Memes make the world go round. Well, not exactly, but they certainly helped me get through my summer internship. Between the stress of research projects and meetings, I found respite in scrolling through my Instagram Explore page and grinning at jokes that the pilgrims would have found incomprehensible (if not explicitly blasphemous).
During one of these breaks, I stumbled upon a post from @OfficialMcGillMemes that had gone viral. Without getting into the nitty-gritty, the meme used a format from the animated film Inside Out that likened developing class consciousness in response to seeing the McGill senior administration’s ballooning paycheques to the characters discovering a new emotion. I stopped to read the post. I chuckled. I heaved a frustrated sigh at the situation. Then I moved on, not thinking twice about the meme or its McGill-related subject matter.
It’s safe to say that much of the McGill student body is familiar with memes about the university—how else would we preserve crucial institutional memory if not through videos of Flood Girl, photos of the Lettuce Club, or screenshots of our esteemed administration’s online blunders? But this particular post seemed to have popped the McGill bubble and spread to far-reaching corners of the internet; rather than garnering the account’s average of 300 or so likes, or even their previous personal best of nearly 1,400, this post boasts over 15,000 likes as of this article’s publication.
Using humour to cope with difficult situations is nothing new, particularly for Gen Z. As the first generation to grow up with phones at our fingertips, many of us are accustomed to getting some or even all of our news from social media platforms. When you consider that we are bearing witness to countless atrocities and abuses of power through our phones in real-time, every day, it seems like the only option is to resort to humour or risk losing all hope.
Still, seeing how the niche account’s Pixar-inspired meme had gone semi-viral gave me pause. Why did this post in particular resonate with people? Not everyone who liked the post currently goes to or has ever attended McGill, but surely many have. If even a third of those people were students who organized a protest or circulated a petition against McGill’s decision to raise senior administrators’ salaries while neglecting AGSEM members’ right to a living wage, the potential for shifting the status quo would be enormous.
Social media has given us the freedom to engage by reposting an aesthetic infographic or commenting under a topical meme, then letting these movements go out of sight, out of mind when we put our phones down. The actions suggested above are undeniably more strenuous and emotionally-taxing pursuits than engaging in online activism, but they are well worth it. The remedy for despair is direct action and community-building, not memes.
It should be stated that this is as much a critique of my own hypocrisy for engaging with more political memes than tangible activism as anyone else’s. If I had gone to half as many rallies as I had scrolled through satirical Onion articles about the ongoing siege on Gaza or chuckled at a post calling out McGill’s overreliance on the police, I probably wouldn’t be writing this. However, as I was reminded by a chant at a recent student rally, “We keep us safe.” The only way we effect change is by showing up for each other offline and fighting for it.
Silly as it may sound, coming across this post was the reminder I needed that sitting on the sidelines never leads to progress. Attend a rally. Sign a petition. Stand up against injustice in the ways you know how. Memes can be an effective way to start a conversation, but they can’t be the end of the discussion. Sure, you can argue that it isn’t that serious. But unless our memes are accompanied by concrete action, the joke will still be on us, whether we’re in on it or not.
