The Endless Journey Of Memes About Maps

Few manmade creations convey as much simple information as your average map. For the many of us never going into space, they are essentially the only way to get a bird’s eye view of the world. At the same time, they’re also subject to all the whims of human error and influence. It’s no wonder they have been popular in memes, as the opportunity to manipulate them practically hands us a ready-made template on a silver platter. Not unlike memes that use charts or graphs, map memes give legitimacy to thoughts that may well be anything but legitimate.

Depending on how they are used, map memes can convey cultural, geographical and social information in their humor — sometimes all at once. This is especially true when they are used on a national scale: When the goal is often to sum up as much about the country as possible.

By virtue of English-speaking meme culture having a heavily North American influence, many of these have a U.S. focus. This is abundantly clear in a meme like the Electoral College map parodies that take the fraught topic of politics and turn it into an excuse to ridicule different groups and decompress the complicated voting system using nonsense with a precision that would be difficult to achieve using anything but a map. This is proved by the fact that it had a successful precursor in Jesusland, which was cruder still by using cultural stereotypes, insisting on a north-south divide between cosmopolitan and bible-thumping.

While many in this genre capitalize on the country’s size by fitting in more information than you would find in your average meme format, there is a minority that benefits from finding a sense of unity. Jeb Wins continues a preference for map memes to reference U.S. culture, but also became large enough that it was able to be used for any number of countries.

Providing a very uniform spinoff of Election Map memes, their premise is based on beleaguered 2016 Presidential nominee Jeb Bush winning in every state. As a meme stemming from a seismic election cycle, its focus on a result that was completely outlandish on several levels acted to neutralize these factors for the sake of the meme and made it easily applicable to use in places like the U.K., France or others.

While memes on this scale are frequently subjective or based on fantasy, they have been known to find humor in taking advantage of reality. This can be seen in the small yet impactful subgroup of road trip memes, which find rude-sounding places and display them as a journey on Google Maps. It’s a puerile joke, but also a successful one as it draws attention to actual places that anyone could find on a map themselves with enough effort.

The Google Maps parody has reached such a level of renown that it gets used on an international level as well, the ultimate shitpost for a geography nerd with too much time on their hands. A great format for gifting those consuming these memes with mostly useless knowledge, it succeeds on the dual purposes of trivia and straight-up immaturity.

They can also join forces with national map memes in their exploration of the opinions held by different groups and countries. One of the most prominent examples of this has been The World According To…, which brings personal opinion to a worldwide scale. Not unlike Electoral College parodies, they use stereotypes as the basis for their humor, but they differ in that they present a specific country as the culprit, rather than granting automatic legitimacy by leaving it down to an unnamed memetic voice.

This contrasts with how many local map memes tend to work. On this smaller scale, the memes that become popular tend to be more focused on oddities than broad formulas. They have acted as a means of expressing personality traits, as with the Alternate Route format.

Used to represent a distraction that attracts the creator of the meme and then lengthens the journey to a place or an abstract goal, the format displays a rare detour in which a journey-based map meme has been edited in some way. Often used to describe insecurities or flaws within the narrator, it shows personal vulnerability in a way that diverges from many other forms of map memes.

The other group local map memes can fall into is that of the excavation exercise. Gimmick accounts like Sad Topographies on Instagram have made the most of extensive web mapping, finding the most tragic-sounding names of places or landmarks. Achieving a similar goal to the Google Map parodies, they broaden its emotional range from childish to existential. Between this and Alternative Route, the map is no longer a means for humor that only lightens the mood.

Few of these memes would be possible without the technologies which make maps so much more of a part of our lives today, so it’s understandable that they have been memed too. As previously mentioned, Google Maps has the edge due to having some of the most comprehensive use outside of creating new formats with both mobile and desktop capabilities.

However, this has not stopped other apps from getting in on the game. With many of us so reliant on the use of the map feature on our phones, it also becomes meme fodder when things go wrong, as with the bug-riddled release of iOS 6 Maps. They are even more prominent though when they offer something new, such as when Snapchat added its "Snap Maps" feature. The detail became memeified soon after its introduction with many sharing videos of the strange happenings in their local areas. With it, map memes came full circle: proving that above all, they care about the weirdness that you find when you zoom in.

By its design, a map is meant to provide information about the world in a simplified way. Often, this is also the aim of memes, even if they are for more subjective entertainment purposes. The combination of the two creates a kind of welcome cognitive dissonance, which allows the different formats to remain consistently popular. They pride themselves on being a learning curve: map memes are a phenomenon that allow us to travel for free, as long as the destination is a part of our imagination.

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