The Birth of the Gentle Meme

Social media is a place where our thoughts and feelings flow out almost unfiltered, rendered as strings of text. What would normally be spoken aloud—moderated in the very act of being voiced—loses that self-restraint once converted into writing, and begins to circulate endlessly. It resembles nothing so much as a Möbius strip.

One of the central issues here is “quotation.” In academic papers, quotations are formalized as part of debate—combat, in a sense. Likewise, the “quote post” feature in Twitter-like interfaces often generates friction because the very act of quoting carries a combative nature. A repost accompanied by immediate personal commentary is often taken by the original poster as a form of checking or countering. In response, a uniquely Japanese posting style has developed: a kind of “manners” where one seeks to avoid face-threatening interactions while still saying what one wants to say. In Japan, direct quote reposts are often avoided, and instead it is common to first repost someone’s content and then immediately create a separate post with one’s own comments, thereby softening the sense of confrontation.

One expressive form that arose to sidestep such friction is the “air-reply” (エアリプ). This is a chat-like response exchanged between those who believe they are sharing the same scene, without directly naming or addressing the other party. Because it deviates from the quotation format, it becomes difficult to critique it through quotation in return. The air-reply is thus a rhetorical device—woven by slightly rearranging the given structure.

Yet the fundamental architecture of social media contains a dilemma: when communication deepens, it tends to produce conflict; when it stays shallow, it slides into tedium. A will operates: I don’t want to interact with people I don’t know, but I do want to interact with those I do. That ambiguous boundary often generates a sense of “suffering.” Separate too strictly and things stagnate; mix too freely and it devolves into infighting. And still, despite this impasse, we remain on social media.

Why? Because by slightly rearranging its functions and formats, we can generate new forms of expression and new ways of relating to one another. The repost with added commentary, the peculiar detour of the air-reply—these are proofs of that creativity.

And what eventually emerges from such attempts is an expression that is neither aggressive nor combative, but one tuned to fit a public space in a balanced way. Something that does not wound another, but can be gently shared with others. What comes into view there may be a new mode of being: the “well-tuned meme,” mellow in tone, public in orientation.