Is our overuse of memes making us less socially intelligent?

📱 In recent years, something has changed about the way we talk to each other — or rather, the way we don’t. Hahas have turned into tears, “that sounds good” has turned into WhatsApp stickers of humanoid cats with distorted faces holding a thumbs-up, and good mornings have become a competition of who could send the kitschiest-fonted, dove-filled GIF with the words in barely legible, glittered cursive. Such is how we communicate online in 2026…

… And it’s seeping into how we communicate in person, too.

💡 The Long View is EnterpriseAM Weekend’s monthly space for the essay — a take on something worth sitting with. Not news, not a how-to. Just a question the week left behind.

The average human attention span online has dropped from two and a half minutes in 2004 to 47 seconds today, according to psychology professor Gloria Mark, whose research on digital attention has tracked the deterioration across two decades. We switch faster, process less, and retain less of what we read. Paragraphs become obstacles, and long texts subconsciously elicit the long meme-ified response of “I ain’t reading all that, I’m happy for u tho. Or sorry that happened.”

What replaced the paragraph was the image: the meme, the WhatsApp sticker, the GIF, and the custom emojis. No words required — it’s all implicit now (or is it?). This has raised concerns globally about what that means to our own interpersonal relationships and offline communication skills. After all, we’re not walking around with cat WhatsApp stickers on A5 paper — though that might prove a lucrative endeavor.

This concern isn’t new, nor niche. In a 2024 peer-reviewed study published in Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking, 453 participants across age groups were surveyed on their use of digital communication tools and their perceived effects on language and interpersonal connection. 64% reported that heavy use of internet slang and memes had reduced their formal writing ability over time. More troubling: 52% reported that face-to-face conversation had become harder after extended periods of primarily digital communication.

A generation that grew up expressing emotions through Rage Comics has developed a rich emotional vocabulary for digital space. Graphic designer and AUC adjunct professor Dina Shaaban, speaking to the AUC Caravan, put it plainly: “Most people don’t like to read, and now with the quick lifestyle that most of us lead, people don’t have the time or the patience to read.” The implication is that we have collectively optimized for brevity at the expense of depth, that what we have gained in speed we have lost in nuance, and that the shorthand of digital communication is making us worse at face-to-face life.

The concern, again, is valid, but it rests on the premise that memes are a simple form of communication. They’re not.

A 2023 cyberpragmatic analysis of WhatsApp stickers by researchers at Binus University in Indonesia examined 100 stickers drawn from real student conversations, categorizing them against a seven-type taxonomy of text-picture relationships. What the study found was that only 5% of stickers were purely visual — no text. The dominant category, at 37%, was “additive”: stickers where the image and the text each contribute meaning the other cannot carry alone. 10% fell into an even more demanding category — “interdependent” — where neither the image nor the text produces the meaning in isolation.

The meaning exists only in their combination, in the gap between what you see and what you read, decoded by a reader who knows the cultural context, the conversational register, and the emotional subtext that makes the joke land. That, if you ask us, seems pretty complex.

The point is sharpened by a 2024 Scopus-indexed study from Middle East University in Jordan, which conducted a linguistic and semiotic analysis of 60 Arabic and English memes drawn from Facebook and Instagram, applying Halliday’s socio-semiotic framework to their verbal and visual structures. The main finding was that memes operate through the textual cohesion devices of ellipsis, reference, conjunction, and repetition. That is to say, memes work by leaving things out, and they rely on the reader to supply all of it from shared cultural knowledge. To get the joke, you have to already know something. The meme tests whether you do.

A 2025 survey of Algerian youth proved this, in which 75 respondents, the entire pool, recognized all the memes presented to them. These memes were sourced from documentaries, reality shows, talk shows, obscure historical events, and more niche sources. The respondents hadn’t seen the original footage from which these memes were derived, but the recognition did not require that. What this proves is that memes and meme-based communication weren’t indicative of a lack of critical thinking or studied awareness but rather a different kind.

What worries scholars isn’t memes; it’s what they might be replacing. If you’re reaching for a crying chihuahua to express sadness — as we’ve all done at some point or another — you’re not actually writing out what you feel. Memes aren’t making us stupid; they’re just irrevocably changing the way we are human.

But with new change comes new tradition, a phenomenon dissected by Dazed Mena writer Yasmin Alrabiei earlier this year, in which she examined Arab “aunties and uncles’” animated WhatsApp greetings — noting that these glittery “kitsch” memes are anything but unserious, drawing from decades of earlier traditions. Memes aren’t limited to Gen Zers and Millennials — they’ve proven themselves vital across all generations. They have changed how we communicate, yes, both online and offline, but that change isn’t inherently negative.