Are memes good or bad?

Memes are now a prominent form of communication online, offering snippets of humour for today’s impatient, unfocused social media scrollers, hungry for a hit of excitement before they move on. But the attention-grabbing and often reductive nature of memes designed to trigger netizens into liking and sharing them has led many to label meme culture “toxic”. This is because images used in memes are often disconnected from their original context. Despite so, memes have many defenders.

One is Dr Jeremy Sng, a lecturer at NTU’s School of Social Sciences. The 33-year-old, whose research focuses on the psychological and behavioural outcomes of media use, believes several criticisms fired at meme culture, such as it contributing to misinformation and poking fun at authority figures, are not fair. “Making jokes at the expense of others, including those in power, is something people have done in private conversations and coffeeshop talk long before memes came about. So, it is a bit unfair to blame this solely on memes.”

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