with others. So even if you feel attacked, know that you are not alone.
