In this episode, we explore how memes serve as windows into the evolving logics of generation, value, and belonging in digital culture. Our guest, Dr. Tommaso Trillò, Senior Lecturer in the Department of Communication and Journalism at the Hebrew University and former postdoctoral researcher in prof. Limor Shifman’s ERC project DigitalValues, joins us for a conversation about the everyday aesthetics of internet humor and what they reveal about how people inhabit platforms today.
We begin by discussing two emblematic meme genres — Good Morning memes and POV memes — each drawing on different social and technological ecologies. Through these cases, Trillò shows how meme cultures articulate generational logics and values in everyday digital life. Good Morning memes, circulating mostly through family group chats on platforms like WhatsApp and Facebook, reveal how older users express care and social presence through repetitive and affective visual forms. POV memes, emerging from TikTok’s short-video culture, highlight how younger users explore identity, affiliation, and shared experience within algorithmically curated spaces. Together, these examples offer a glimpse into how digital media sustain diverse modes of community and expression across generations.
The conversation expands to consider how values such as authenticity, identity, and affiliation become encoded in digital images and vernaculars, following insights from the DigitalValues project. We examine how memes act not only as humorous artifacts but also as cultural texts that negotiate what users find meaningful, desirable, or genuine online.
Finally, we discuss the broader theoretical frameworks of platform vernaculars, platform politics, and platform imaginaries — exploring how users adapt to the constraints and invitations of specific platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok, and how these spaces, in turn, shape both aesthetic norms and generational imaginaries. The episode concludes with reflections on the professionalization of content creation and the transformation of social media from spaces of personal communication to algorithmically curated environments of performance and aspiration.
