Memetics across Generations. Demographics and Meme Usage
Memetics across Generations. Demographics and Meme Usage

Summary/Abstract: The following study focuses on the use of memes on social media, their prevalence inconversation and their usage based on the age of the contributors. The main question it asks iswhether the use of memes in computer-mediated discourse is a momentary trend or whether itexhibits signs of continuous language evolution. A quantitative linguistic study is employed toanswer this question within the scope of the study. The environment of the study, the socialmedia platform analyzed, is Facebook. The article looks at popular pages on Facebook anduser reactions to the posts made by their administrators. It identifies memetic responsesamong them to observe their prevalence within this digital discourse, then it compares them tothe user age data available. Based on the quantitative results, the study shows whether the useof memes rises exponentially the lower the approximate age of the user. The most recentdemographic studies of Facebook at the time the study was conducted are employed andcompared to the quantitative results to surmise whether the result bears traits of digitallanguage evolution. Within the scope of the study and the selected dataset, it demonstrates theaforementioned traits in younger generations and their prevalence on social media. Thearticle provides an example, and a baseline data analysis, of how meme usage rises withyounger generations, as well as insights into usage by older generations and discrepancies indigital language evolution markers.

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