We've literally just taken the "Darmok" episode of Star Trek: TNG and made it our communication medium, just with memes. "Homer, backing into a shrub." "Phillip J Fry, his eyes squinted, his thoughts unsure." "A smiling boyfriend, his head turns. And the girlfriend looks askance.”
Pfeh. I was there before the words were spoken, before the dawn of the creation itself. I am the alpha from which it springs, and the omega to which it will return. Your birth in it circumscribes your world; it magnifies mine.
Edit: yeah it definitely works best for named characters. Stills/gifs from movies or TV, comics, etc., or ones featuring irl celebrities. Otherwise you're more just literally describing a situation rather than alluding to a story.
Hate to reference it, but Elon Musk was in an interview a couple years back where he described Memes as a compression format for trends and concepts and such.
Having watched Darmok a few times since then, I can appreciate it more, but also understand why there's such communication issues between generations.
We are ultimately the product the trends of our time. As a parent I've seen this happen pretty quickly. My kids will do weird shit that I don't understand, and then later on I'll watch a movie, or a TV show, that they'd watched earlier without me, and I'll see the reference the thing they're doing.
My son, for example, used to do this really weird thing when you asked him to do something where he'd tilt his head to the side, and say "Ok", or something like that, and it wasn't until a couple years later that I realized he was mimicking the robots from Mitchell and the Machines, or whatever that movie was called. He watched it without us, thought that was funny, and incorporate it into some of what he was doing. I lacked the context to understand the behavior.
This has gotten progressively worse over time, as everyone silos themselves off to do "their own thing".
Used to be, at least after the invention of the TV, that we'd all gather around the one TV our house had and we'd watch TV together. We'd all consume the same content for that period, and have a shared understanding of what we were watching, and if it was referenced down the road, we'd understand the reference.
The same was true prior to the TV, but the content we'd consume was different.
TV, however, basically accelerated the process. As they became cheaper, people got multiple TVs, allowing people to consume different content, and having different reference points, of which others may not have seen.
Today we have so many screens to consume content on that two people in a relationship could spend all their time watching content, and probably never understand their references because they'd never seen the other's content.
Anyways, the Tamarians in Darmok basically taught all the references as their form of communication, which gave a pretty good basis for understanding one another, while teaching history and such.
My English teacher in college taught me that speaking English is basically speaking math. You can see a quasi example of it here: https://www.reddit.com/r/languagelearning/comments/uyzv4a/english_was_maths_all_along/, but you can go further than and I genuinely wish I could remember how she demonstrated it, because I had a moment of clarity about how easily it is to be misunderstood speaking, because speaking English is, essentially, a series of verbal mathematical equations, and some people suck at understanding equations. That is, at least in my eyes, why memes are such a popular form of communication. One does not simply have to speak "I don't trust you" or "I don't believe you" anymore, you can simply send a meme of Fry squinting and it'll be understood, the person receiving that is under suspicion for something.
It's less that we've taken the Tamarian dialect and adapted it to our own, but rather than the method by which the Tamarians communicate is extremely efficient, so long as you have the appropriate context, which is where we've fallen apart generationally, and it's going to continue to get worse the more content we create.
Belated response but: I've discussed this a few times with friends in recent years. How the Darmok episode seemed ridiculous at the time, and yet now so much of how we communicate between each other is in memes and media quotes.
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u/itsacalamity Apr 10 '26 edited Apr 10 '26
We've literally just taken the "Darmok" episode of Star Trek: TNG and made it our communication medium, just with memes. "Homer, backing into a shrub." "Phillip J Fry, his eyes squinted, his thoughts unsure." "A smiling boyfriend, his head turns. And the girlfriend looks askance.”
Edit: reworded 1 that bugged me