I personally create memes for one of three reasons.
The first is that I love entertaining people. I love making people laugh. I love writing stories and drawing and dozens of other art styles. I love coming up with an idea and then improving on my current skills in order to make it possible.
Nothing makes me happier than making someone else's day just a little less shit. This is the reason why I will happily spend hours to make something that only a few people will see or care about.
This drives me to sit down and think about what the people in general want to see and then creating it to the best of my ability.
The second reason that I create memes is a bit more nebulous but is best described as being the same reason why an artist paints a particular painting or the photographer takes a specific photo.
There's no real objective reason. It just feels "right". Like, this image is meant to be.
Maybe another content creator can explain this better than I can, but sometimes you just get this overpowering urge to make something. You get an image stuck in your mind and you are compelled to make it a reality, which leads to things that aren't necessarily funny, but are pleasing to look at.
The third reason is, well, I suppose you could call it as a tool of activism. To point out something I find wrong with the world and bring it to the attention of others.
I am not an aggressive man, but I can't abide seeing good people getting people getting stomped on without doing something about it.
Anyone who knows me, or keeps track of what I do, can clearly see that I have almost exclusively made or uploaded nothing but memes relating to the Russo-Ukrainian war for the past few months.
I don't speak Ukrainian or Polish, so I can't help at the border providing humanitarian aid, beyond what I personally donate; and I have no combat experience, so I can't take up arms and support what I feel is a just and righteous cause that way. All that I have is my sense at judging what the wider community finds entertaining to upload or create things that I know they will like, in order to keep the war in public consciousness and do my part in fighting the propaganda war on disputing and countering Russian disinformation.
I've also spoken out against China's genocide of the Uyghurs and the authoritarian practices they force upon their own population.
It's not much, and in the grand scheme of things probably comes to nothing.
But at least I tried. At least I did something.
As for why I got into memes in the first place?
I was born in 1994 and grew up with the internet. When I was a kid, smart phones didn't exist, you watched films on VHS and computers were for adults to do boring record keeping and grown-up stuff on.
Then, around the early 2000s when personal home computers became more widespread and the very earliest smart phones started coming onto the scene, the very first memes, things considered dead or archaic now, started to be shared among me and my friends; and knowing the latest injoke made you one of the cool kids.
This was in the era of Advice Animals, YouTube Poops and Filthy Frank. I understand that these seem basic and uncool (I suppose that would be "cringe" in modern speak) now, but at the time, this was all there was. Memery and shitposting was in its infancy, so there were no hard rules back in the day, it simply just was.
Then, as everyone started to get a smart phone, tablet or PC, it started to mature and structures began to form. It also began to diversify as well, as the people who made and spread them grew up; so did the content that was being produced.
I remember spending hours as a teenager reading Polandball comics on my Ipod touch, and I can safely put my hand on my heart and say that I learned more about history, linguistics and culture from these than I ever have from any piece of mainstream media.
Another key point that ties into this is the advent of sites like KYM and Reddit giving each individual image its own comment section. This allowed people, who would otherwise have absolutely no reason to interact with each other, to discuss the image, gif or video, which lead to in-depth discussions about what was being depicted, such as cultural customs, historic events or current political issues in various countries around the world.
Because of this, friendships were formed, rivalries were started and people shared the memes with their friends and families. This caused random gatherings of people to build close-nit communities with deep histories going back over decades.
I can't say for certain when memes were first used as a propaganda tool to wage an information war; but I first experienced it in full force during the 2016 US presidential elections, where this site was drowned in pages upon pages of Pepe the Frog and dozens upon dozens of memes mocking Donald Trump and his gaffes both past and present.
After that point, they were always around. The Soyjak Scourge a few years ago was particularly bad and drove many users from the site whilst carving deep rifts in those that remained. It was a terrible time filled with despair and sorrow as it felt like the community of the site had been gutted, never to return.
Thankfully, things are starting to heal and a new community is starting to form, although the older members will still make references to old users who used to have a name for themselves that jumped ship for greener pastures.
If you want a good example of an effective use of memes in a political setting, I highly encourage you to check out the North Atlantic Fella Organization. They started off as a bunch of shitposters who countered the propaganda being spread by Russian state officials on Twitter too becoming an acknowledged and respected arm of the Ukrainian propaganda department, with heads of Ukrainian branches donning Doge profile pictures and praising their collective efforts.
One last thing I'd like to bring up is the difference between a memer and a shitposter. Whilst they create similar content, they go about it in two very different ways.
The memers will use a pre-existing template or a well known format to make their content. Their content tends to be more broader in scope and will include more references to other things with nothing really new added to the original format.
The shitposter will often create something completely from scratch or will disregard commonly agreed upon formatting rules. Their content is generally aimed at a specific audience, sometimes even a specific individual, and tends to be more personal and detailed than the average meme.
Because of this, the shitposters tend to be the driving force behind the creation of new memes, whilst editing and proliferation by the memers will decide whether a particular creation of the shitposters becomes "mainstream" or not.
That's all I have to say for the moment, but if you have any other questions you’d like to ask me, please do and I'll get back to you as soon as I can.