IMPACT COMMUNICATION
AND INNOVATION
AND INNOVATION
Ten years ago, I was starting journalism school. For some reason, among the courses and professors I had access to, that year of 2008 ended with a few absolute truths echoing in my head: communication clichés like the expressions that we are "constantly being bombarded by images" or the idea that images can be deceptive, which is why a caption can provide better direction for interpretation. It was my first contact with some of the themes addressed in semiotics, a field of study that focuses on how individuals give meaning to things or, in other words, a science that studies signs, languages, and cultural events as meaning-producing phenomena.
This was the path I followed in my master's degree, preferring to study cultural semiotics rather than following its more pragmatic and linguistic side. Despite having the idea deeply rooted in my head that images deceive, just like Magritte's pipe, it was they that always inspired me to, nevertheless, produce texts. I make this digression here because I recently came across a text published on Dazed Digital, in which we have access to an interview with those responsible for the GenExitstudy. Conducted by Box1824, the report addresses the behavior of Generation Z, that is, the generation born after 1995.
One of the traits mentioned in the report is "memethink," that is, thinking in memes. Just as the word "meme" was a neologism created by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in his book The Selfish Gene (1976), in which he describes the principles of the dissipation of ideas and cultural phenomena from a biological perspective, the term can also serve as an abbreviation for mimeme, which means imitation in Ancient Greek.
Just as we human beings develop and learn from observing and repeating our surroundings (mimesis), we also end up creating a mimetic or memetic behavior and reasoning based on the way we communicate on the internet.
In the past, memes were extremely rare. Culture moved slowly. The memes you knew through your family were more or less what you would be stuck with. Today, not so much. The world is flooded with memes. Memes about what to eat (avocado toast), memes about how to dress (Stan Smith), memes about what to do (fidget spinners), memes about what to care about (#goals), and, of course, memes about what you think… (GenExit, 2017)
When we reproduce, share, create, and modify memes, we don't do it consciously. According to the researchers responsible for the report, it is as if we are experiencing an unconscious synchronicity, in which the distance between what we say we want and what we actually want becomes even more confusing, since memes support us in a form of communication that is more ironic, subtle, and coded, therefore less assertive and less textual, and more grounded in the ambiguity of images.
More directly to the point, we live in a media environment defined by a very specific form of language: marketing. It has become our instinct to assume that everyone is trying to take advantage of everything. We have all internalized this style of messaging. (GenExit, 2017)
Thus, the report understands memethink as a collective reasoning based on images, which, incidentally, would be more dangerous than the idea of doublethink explored in the book 1984by George Orwell. That is, thinking in memes may be more harmful than the act of accepting two mutually contradictory beliefs as correct at the same time. As described in the research, “thinking in images is inherently more emotional than logical. This leaves us prone to having our thoughts hijacked by stupid, shallow, and simply evil ideas.”
To illustrate this argument, the research mentions the rise of the alt-right and how it has used this visual instability as a way to spread its ideas, while appropriating these manifestations and decontextualizing them for its own benefit. As an example, the report recalls how Hitler decontextualized the swastika, a symbol of good luck in Buddhism, to turn it into an emblem of Nazism and a mark of negative memory for the West.
The same occurred on Facebook, when the alt-right began using the social network's stickers, images, and specific reactions as a way to decontextualize these images and expressions, thus turning them into a symbol and gesture associated with the movement without them being so originally. This behavior was given the name "redpilling," an allusion to the scene from the film Matrix (1999) in which the character Morpheus offers a blue pill and a red pill to the protagonist Neo, where the blue one would make him continue living the lie of the world he thought was real, while the red pill would open his mind to the truth.
The goal has two phases. First, convert: if you have always been a fan of SpongeBob since you were 10, he is the perfect vehicle to convince you that vaccines cause autism. And second, destabilize: what better way to undermine the meaning of things than to insist that everything can be subverted? (GenExit, 2017)
But Gen Z, which already shows itself to be contrary to traditional institutions (government, school, brands), also reflects this same sentiment on social media because it is a space where their parents are present, making everything as predictable and bureaucratic as in the "real" world. Likewise, social media currently operates on a logic much closer to the behavior of millennials than Gen Z, which justifies their discomfort and preference for following and creating fake accounts or fictional characters on Instagram, just as they also prefer the impermanence of networks and formats like Snapchat.
According to Sean Monahan and Sophie Secaf, who led the GenExit research, following and creating fake Instagram profiles is an attempt by Gen Z to escape this reality of social media that is heavily driven by marketing. This is how they manage to create more private spaces. "It also comes from this older idea that there are only two real political responses to any situation. One is to vocalize, to say something, and the other is to flee the situation if you don't like it," explains Monahan.
Just as blogs and photo blogs were true virtual diaries at the beginning of the last decade, when millennials used GIFs and pre-made templates as a way to express a digital identity, Gen Z doesn't necessarily want social media to cease to exist: they are just tired of having to live with this reality where people become brands and everything has to be monetized, a behavior typical of millennials, who are now adults.
According to Monahan, Gen Z is reacting somewhat negatively to this behavior because it is a shallow way of taking advantage of social media. "Should social media simply be platforms for promotion? When they emerged in Web 2.0, it was believed that they would present incredible opportunities for the democratization and diversification of culture by having these spaces filled by all these voices. However, we ended up funneling culture in several ways. Instead of having a cable subscription with thousands of channels, now there are only a few, and they are Instagram, YouTube, and Facebook... If you don't use these platforms the way they were meant to be used, the algorithm will edit them for you."
Thus, as influencers collapse, whether due to the extreme emotional effort of maintaining their digital persona or by breaking that mask by showing another side that clashes with their advertising script, Gen Z prefers not to enter this spiral at all. After all, these young people know that a person is much more than a single identity and they do not want to have to fix themselves to a single digital persona, committing to being consistent with this character created for social media and monetized by the universe that dominates it: marketing. "Sure, images help people communicate in a way that wasn't possible before smartphones or in the pre-internet world, but that's not the whole context of how memes work," states Monahan.
When advertising campaigns and groups "appropriate" memes and take advantage of the assimilative quality of this reasoning to subvert them for their own specific ends, which have nothing to do with the true meaning and origin of that image, we have what is called redpilling. When we use social media as a way to turn our identity into a product and our person into a brand, we reduce ourselves and imprison ourselves in a market logic that Gen Z seems to want no part of.
But it is not just with current online behavior that Gen Z wants to break. In fact, these young people are also refusing to participate in the job market as it is today and are also not going to college:
Young people feel suffocated by urban gentrification, astronomical student debt, and stagnant or shrinking wages. They are ambivalent about traditional cultural hubs—and the lifestyles associated with them. The old pillars of identity—credentials, careers, and party affiliations—are being abandoned.
In this landscape, cities like New York, London, and Berlin remain inspiring—but no longer relatable. Perhaps that is why we gave this generation an almost apocalyptic title: Generation Z. The current situation clearly isn't working, but it is important to remember that change does not mean the End. (GenExit, 2017)
In other words, breaking with the current logic does not necessarily mean destroying it and reducing it to zero. On the contrary, Gen Z is rejecting these options in order to transform and update them as a continuation (and possible improvement) of a trend previously diagnosed by Bauman when describing our times as liquid: adaptable, fluid, and imprecise. While millennials went through a phase of anxiety over breaking with institutions and ate their avocado toast to feign a quality urban life while unable to afford a home of their own, perhaps Gen Z will live their adulthood in a next stage that will be a consequence of this moment, where we must turn our Selves into products to escape the 9-to-5 office grind and "company" happy hours.
