Task 2 – Jack Brooks

The meme I saw that was self-destructive was of a man sprinkling salt with a caption that described making poor choices as a lifestyle. The meme promoted poor living and behavior. The meaning behind it seems to be that it is okay to make poor choices and do things that won’t better your life. I believe it is something that people might look at and relate to, instead of thinking to do the opposite. Therefore the effect of the meme is a negative one, because people won’t want to change the lifestyle that they are living, instead they will see it, laugh and agree because they can relate to it, and scroll onto the next thing in their feed.

When this showed up on my feed, it came with other memes that were very similar. I did what most people would do, recognized that it was a famous person, read the caption and partially agreed, and moved on. I believe that one of the issues with social media and the idea of “memes” is that a lot of these destructive memes don’t come one at a time, instead it realizes that you spent an extra few seconds on a post, and gives you more and more of the same thing. I believe that is the effect of memes like this, is the fact that you typically don’t just get one, instead you get a ton of these negative destructive memes at one time.

I recreated the meme with the same person, but changed the caption to promote a healthier and better lifestyle that people would hopefully look to in order to better their lives. I don’t think that this meme would have the same virality. I think that a lot of memes that are viral are ones that often promote a self destructive type of behavior. I think that negative and destructive memes are more relatable to many unfortunately, and ones that promote better things are harder to relate to. I think that creating a culture online that promotes positive ideas starts with showing to people that their are good things online. I get the feeling that a lot of the stuff I see is negative and if that were to change for me and others online, people would seek out positive memes and videos. If people do that, it would show communication companies that we want to see positive things and they would change. Unfortunately right now, we are showing them that negative content is more important than positive content.