The Downside of Meme Reviews
Photo by Mika Baumeister on Unsplash
The internet is an open and endless place, and like any free and open thing, people are wont to bend it to their will, to their desires, to their own insipid purposes.
Social media has given us all a voice, a platform for outrage, engagement, and entertainment. But we’ll all be darned if we’ll stick to playing our old song and dance on the approved stages and forums; we want our peers to think we’re funny NO MATTER WHERE WE ARE, and just like we might have once made a joke in the grocery store checkout line, we’re now prepared to funny it up in the review section of all our favorite shopping sites and internet electronico marketplaces.
But sometimes the joke can go too far. Not so far that anyone is actually injured in any way. Just injured from a lack of knowledge. After all, if you’re not on the inside joke, you’re left out in the cold.
This is the downside of meme reviews.
I get it, trust me, I get it. Review Party Dot Com is hosted by two silly improv boys, and we know what it’s like to want to jump into a scene that’s just killing it! “That’s so funny! I want to be a part of THAT funny! I’m jumping iiiiiiin!”
And hey, sometimes it works. Sometimes the funny times continue and are made even better by what we’ve brought to it. “We didn’t ruin anything! Everyone on stage and in the audience got what they came for! Laughs and high fives all around!”
But sometimes we ruin it, and sometimes we don’t even notice we’ve done so. We don’t notice the couple in the back who really wanted the scene to be about banana slicers, not about us making fun of banana slicers. They didn’t get what they came for, but everyone else seems to be enjoying themselves. Maybe it’s just the couple who don’t get it? Maybe they don’t belong? Maybe?
NO.
Those people belong too. We of the funnybunch took it too far. We got high off the banana ripening fumes and stopped paying attention. And that’s exactly what we do online when we piggyback and write our own meme reviews.
We’re so darn clever. We did so well in our liberal arts creative writing class. We’re slightly well read and use adverbs liberally, so that shows we really know what we’re doing. Passive voice? I was bored to death by that lesson. The peeps need my mad takes!
But let’s be honest. Let’s take our commedia masks off and look at ourselves in the mirror. Who are we helping with our funny review of a product we never bought or used? Buzzfeed? Those who read Buzzfeed? Or maybe Twitter or Reddit re-posters? There’s space for the funnies in those places already.
And I know, I need humor as often as I can get it, too. But think about our elders. Think about those who’ve been using Amazon since it was just for books from A to Z. For your great aunt who wants to buy you a nice shirt with three wolves on it (because she knows how you used to like wolves), and just wants to know if it will stretch or shrink in the wash, because she is absolutely going to pre-wash that for you.
In some cases, these meme reviews are warranted, even necessary; don’t eat a lot of sugar free gummy bears unless you’re near a toilet; don’t market a PEN to the ladyfolk, you C-suite creeps. But by and large, our deluge of jokes are a distraction from real, genuine reviews. For as much effort as you put in to make something funny, you could be overshadowing a legitimate review of someone’s real experience. Their story is drowned out. And we drowned it.
So howsabout everything in moderation, eh?
Especially Buzzfeed, man; they repost 50% of their own content anyway, my God!
Oh, but the meme reviews, too. Tap the brakes on those. If the product itself is a joke, don’t waste your time. Read a book instead, learn about the passive voice.
