Technology is considered man’s right hand now days, but on the other hand it is also a grave danger to human minds as it is changing the way people used to think in both positive and negative way.
Though it’s 21st century but we are living in a society where most of the youngsters wants to be cool or have a fan following. Sometimes, in doing so they have discovered many ways through which they can get fame and have a fan following to brag about. These youngsters are one of the reasons of conflicts and confusions among society. Youngsters have set many trends which are almost very common now days and MEME is one of them, and now we are at a stage where a normal social media user sees minimum 5 memes on daily bases.
Everything in limit is acceptable. Meme was introduced as a source of quick entertainment, but now it has become more than that because meme now days contain information about any topic and also is a great tool to aware people about the current issues of society, governments or anything. Meme now a days carry such content which is quite triggering and questionable and causing conflicts
The problem arose: Memers now days make memes just to be in trend and to prove a point but in doing so they are causing damage to human minds because users have been seen such content from quite a while now and now they are used to this kind of stuff.
NUMB is a suitable term because users have started taking everything lightly and don’t take anything serious because of meme, as they think it might be for entertainment purpose but some time things could get out of hands, it’s just like the old rebel and the lion’s story. Politics and religion are such subjects who should not to be make fun of because everyone might have different point of view but memes causes huge conflicts.
Memers also have started to make fun of everything which is not cool because it impacts the mind-set of users and they take everything on lighter note. In recent we have experienced huge amount of memes which caused conflicts and confusion. Earthquakes are such a prominent example in this scene because it always cause confusion among people that some news is saying that people are feeling aftershocks and on the other hand situation seems normal on social media.
The digital injection: It’s just like how injection works you don’t really notice the substance in it but you feel it when you are cured. Same as that we don’t really notice the slow poisoning memes are doing to us right now as it is in trend and users promote such content. Many meme pages are very popular having huge fan following who share their contents and tag their friends.
A funny Disaster: A Theory of Media Studies Known as theory of cultivation Talks exactly about this issue that heavy viewers are most likely to be effected the most, Since youngsters have been exposed to such content their way of thinking have been changed and they are becoming less serious day by day that they can’t even tell the difference in their change in behaviour towards everything, most of the youngsters are now becoming short tempered because they cant bear a joke and they connect it to their online world where a joke’s mean is to criticize something.
Parent’s lack of attention is the basic reason in this era and then they give mobile to their child so they can kill time, becomes the first step towards the disaster and soon after they realize it becomes almost impossible for them to get mobiles back.
When they can’t get it back they curse them or say bad things to children which automatically triggers them to exhale the exhaustion through memes and that becomes the downfall of others who follows the content produced in that scene.
YouTubers and reaction channels: Youtubers have created reaction channels in which they react to different memes, now if we take a step back and think at a bigger perspective we find that memes have covered almost every social media platform
Meme, a source of pocket money: By creating memes for social media platforms the memers have gained audience and when there is audience advertisement follows. Brands contact these pages to advertise their products and in return they pay them, and as according to our society when children are started to paid, the finger automatically stops raising by the parents and the children think it as a green flag that they are doing nothing wrong but in fact they are causing huge damage to others.
A culprit beside: There is an old saying which goes like: Only smoke and fools like high places. Sometimes it seems that memers have absolutely no idea of law and have no ethics they don’t even know that there is a law according to which you cannot de-fame some one, but we see that memers openly defame anyone and anything without any restrictions and government is not taking it seriously which is a cause of cyber bulling.
A child’s first school is her mother’s lap. We all are Tarzan in saying such quotes but we don’t really mean it we say them just to look cool and have a upper hand in conversation. We do know that if we don’t maintain a check and balance we will not grow but we are scared to take the first step because it might trigger the memers and the next thing we know we might be trending and everyone Is making fun of us.
Have we allowed the social media to control our normal life and change its behaviour?
The writer is a student of BS Journalism, Semester 8 at School of Communication Studies, University of the Punjab, Lahore. He can be reached at [email protected]