A Mix of Information and Popular Culture During Pandemic

In this generation the use of social media is huge, especially now with Covid. Gen Z uses memes as one way to express our thoughts or emotions in a simple but funny way. With internet humor though “funny” equates to when you’re scrolling through posts and you see one and it makes you exhale harder than normal, not actual verbal laughter (funny can still mean actually laughing it just usually doesn’t). The use of these simple pictures (or videos) keeps everyone connected to one another even during trying times and they help provide each other with support as well when it’s needed. I provided explanations to make them easier to understand but usually if you explain them they stop being funny. 

A few examples of these from the United States would be:

A short explanation of this one would be that colleges and universities should be explaining thoroughly what’s going on with classes and on campus in general. Instead though they haven’t been extremely helpful in providing any information with students when it comes to classes being online or in person or if we should be moving back home for those of us living in dorms, etc. The correlation with the picture is the guy (colleges) is holding hands with his girlfriend (useful information) making it appear like they’re in a good relationship. However he’s checking out another girl (bad information) proving that he isn’t truly doing what his relationship image is saying. Simply put: says he’s doing one thing but is doing another.

This one’s real simple. Schools canceled all the events for students and we’re not allowed to spend time with each other because all of the restrictions but schools are still giving us work to do.

This one is also simple. When the restrictions were put in place by the government a large portion of the U.S. population made it very clear to the government that they would not do that and continued going about their everyday activities as normal (there were also huge protests nation wide against restrictions).

Also simple. People that already spend most of their time chillin by themselves at home think the lockdown will be the same for them as life has always been, just chill in the house. Out going people think it’s going to be going out by themselves, lonely. Social media cracks the lockdown up to be some apocalyptic world. In reality though it was simply weeks of people hoarding and fist fighting over toilet paper because they were scared stores were going to run out of it. 

This one is also simple. When Covid was first a thing everyone was laughing about how it was only going to be a week before things opened back up and then it was two weeks and people laughed about how maybe it was going to be a month. Many jokingly said they hope it lasted all year and unfortunately that’s how it’s gone so far. Now we have all reached a point where Covid memes aren’t very funny anymore and we all just want things to go back to normal.

A few examples from another countrywould be:

These two go hand in hand and are pretty easy to grasp. These are two memes from the United Kingdom about how Queen Elizabeth has been the Queen for what feels like hundreds of years and she’s still healthy and running the country well. The memes joke about how her son and her prime minister both tested positive for Covid but, since she’s been around so long that she has to be immortal, she is in no danger of getting sick or dying. The bottom right portion is joking about how thousands of years from now when no one is alive anymore the Queen will be.