A person’s hand is seen throwing pens into an empty wine glass while the Christmas carol "Jingle Bells" plays in the background. The goal is to create a viral video by successfully landing one pen in the glass. After several failed attempts, the person runs out of pens and abruptly tells the friend recording, “Just turn the camera off,” as the screen cuts to static. This type of graphic storytelling, particularly popular on social media, is known as internet memes.

According to Britannica, an internet meme is an amusing or interesting picture, video, or post shared widely online. Social media platforms are flooded with short videos, images, and other content often paired with text or sound to convey messages that quickly go viral. Understanding memes often requires a certain level of internet literacy, which comes more naturally to those born after the internet’s invention. For those of us who first encountered the PC era in the late 1990s, when operating systems like MS-DOS dominated with their dull black screens and blinking white cursors, today’s meme culture can feel unfamiliar. My son, a member of ‘Generation Z’ digital natives who grew up with constant internet access, has no trouble grasping the concept.

More broadly, memes are ideas, behaviors, or styles that spread within a culture. They serve as a way to perpetuate values, mannerisms, and beliefs, forming part of our collective identity. I recall my university days when students from Addis Abeba often struggled to communicate with peers from rural or remote areas. These misunderstandings were rooted in cultural memes i.e., unspoken norms, language, and humor, that didn’t make sense across groups.

In those days, city students often made jokes at the expense of their provincial peers, which, in hindsight, was immature and sometimes hurtful. Over time, as the freshman year passed and students mixed in different fields of study, these cultural clashes faded and were replaced by understanding and mutual respect.

A sentence from one of the short stories in the anthology by my favorite author, Margaret Atwood, titled The Bluebird's Egg, encapsulates what it means to feel left behind by a cultural phenomenon. In the story, an educated daughter's worldview after a year in college alarms her mother, who struggles to understand her. The narrator in the story, Significant Moments in the Life of My Mother, reflects, “It struck me, for the first time in my life, that my mother might be afraid of me….I had become a visitant from outer space, a time-traveller come back from the future, bearing news of a great disaster.”

I found myself in a similar position with my son. To him, emails which were once considered revolutionary in our time are outdated relics. Meanwhile, I initially struggled to grasp the concept of memes, which he understood with ease. A New York Times article captures this generational divide, posing a fundamental question: Internet culture is saturated with memes, but how would you explain a meme to someone who does not get it?

My parents' generation, the ‘Baby Boomers’, are even further removed from the digital language of memes, with rare exceptions.

Some memes are so difficult they feel as if they are written in an alien language. The reality is that while the language might be familiar, the meanings, contexts, and symbols have evolved within specific online communities. Even emojis and smileys, once straightforward forms of expression, have evolved over time to represent varying meanings.