Our Meme Chats Are Keeping Us Together

We're turning internet friendships into real friendships and real friendships into internet friendships

People make friends online.

Despite what our parents warned us about, we frequently talk to strangers and, as we got older, sometimes turn those relationships that stemmed from chat rooms or forums about similar interests, or just social networking into actual, real-life friendships with all of the physical presence that comes with it.

It’s not just an internet generation thing. People had pen pals, etc., that they never really met in person, but still created and fostered these long-distance and largely faceless relationships for sometimes decades. Sometimes people started sending mail to serial killers in prison. I think making friends with someone through an online video game is a lot healthier than that.

As I get older, into my 30s, life naturally gets in the way of a lot of real-life friendships that I have formed. Friends move across the country, others get married and start having families. It’s not as easy to just drop everything and hang out with people as it was when you might’ve even lived down the hall from each other with no real responsibilities in the world.

In a recent story in The Atlantic, Isabel Fattal recounts some advice-by-way-of-warning she received during college.

When I was in college, an acquaintance who had graduated a few years prior came back to visit for the weekend. As we walked around campus on Saturday night, he flung his hands into the cold Connecticut air and exclaimed, “You guys are so lucky; you live a minute away from all your friends. You’ll never have this again.”

It’s funny how much advice at this point in your life comes from someone who is obviously sad and regretful, now faced with the reality of their own mistake as you exist in the time before you’ve made that same one.

I’m not one of those people who perpetually thinks about college, or thinks college is the best time in your life. It’s a good time in your life. And I’m happy for the friends I made and grateful we all lived a minute (or even 10 feet) from each other, and I recognize that the change that Fattal’s graduate acquaintance was right. Your friends will move farther away, even if it’s not that far at all.

This, also, isn’t a new phenomenon. But what I’m noticing is that, with my age group and my group of friends at least, this natural distance that grows as a result of getting older is different in the digital age. We’re able to consistently stay in touch, and that’s one positive thing about the internet, but the way we do it is sometimes weird.

I’m talking, of course, about meme chats – the practice of having a group chat with people you are/were close with, and not actually talking about anything of consequence. You don’t check in. You don’t tell them the news about your job or the details of your dating life. You just send memes back and forth, and you react with either emojis or heart/exclamation symbols on iMessage. Maybe you comment back, but mostly it’s just tacit approval or moving along to the next ones.

The meme chat, in essence, is taking this idea of turning the internet friendship into a real one and reversing it, turning real, intimate relationships nurtured through years and years, and turning it into an online representation of friendship – one where actual English words might not be spoken for days, weeks, months or ever.

I don’t know that it’s a bad thing.

As I said, one of the few beauties of the internet is the ability to stay in touch with people no matter the physical distance between you. My core group of friends from high school was pretty much inseparable from age 14 to 18. Then we went to colleges across the state of Pennsylvania, which at the time felt like a giant distance. Now we’re spread across the time zones of the U.S., the shortest distance being about 2 hours between many of us. Some of my friends from college have moved far away, too, but sometimes the relationships just get cloudier because of life – jobs, kids, being 31 and being tired after work, etc.

The thing is, I don’t feel like I’ve lost any friendships, despite the fact that some of us haven’t actually “spoken” recently. We “talk” to each other pretty much every day, make no mistake. But we haven’t talked talked in a while in some instances. There have been times where my parents have asked, “Have you talked to [friend] lately?” And I say, “Yeah, I talk to him pretty much every day.”

“How is he?”

“Seems fine” is the best answer I can give sometimes.

Again – not necessarily a bad thing.

It’s important to also try to check in on your people and take genuine interest in their lives. But, in other instances, it’s still OK to just make each other chuckle and know you still want to be in the picture – by sending pictures.

If you want to look at it this way, the meme chat as friendship is kind of a beautiful thing. Without having to say a word to each other, we can communicate Hey, I saw this picture in my free time, and it made me think of you. I thought of you because I know your sense of humor, what you’re interested in, and what you appreciate. 

We’re sending mixtapes to each other using a different emotional language.

Friendships that otherwise might have fully deteriorated are kept alive through ongoing exchanges of pictures and videos, and it’s hard to say that being able to nonverbally communicate like that isn’t nice.

Citing another writer, Jennifer Senior, Fattal says in The Atlantic how friendship desires ritual. Like any relationship, it requires work. A “perpetual opt-in.”

It’s hard but not impossible. Senior notes that when it comes to friendship, “we are ritual-deficient, nearly devoid of rites that force us together.” So we have to create them: weekly phone calls, friendship anniversaries, road trips, “whatever it takes.”

Whatever it takes, to a generation who spent time together on their phones, can mean sending each other funny pictures instead of speaking out loud, or even with words at all.

It’s one of the cliche hallmarks of true, deep friendship that you can see each other after years of being apart and fall right back into things as if it had only been a couple of hours. A good meme chat aids with that I think. You have little things to reference. You know the other person is probably fine in their personal life (and you can tell if they’re not based on how unhinged the memes they start sending are).

Is it a true substitute for honest-to-goodness face-to-face friendship? No. But it’s better than the alternative of cold awkwardness if and when you do see these people again or the loss of the friendship completely.

There have been times in my life, while rare, that actual strains in relationships form over stupid arguments or whatever. In a lot of those instances, things could go the route of radio silence until we just fully drift apart like the least tidy breakup ever. Or, we just give each other some space, peek out from our shells by sending a picture or two, and nonverbally signal to each other that we’re still interested in being friends, creating a stupid little bridge back to real human connection, where we can either discuss things further or choose not to.

Like many things as the world deteriorates, people around my age will be the guinea pigs. Our parents never had friendships exactly like this. I know my own parents had their friends from high school and college that I had never met. I heard their names when they told stories, but until Facebook rolled around they saw them rarely or never by and large. There was no way to do what is essentially transmitting nothing but an impulse to recognize “funny” or “cute” or “gross” instantly to that person’s brain hundreds or thousands of miles away instantly. Back then, a long distance call was enough to land you in debtors prison.

I’d wager that most of you reading this are in at least one group chat. Your family one might even count, depending on your closeness. Plenty of people I know are in scores of them, each one serving a specific purpose like a specific tool. Some have rules about what can and can’t be posted, like a traditional chat room during the innocent beginnings of the internet. I am in one chat, for example, that’s meant for the exchange of corny entrepreneur memes only. 

We give the chats names, sometimes based on inside jokes among the participants, and that becomes a de facto name for that group of friends in real life.

Some of these chats are with people that I can interrupt the jokes to say, “Hey, want to get a drink tonight after work?” and others are with people I haven’t seen in years. The point is that when I do see them, whenever that might be, we slip right back into things because we’ve been making each other laugh without actually exchanging words for the interim.

Social media, despite its many, many, many, many, many, many flaws, has succeeded in allowing us to stay in contact with people from the past – for better or worse – effectively killing the need for high school and college reunions for my age group. We don’t need a reunion because we choose to still be in touch with the people who we choose to be in touch with. There’s no “What have you been up to?” conversation anymore because, for the most part, we know what each other have been up to. And if we don’t, we at least have been sending videos of guys doing tricks with construction equipment to get a laugh or at least a “heart” reaction on iMessage, letting each other know we’re still alive, we’re still laughing at the jokes we used to laugh at for the most part (it’s good to let some things go as you mature).

And we’re seeing what it looks like when a generation that’s turned internet interactions into actual friendships turns actual friendships into internet interactions – both validating and invalidating both, I guess.

I see a use in it, at least. As someone who has never outright ended a friendship consciously, I’m afraid of letting the close ones I’ve cultivated drift away through inaction. At least if someone does something bad to you, you don’t feel any pangs of guilt that they’re no longer in your life. But if their greatest sin is just existing beyond arm’s reach, then I feel it’s at least partially on me to keep them there and keep them from drifting further. Perpetually checking in can grow tiresome. Sending a video of a guy in a horrifically terrible rap battle is a less weird way of continually asking if we’re still friends.

We are, because you sent back another video.

And as someone navigating what you would consider “real adulthood” now, I don’t know that something as seemingly juvenile as a meme chat will be something we outgrow. It might. I can see where it stops being charming at a certain point, where we’re all expected to either speak like adults or just let go of these friendships like our outdated, hand-me-down furniture from college and our early 20s. But, I think, if anything, we’ll just adapt them. They might even become outdated in the process, and future generations regard them the way we do when we hear someone talking about talking to truckers on Ham Radio.

Ham Radio would also make an excellent name for a chat where we send cooking videos, too.

Today’s Snakes and Sparklers musical guest is Slaughter Beach, Dog.

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