The memes that propagated ridiculous and supposedly “funny” theories about Princess Kate Middleton's media absence ceased almost in unison last Friday afternoon. It was then that the Princess of Wales made public a video on her social networks in which she explained that the true cause of her disappearance from the public sphere was due to the fact that she was diagnosed with cancer and is under treatment.
Automatically, all the content that had been created on the internet on the subject lost its charm. Even many public figures, such as the American actress Blake Lively, who had taken advantage of the issue to make a meme and advertise her beverage brand, had to publicly apologize for having made jokes about the matter. All those memes, which had been created with a satirical objective, became obsolete.
“The meme is a form of expression highly linked to current events,” Charas Vega, @charcastrology on social networks, explains to La Vanguardia. “The more current, the more it is understood and the better it works.” This content serves as a thermometer of society and is very useful when identifying what is the topic of interest at the moment. For example, in July 2023, social media was flooded with alien-related memes. This occurred after, on the morning of July 26 of that year, David Grusch, a former United States Air Force soldier, stated that the American government was guarding extraterrestrial ships with “non-human biological remains.”
At the same time, those who were not talking about extraterrestrials were discussing the separation of Rosalía and Rauw Alejandro. Some memes even linked both topics, with images of aliens shocked by the breakup.
Charas Vega was one of the content creators who participated this month in the latest edition of Memefest in Barcelona. The event, organized by the Filles d’Internet collective, has taken place every year since 2018 at the Center de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (CCCB). “All this digital folklore is an expression of contemporary culture,” explains one of the festival organizers, Edgar Riu. “Memes are often perceived as trivial in a broader cultural context, as simple jokes shared on mobile devices, but we believe that observing the humor of young people on social media gives us a unique perspective for understanding politics.” and other aspects of modern society.
The web archive of the National Library of Spain, responsible for preserving the national digital heritage, decided in 2009 to include memes as part of its extensive collection that ranges from web pages to books, films and videos that are published online. “It is an ephemeral cultural heritage, which will never be printed, and helps document events of all kinds,” explains José Carlos Cerdán Medina, responsible for the web archive of the National Library of Spain. “Memes play an important role in daily communication, they emerge quickly and spontaneously, they go viral easily and they reflect current issues. In fact – Cerdán Medina explains – in recent electoral campaigns, memes have been used as a form of communication and dissemination of ideas”.
The impact of memes on politics has generated global controversy and there are even those who have attributed some political triumphs to them, such as the rise to power of President Donald Trump. During the 2016 presidential campaign, Pepe the Frog, a meme that was originally a peaceful and harmless comic book character, was used by some Trump supporters online as a political symbol. The frog became an icon of the far right and was even considered a racist symbol, on the same level as the swastika.
“For me, Memefest is a bit of catching up on everything so as not to be left too far behind,” says comedian Judit Martín. The artist was in charge, in this latest edition, of exposing conspiracy theories. “Each edition is about a main theme and this year's was truth and lies on the internet.” Martín exposed some of the craziest theories that circulate online, from flat-eartherism to the extravagant hypothesis that maintains that Finland, in reality, is an invented nation. “The meme here plays with the idea that we no longer believe anything in each other, there is so much fake news that it is very difficult to control where the truth is.”
Content creator Charas Vega finds it difficult to identify the first meme she came into contact with, but she remembers the image of basketball player Yao Ming laughing as one of the oldest. Today, memes have evolved both in their format and in their dissemination. They are no longer limited to specific pages, but are present on all types of social networks and it is practically impossible to avoid them. “When the media, political parties and other institutions realized that memes can condense information and transmit messages in a less aggressive way, they began to use them widely,” Vega acknowledges. The short and accessible format, combined with their rapid dissemination capacity, has turned memes into highly effective communication instruments.
