Are Internet Memes a form of AAC?

As we've seen in previous posts, AAC or Alternative and Augmentative Communication are systems designed and developed to assist people with speech, language and communication problems. The type of AAC most adapted to our needs in the classroom are pictograms, simple representations of more complex, cultural concepts that can be accompanied by a supporting text for those students who may benefit from it.

Both Memes and pictograms require a cultural background that needs to be shared between the transmitter or source and the receiver. As units of cultural meaning, they belong to a particular human culture and, if properly designed, they can be understood by any member of its group of origin.

In this sense, memes and pictograms share most of their characteristics, only that pictograms have a lower level of complexity, while memes' complexity may range from the lowest to the highest levels (reaching even Dadaism), by adding video or animation; sound effects, voice and music, as well as image or video editing.

The main difference between pictograms and memes lies on their purpose. While AAC pictograms goal is to communicate a precise message, memes can go beyond that and convey behaviors and emotions by subverting expectations. Such function links memes directly to its socio-cultural background so deeply that we can find correlations between one particular group and its memetic production.

To illustrate this example we can compare Western and Chinese memes.

In the Western socio-cultural background memes have a tendency to communicate either complex situations such as reactions to something previously stated while applying cultural elements as the medium to convey the meaning, or their goal is to convey emotions.

For example:

However, memes in China could be directly linked to Western memes from back in the decade of the 2010's, where they shared more characteristics with pictograms and the emotions they conveyed were mainly humorous.

For example:

These two memes share the structure and the message (although not so much the formality), and their difference with the previous one is the lack of context and therefore the lack of subversion. In this sense, such memes are closer to AAC pictograms than to today's Internet memes, due to having a lower cultural weight.

So the question now is: Can Internet memes be used as a form of AAC?

Perhaps, if we expanded the domains of AAC to a broader system of communication, including emotions and reactions, then we could definitely consider memes as a more complex type of AAC.

This new AAC would be a system capable to creating a situational setting and an emotional reaction to it. It would work as some kind of really short storytelling that would be based on subjective impressions of real situations. As such, memes would be a direct gate to its own socio-cultural background and, therefore, could be applied as a tool for foreign language and culture education.