Memetics across Generations

The following study focuses on the use of memes on social media, their prevalence in conversation and their usage based on the age of the contributors. The main question it asks is whether the use of memes in computer-mediated discourse is a momentary trend or whether it exhibits signs of continuous language evolution. A quantitative linguistic study is employed to answer this question within the scope of the study. The environment of the study, the social media platform analyzed, is Facebook. The article looks at popular pages on Facebook and user reactions to the posts made by their administrators. It identifies memetic responses among them to observe their prevalence within this digital discourse, then it compares them to the user age data available. Based on the quantitative results, the study shows whether the use of memes rises exponentially the lower the approximate age of the user. The most recent demographic studies of Facebook at the time the study was conducted are employed and compared to the quantitative results to surmise whether the result bears traits of digital language evolution. Within the scope of the study and the selected dataset, it demonstrates the aforementioned traits in younger generations and their prevalence on social media. The article provides an example, and a baseline data analysis, of how meme usage rises with younger generations, as well as insights into usage by older generations and discrepancies in digital language evolution markers.