Instructional Message Design: The Laws of Simplicity – Time

Many of my friends and I were quite active on watsapp sending and receiving numerous memes. I normally limit these but last week I guess I just needed a little extra moments to laugh, so I’d usually send memes with the hashtags #morninglaughter (if I’m sending them in the morning), and #eveninglaughter (if I’m sending them in the evening).

For this post, I’d like to look at Maeda’s (2006) law of simplicity with regard to time, and the new internet/social media craze or trend regarding memes. Similar to Twitter, Memes are some often use a minimal number of words combined with images to convey a message – this message might be an emotion, thought, expression etc. Like tweets, memes are never meant to be wordy, but concise and often denote humor in the form of sarcasm, metaphors, or even “shade” (shade is a contemporary term in popular culture referring to any kind of under-handed or subliminal insult/jab at someone).  In addition to being concise, humorous/insulting and visually based, memes must be contextually specific….the message and its meaning must be grounded in some socio-cultural context – usually this is a recent event, television show, or character/personality.

The thing about memes, is that they use some of the most hilarious and/or iconic images to further convey the meaning/message. Very often the image is used as a visual translation of the text or vice versa.  The meme below is a perfect example of all these traits that I’ve observed in the memes I’ve come across, and the ways in which they are used #laughter #funny:

Funny isn’t it? -- this was actually a meme a few colleagues and i shared to describe persons who will never change #nomatterwhat or to allude to an age-old proverb that you can't teach an old dog new tricks....I also used the same meme to convey a different meaning to my colleagues that I'm jokingly a "thug" or "bad boy" or "gangster" (which was hilarious because they know I'm not a thug etc lol :-) )

Memes reinforce several proponents of Maeda’s (2006) laws of simplicity. Not only are they simple, and concise (as we discussed in previous posts), but because of this they are also efficient as they convey they message/meaning in the shortest/quickest way possible.

I actually had a conversation with a very good friend of mine just using memes via watsapp. We used memes to relay information, create humour or “shade”, and we even used it to end the conversation….it definitely had me glued to my phone with excitement just waiting for the persons’ responses and what memes that person would use……it was soooooo much more engaging than a regular text-based conversation on watsapp. I also had a similar conversation with a couple of other friends in a watsapp group. Because of those two conversations, I’ve created a folder with dozens of memes for future conversational use, but I haven’t actively used the folder of memes since then….considering Maeda’s (2006) laws and my recent readings, I think it’s something I should resume with immediate effect!

Since I like memes so much, here are some others below which I used in different contexts for different motives and meanings, and shared with different people: #enjoy lol

After a friend sent this to me, I jokingly shared this with my other friends who probably shared the same sentiments about having to show up for work after the eclipse. 

My colleagues and I used this to trigger a conversation about persons/colleagues who ate uncontrollably at a formal event. This soon led to a conversations about other situations where our families and friends who often eat a lot, and about creativity.

This was one that I received from a friend, and then i shared it with other friends (including married persons) just to get a reaction. While the male recipients reacted by identifying with the male/silent bird, saying that it couldn't be more accurate, the female recipients often found it as a distortion of reality/the truth. I guess this meme could have perhaps triggered a future research project and/or publication? #hmmm

A friend sent me this one in response to my post about Elmo and the eclipse (see above)....it was a kind of competition to see who could out-meme each other based on the text/message, the image, and the creativity of the meme in light of the eclipse that occurred that day.

A colleague sent this one to me via watsapp when she was about to go on her leave. lol.....I think it's something we can perhaps all relate to when any vacation comes lolll.

As you can tell, I think memes are some of the most creative and engaging ways to convey a message (even if it is for instructional, marketing or other purposes). If you like any of these memes, you can access these and more via social media such as Facebook and Instagram and you can create them yourself via the numerous free online meme-generators. #happymeming :-)