How do meme sites shape youth opinion?

Social media is a great tool. But what is great is not necessarily good. Our Montenegro is a specific country, and we are leaders in many categories. Throughout this text I will talk about those categories. One of those leadership positions also belongs to research on social conditions - we are a country with probably the most conducted social research per capita. Unfortunately, most people are only interested in one type of research - political public opinion.

Now that I have interested you to read further, mentioning the leadership position (after all, we Montenegrins are known for liking to be the first; and don't get me wrong - there is nothing wrong with that), so I also mentioned political public opinion; now I can mention some boring numbers. Let's say, according to research by the Fridrih Ebert Foundation, 71,1% of young people in Montenegro (aged between 14 and 29) read an article from print media/portals less than once a week. Some would say that it's not so bad either, and that there are more productive ways to use your free time. However, what would you say when we compare this data with the fact that a teenager spends an average of 3 hours and 17 minutes per day browsing social networks?

You don't need to know more mathematics to come to the conclusion that social networks have a much greater influence on young people than other media. It wouldn't be a big problem (if we ignore that the average teenager spends about 14% of his day scrolling through Instagram or Tik-Tok) if social networks weren't filled to the brim (poisoned) with memes. For older readers, a mime (English "meme") represents a (sarcastic) interpretation of a certain phenomenon; most often it appears in the form of a picture with a description, but it can also be in the form of a video or a phrase. Simply, me I could define as a postmodern aphorism on steroids.

Jokes have been replaced by mimes, and that's to be expected; the third industrial revolution sent jokes into oblivion and mimes became the superior form. However, what is expected is not necessarily good... All over the world, and especially in Montenegro, we are experiencing increasing polarization and politicization of society. Unfortunately, even that monstrous phenomenon, the mime, was not spared. If we stick to this introduced nomenclature (that mime is actually an aphorism on steroids) we could say that it is obviously, among others, steroids that politicize this being in development - mime. And so we came to the second leadership category; we are the first in the world in the number of mim pages per capita. There is no neighborhood that does not have its own autochthonous meme page, whose owner - enjoying the richness of anonymity - expresses his opinion about everything, everyone and everything. Why? That's why. And that would be the wealth of modern times - everyone can express their opinion without consequences, anonymously, through an interesting form - if the owners of those pages are aware of the impact of their own words. And so everyone who is (and everything is) targeted by these meme sites is the worst, the most incompetent, the most miserable, the most horrifying (I'm pretty sure this construct still doesn't exist in the dictionary), the most criminal - all the (worse) .

What is that impact? How are the most popular mime sites using it? The more popular a page is, the more its influence grows linearly - and the possible consequences are exponentially greater. And so, in the last few years, we have more and more examples of the use of this form in order to label certain people, certain ideas, certain organizations; and no one is protected. A few months ago, information was leaked that some organizations even paid "racket" to certain mime sites so that they would not attack them. In order for someone not to be fooled into calling this situation "the birth pangs of democracy specific to Montenegro", it is worth mentioning that the last presidential elections in the USA were declared "my elections". We are not the only ones in this poison, but we are possibly the best (leaders).

Speaking of poisoning, to finally connect mime and politics - since the overwhelming majority (71,1%) of young people do not directly follow social events, and since we spend 3 hours and 17 minutes per day browsing social networks (among other things, mime pages), the opinion of young people about social phenomena is formed on the basis of the interpretations of the mentioned events provided by mim pages.

Honestly, it's not all the fault of the pages that are so vilified in this text. The shadow digital revolution is followed by "instant" devolution. It is increasingly difficult for people to maintain concentration towards a certain phenomenon. Each person watches an average of 50% of videos on YouTube; after that, we respond to a message on Facebook, then switch to Instagram - even the products that are created to keep our attention as long as possible (more views - more money from placed advertisements) fail to tame us. That's why every high school student today is more eager to read the interpretation of the reading material on various websites, before actually reading it. Not only the students should be blamed here either, the plan by which, for example, in the XNUMXst century, students of the first grade of high school are prescribed to read "The Iliad" is also to blame. It is a complex source of problems, and includes all segments of social reality. If the whole book is shortened to a few pages of interpretation, why not shorten the daily news to mimes...

Hand from heart to forehead, young people are not the only ones suffering. In the last few months this poison has spread to the whole society; thus populism has never been more popular. Obviously, the winning mime mechanism is also taken over by those who shouldn't; colored presentations and graphs are smearing society's eyes. The more colors, the less text - the more dangerous the populist poison. One of my teachers from high school said: "He who doodles on the chair should look after the sheep"; I didn't understand it then, unfortunately I understand it more than well now. The "mimization" of society is at work.

Polarized society > polarized individuals > polarized memes > young people create extreme attitudes. The whole world is suffocating in this ash of extremism and populism, and it is up to the responsible social actors to find a recipe to solve this situation. The key ingredient in that recipe is definitely a campaign that should send a message to us young people why it is bad to form our thoughts on important topics based on other people's (often bad) interpretations of events, such as the interpretations provided by meme sites.

It is the author student of electrical engineering