The viral nature of digital memes: how meanings degrade in mass society

Abstract

Modern mass society, which is undergoing active stages of digitalization in many areas of socio-economic relations, urgently needs to standardize communication in addition to structuring the emerging digital ecosystem. This requires the introduction of understandable linguistic and visual forms that will not only actively convey the meaning inherent in a particular message, but also form certain forms of communication, as well as generate new cultural codes. Modern Internet memes cannot be considered simply as a set of thematic images aimed at conveying certain messages to a mass audience. For a mass society, such a communication format becomes a tool for faster and clearer communication of the desired meaning, motivating the recipient to take a specific action. Nevertheless, such standardization of communication carries with it a particularly high risk factor, not only in terms of impoverishment of communication, but also in terms of the loss of important semantic meanings. Memes are able to briefly convey certain meanings, the usual translation of which requires a much larger number of verbal constructions, but such meanings are extremely limited and one-sided. Having become accustomed to the perception of only one specific meaning in a virtual sign, represented as a meme, the mass person practically loses access to the perception of many other meanings embedded in numerous layers of language. This threatens the widespread primitivization of cultural codes in the near future. This can further lead to individual and social degradation, a decrease in the pace of development of society due to the inability to perceive both more complex language structures and specialized information necessary at least to maintain the current level of equipment operability and technology proficiency.