Libraries are known for their book collections, but how about a collection of memes?
Well for the past 15 months the Alexander Turnbull Library, a division of our National Library, has collected more than a thousand memes, as part of its work to document what modern New Zealand looks like.
“A meme is usually an image or a piece of text that makes a statement about what’s currently going on in the world around us,” said Valerie Love, the library’s senior digital archivist.
“It usually uses some sort of cultural reference, so often pop culture, characters from television or a movie, or sometimes actual people.”
The collection started as an experiment during last year’s Alert Level 4 lockdown.
“Memes have been around for a while now but during lockdown we were just seeing so many of them because people were at home and going online and creating memes and sharing them,” she said.
Many of the memes in the collection relate to politics and Covid-19, some even referencing Wellington’s recent move to Alert Level 2.
And while they provide a few laughs, Love says memes could be more important than we think.
“There are already researchers who are studying the impacts of memes in terms of politics and culture and the ways in which we communicate so we know these are going to have research value in the future.”
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