Well? I loves me a good tragic tale. I suppose it became something like Imgur, where everyone is a comedian with no audience and no one really communicates?
From your aparent bafflement at the strange habits of the more image-dependent communicators, I gather your perspective is that a copy-pasted gif can take the place of a well-placed (written) contribution to a discussion, but it’s too much of a jokey-memey, impersonal and slippery-to-interpret thing to really constitute a well-placed contribution to a discussion. No?
I kind of disagree. Low in meaning, yes, but not devoid of it. Through context and repetition that slurping thing has changed, in my mind at least, from something nonsensical to kind of funny to kind of not funny anymore to something familiar and surprisingly clever in aggregate. Through the magic of the Kuleshov effect, it does acquire some measure of meaning depending on context even if it’s technically the very same message repeated over and over.
It is saying something, at least as much as “christ, what an asshole” or “just look at it” is saying something, even if it’s just “remember our shared inside joke? huh?”. Perhaps not enough for top quality discussions, but I still get a laugh out of it and that counts for something, I guess.
Maybe I’m just easily amused.
Discuss.
