Breaking news: Zara Larsson has officially escaped the Khia Asylum, Bebe Rexha is already trying to reheat her nachos, and if you can understand this sentence, you are almost certainly Gen Z. How can I tell? Meme-fluency. Nowadays, the cultural conversation happens online, with music, film, TV, and fashion circulating freely between generations, and memes have quietly become one of the last reliable ways to measure age.
The truth is, we just don’t all find the same things funny. Sure, someone Gen Z can appreciate the spectacle that Doge created, and a Millennial can try to wrap their head around ‘She=Onika Ate=Burgers,’ but neither party is going to be rolling on the floor laughing (ROFL). So, why are memes so limited by generations? The answer lies in their changing purpose — from jokes with mass appeal to fleeting cultural artefacts.
In their infancy, memes existed on fewer platforms with chronologically organised feeds — think MySpace, Bebo, and early Facebook — and were designed with maximum legibility in mind. All users saw the same Nyan Cat video at the same time and found it funny for the same reasons, with the newborn internet encouraging this monoculture with enthusiasm. Now that the internet has cemented itself as part of our lives, though, algorithms reward the opposite, separating generations and dividing them further into niche subcultures. Memes have followed suit, increasing in quantity but reducing in longevity, and rejecting a solid meaning which ties them to a single cultural moment, instead embracing a specific period on the internet. Memes are now cultural timestamps — an intelligent way of commenting on and furthering the current online conversation.
Take Grumpy Cat for example, a Millennial meme which reached phenomenal levels of fame, but fame for being exactly that — a grumpy cat. Compare this to the Khia Asylum, a fictional location in which less successful celebrities are jokingly deemed to reside; most Gen Z individuals using the term won’t even know its origins as a joke about American rapper Khia but appreciate that it can be used in numerous cultural contexts. Memes are transcending their foundations and taking on a life of their own, the definition of fleeting. Newer memes reward the chronically online, who use the internet enough to understand their changing meaning, and the static memes of old are increasingly dismissed as cringe.
So, is this a good or bad thing? Certainly, a rapid expansion of Gen Z vocabulary is occurring, with words like ‘slay,’ ‘flop,’ and ‘ate’ all taking on new meanings born out of different memes. But with Gen Z sprinting forward, the exclusion of Millennials — who use the internet roughly half as much on average — is inevitable. Even the Millennial authorship of certain memes is being erased; the virality of clips from early 2000s TV shows like America’s Next Top Model and The Simple Life often forgets that they were created by Millennials for Millennials: ‘that’s hot’ is not a Gen Z phrase.
So far, Millennial and Gen Z memes have managed to exist alongside one another, but only time will tell if this relationship is sustainable. Memes may no longer encourage monoculture like they once did, but that fragmentation is not a failure, it’s simply a change in function. If you understand a meme, you were there. If you don’t, you weren’t. And increasingly, that may be the point.