Discourse has been a pretty big concept for me to unpack over the past year. I’ve finished classes on communications research and theories of conflict and negotiation, and I wrote a paper about Bill O’Reilly’s debate about white privilege with Jon Stewart (before he left the Daily Show, RIP). Next I was amidst a rhetorical criticism course, working on a paper about Coca-Cola’s “America is Beautiful” ad and how it impacts immigration and race discourse.

I’ve read just about a hundred academic papers over the year, and successfully used some of their insight to more convincingly articulate my feelings and opinions. Efforts to talk about things that really matter in society were often frustrated before in shitty arguments and really poorly informed debates. I’m sure everybody is familiar with something like this playing out in comments on political Facebook posts.

I’m convinced that discourse would be a helpful tool for literally anybody — we are all trying to navigate the morass of media sources we consume on a daily basis, and discourse is all about how that impacts your view of the world. It can make you happier or angrier. It can persuade you that one event is a B.F.D. (big fucking deal, capitalized and punctuated), while you miss hearing about a whole bunch of other events altogether. And what you read, watch, hear about, talk about, know about… is all you have to work on when you form opinions about people, the way the world works, and how it ought to work.

And the way we think about the world, of course, entirely dictates how we act within it. Words ARE action in many ways. Knowing how language creates a SPECIFIC kind of thought and action, by hiding or minimizing some things and focusing on others, is just as important as knowing facts and statistics. Because no person ever acts solely on objective information, or even on a full set of facts, but on the subjective assumptions that fill in the gaps between the numbers and make them meaningful. One would be, and do, nothing without the other.

Anyway, back to the memes.

Memes are everywhere. Memes find their way into every facet of our lives. Moms send memes to their kids now. Presidential candidates, most famously Obama, have been using them to attract internet users as early as 2008 election. My professor talked about Pepe the Frog in a 3000 level COMM class the other day — since he found his way into the grips of the Alt-Right, a single meme might actually have an impact on the future leadership of this country. Thanks, Obama.

What the hell is a meme anyway? You can look most of them up at knowyourmeme.com for an informed and objective overview, but lots of them are documented elsewhere — from a deep memer’s lense at Encyclopedia Dramatica (tread with care) and from a more removed and analytical one at Wikipedia. For the purposes of this post, I’m going to focus on image macros, which you have definitely seen at least once. It’s just a picture overlayed with blocky text, usually meant to be relateable or funny.

Usually there’s a character — the first iteration was the ever-loveable lolcats (cheezeburgerz, lasers, Grumpy Cat, etc.), and “FAIL.”, for displays of incredible incompetence. Advice Animals are another familiar (cast of) faces, including rage comics, socially awkward penguin, Scumbag Steve, and your cousin’s science teacher, because anybody can make anybody into a meme now, at memegenerator, quickmeme, and any number of other sites, and share them anywhere across the internet, for the lulz.