Is Every Misery A Meme?

As Albert Einstein used to say, 

“Adding a little humor can make even the dullest and boring blog posts fun to read”

It is scientifically proven that laughing and cheering up boosts up your hormones. It lightens up your burden, brings hope, inspiration, keeps you focused and alert. There’s nothing more generous than making someone laugh. Well, except giving away money. Either way, you can truly connect with a person by putting him in a cheerful mood. There are tremendous ways to consume humor in your daily life. Some of them are: comic movies, web series, parody songs, writings, Graphics Interchange Format, and videos. Also, one of the quickest ways to incorporate humor in your daily life is social media’s quick consumables. Yes! Memes. The evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins coined the term “meme” in his 1976 book, The Selfish Gene. The word is a combination of the Greek “mimeme” (something imitated). According to Dawkin, memes cover the idea of how our ideologies, ideals, cultures and customs replicate themselves. Just like a virus, they travel from person to person through imitation, sharing and repetition. But the medium of transfer is the internet. Humor is not the genre to add in a meme. It can be cute, romantic, motivational or related to daily life. Humor doesn’t always have to mean jokes. You can also use cuteness to your advantage. Adding a few pictures of kittens and puppies will always bring a smile to anyone’s face. Trolling is a sister of cyber bullying. trolling a person is actually the act of upsetting her/him by making inflammatory jokes and hate speech on their attributes in an online community; causing shame to them. The content in trolls says something controversial in order to get a rise out of other users for that particular person, especially celebrities and social media influencers. When memes are made up on a hot topic, a celebrity, or any famous personality, people often like it. But most oftenly, memers make fun of them limitlessly so that those persons apologize to the memers and request them not to make fun of their actions or statements. This is actually not a form of humor rather its humiliation of the other person. It’s the mocking of their acts and statements. Most commonly, this extreme meme culture is practiced in Pakistan. It's more like cyber bullying. We have examples of such people in Pakistan who have been victimized by depression just because of cyberbullying in the name of meme culture.

• We have many instances of how celebrities get victim of cyberbullying and trolling, such as:

• When Yasra Rizvi called out haters for marrying a younger man.

• Areeka Haq was trolled by bullies for having uncompetitive acting skills.

• Online community trolled Yasir Hussain and Iqra Aziz.

• People trolled over Shehroz Sabzwari divorcing Syra Yousef and marrying Sadaf Kanwal.

• Ayesha Omer very softly responded to bullying and hate speech over her dress on Instagram. This absolutely shows how people can stoop so low to hurt others.

• When Annie Khalid spoke up about society belittling women for second marriage.

 We all know that two months earlier, an incident related to this took place. Yes, I’m talking about Dr. Amir Liaqat Hussain ‘s demise. Indeed, the news was extremely shocking and depressing. A human who used to put a smile on everyone’s face. A scholar who gave us wonderful Islamic knowledge. A host who introduced the Ramzan Transmission trend on TV channels. A man who told us that Islam was not complex. A patriot who sang songs for the nation. He gave us so much as a nationalist. But, we as a nation; discussed his personal life in public to mock, mimic, troll and criticize him in return. Whatever he did, let’s take it as ‘secondary priority’. But no one among us ever tried to even stop sharing that criticism knowing that it can cause trauma, mental disturbance to the other person. We are accountable for our sole selves and none other. Deep down, all of us know his cause of death. No human can take the humiliation of being trolled upon his tears and depression. Though it is late now, but we can save other lives from social murder via weaponizing meme culture. Cyberstalking and cyber harassment are branches of cyberbullying and are in trend as teens are actively participating on social media platforms like Instagram, Twitter, Tiktok, Facebook, online gaming community, Emails etc. This harmful act also breaches the victim's privacy tending to share or upload personal content of them causing humiliation. As per Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report, an estimated 15.7% of high school students were electronically bullied in the 12 months prior to the survey. (2019) Cyberbullying can do severe damage to a person's reputation. It can cause depression and anxiety, and lead to suicide, especially in young people such as teenagers. Cyber bullying is a slow poison that abandons the victim and exploits their self-confidence. Individuals who are bullied — and the bullies themselves — are at a higher risk for suicidal thoughts, attempts, and completed suicides.