Face Off: Are memes a helpful way to learn?

Over the last decade, mobile phones have become the most important device in our lives. No matter your social media platform, you have probably seen a meme somewhere. Yet, have you ever wondered how memes might be helpful for different types of learners?

For example, memes could help young learners expand their word banks and remember information more effectively. Learning new vocabulary is a challenge, and it is easy to forget the words you learned. Memes are often just images with captions. This is a good way to present new information, making it easy to memorise what you’ve learned.

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Robert E. Horn, a professor at Stanford University, wrote about the advantages of visual learning back in 1998 in his book Visual Language: Global Communication for the 21st Century, stating that “visual language has the potential for increasing ‘human bandwidth’ – the capacity to take in, comprehend, and more efficiently synthesise large amounts of new information.” With the help of memes, young learners can internalise vocabulary words more efficiently.

Memes can also help advanced learners learn more about global affairs. Trending memes are often translated into many languages to make them more accessible. They are also a snapshot of our culture and convey information about society in a simple, funny way. Anyone can upload and send memes online, which makes it easy to exchange ideas across cultures.

Some might say that memes contain inaccurate or misleading information, which might affect students. While true, it gives students the perfect opportunity to train their critical thinking skills by looking up the information and learning to check their bias. Moreover, teachers can filter out inappropriate or inaccurate memes and teach students to avoid them.

Memes are also a good way for teachers to introduce new information. Students will pay attention to something they are interested in, and it is a way for teachers to relate to their students by showing them they are interested in the same jokes or pop culture topics.

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The use of memes has been on the rise in the education system lately, but I strongly believe that memes are not helpful to learning.

If you think about it, modern memes are descendants of cartoons meant to tell jokes. Hence, most “educational” memes are not directly related to learning but mock typical classroom situations. As a student, I might find these cartoons funny and relatable, but they do little to help students learn.

Furthermore, as memes are typically produced for entertainment, they often lack depth. They offer little chance for greater knowledge because they are so simple to understand. You cannot provide deep insight into a topic with just one or two phrases.

Compressing a complicated mathematical equation or a story about a significant person in history into a single meme does not actually provide any information beneficial to the learning process. Instead, it simplifies and compresses the information. What, if anything, can we learn from memes? While memes can be viewed as a way to share small bits of information and prompt further research, they are not a way to educate students.

Using memes in class also poses a risk and could lead to distracted students who fall into the meme rabbit hole, discovering websites such as Reddit and making or scrolling through memes daily. Students may also dig deeper into different types of memes and find ones that are inappropriate, racist, sexist or promote other sorts of discrimination. Furthermore, memes are often used to spread fake news – and since they take information and strip it down to one single line of text, users may interpret the meme differently, which could lead them to believe inaccurate information.

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Memes are a way to joke and make light of a situation. They provide little to no depth of knowledge and thus, are not beneficial to learning. Memes actually pose a risk to students since they could distract or hurt them or worse – lead them to believe false information or propaganda. While they may be fun to see on social media, they don’t belong in the classroom.