![]() According to a Penguin Books survey, more than 60% of respondents had no desire to read about COVID-19. In literature, dystopian fiction saw its worst figures in 2020. ![]() For others, escapism meant going to live on a desert island to fish and water flowers, making Animal Crossing: New Horizons the best-selling Switch game of 2020 and putting it in the top 15 best-selling games of all time in just a year and a half. ![]() During the pandemic, The Office became the most watched series (by far), turning the everyday life of a group of office workers into a small antidote to Zoom work meetings. Strangely, people’s desire to see their own reality reflected in the content they consume did not apply in the same way to other cultural products – quite the contrary. Being cooped up at home, surrounded by screens, no one had anything better to do than be prosumers in the golden age of memes Escapism from conventional culture We soon saw how something that was chiefly the ground of social media and internet forums, with millennials and zoomers at its epicentre, began to jump across generations through Whatsapp groups. The Internet is flooded with images that look the crisis in the face and laugh at it. The peak of Google searches for the word “memes” coincided with the boom in searches for “COVID memes”, with three times the number of searches compared to the other most popular terms such as “cat memes”. An exhausted Wojak saying “yes honey” became the embodiment of tiredness at having to deal with the same thing over and over again. Themes related more to living through lockdown – the implausibility of the situation, the need for social distancing, stocking up on toilet paper, the consequences of being at home (putting on weight and sharing space with children) and teleworking – gave way to more introspective memes. Over time, as weeks of lockdown turned into months, their format evolved. A search for the term “coronavirus” on any social network at the time brought up an infinite number of results with these humorous images of the shared pandemic experience. While the global situation was unprecedented, so was the popularity of these tiny bites of culture and people’s need to find and share them. With COVID-19 leading to half a million dead and much of the world’s population locked down inside their homes, Google searches for the word “memes” reached a five-year high in April 2020. While traditional media excluded humour from their handling of the pandemic, memes became a real-time narrative that allowed us to both explain and grapple with the crisis. Social media sites are often flooded with memes in the aftermath of tragedies, but lockdown took their role of providing social connection to a new level.
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