Making Memes now a serious career option ?

When in 1976 Richard Dawkins coined the word ‘meme’ in his book The Selfish Gene to explain the way cultural information spreads, he may not have realised that decades later memes would rule the world, especially this part at least.

In Tamil Nadu, the youngsters, who see it is an ‘art’ form, have taken it to another level. The Facebook pages like Chennai Memes, Memes Tamil, Memes Tamil Comedy, Chennai Pasangala and Awesome Machi are well known for their humorous content, especially the memes. There are even sites available that help people create memes.

Social media expert Balaji Vijayaraghavan says, “Memes invaded the Tamil Nadu social media scene in 2011, on the grounds of political commentary. It was not received well, but the improvisation happened three years later. The major contribution to meme revolution was a number of fun pages, especially the parody, Srini Mama.

The business angle of memes triggered when Srini Mama trended #KathukitaMothaVithaiyumEraku, to troll one movie that was not received well, targeting its director, from one of his interviews.” He further adds, “People started connecting the snapshot of a scene and its dialogue to a certain real scenario that trends, and that “relatability” factor has opened a new designation, ‘social media meme manager’ in agencies.” There are two kinds of content that connect with people on social media: humour and emotion; and relatability acts as the bridge between the content and the connect with people.

Eventually, when the buzz for such type of content generated better viewer numbers, meme management became a serious business .

How did this social commentary begin? “Memes originated as pages that wanted to drive major engagement on social media and by people who wanted to get the maximum number of likes for their comments.

Memes are usually driven with respect to remarks, dialogues from a web/television series, capturing popular expressions of actors from movies and relating it to a current scenario or simply anything hilarious.

I personally believe memes have just taken creativity to the next level which is completely peopledriven,” says social media expert Sorav Jain.

The making of memes is a serious business for those who spend hours in front of the computer screen, to get inspired by anything that appears on the screen.

“All we need is a priceless expression or a moment. Remember the internet sweetheart and Bigg Boss contestant, Oviya’s iconic phrase, Neenga Shut Up Pannunga? It was gold for us millennials. There were so many memes inspired by that.

Bigg Boss provided us with enough fodder for many variations,” says Ashok Kumar, a meme maker, who says the skill of creating funny content for the internet comes naturally to him. He says, “I have grown up watching Tamil movies and I can call myself an expert in Vadivelu and Vijaykanth comedy. So, anything that I watch today on the internet, I combine it with these comedians’ reaction, and project how they would react.

After some basic editing, and the meme is ready and I upload it. And any meme that I make usually gets thousands of shares on Facebook.”