“It became this sort of collective movement, ‘Look how s... this is’.”
Was she into memes before Covid-19 hit?
“Hardly ever,” says my friend, echoing my feeling. “But, in terms of a coping mechanism, misery loves company. In the two seconds it took me to flick it across to you, you’d laugh and we’d feel this collective pain, and dark humour, that was having a moment of solidarity even though we couldn’t see each other.”
We were far from alone.
While memes are nothing new - the term comes from the Greek word “mimeme”, meaning “gene”, or ideas that spread through a culture - they’ve flourished in unexpected ways since Covid-19 hit.