(Article)

In modern society, the Internet plays a quite large role in the circulation of information. Exchange of ideas, learning new things, and searching for answers to one’s questions quickly moved to the digital format. Likewise, literature has become available online, adding to the diversity of genres with new ones such as fan fiction, podcasts, and memes. In this essay, I would like to focus on the last, most non-standard one.

As we know, memes are images or videos of a humorous nature. They appeared quite recently, but have gained enormous popularity, especially among young people. You can often find memes on social networks, as platforms like TikTok and Reddit make it easy to publish and quickly spread information to the masses.

What is characteristic of this format is the rapid updating of relevant content — today the slander of a politician in a speech — “on the hype,” and after a week it will be forgotten. At the same time, the context of memes plays almost no role in its circulation. Anything can be a topic or a reason for a meme, so it is difficult to distinguish subgenres here. However, if you divide them by categories, you can follow certain groups.

‘Informational’ memes — the impetus for their creation is some event (in turn, they are divided into political, social, etc., according to the event.).

‘Stock’ memes ─ which are based on an image made by the user himself or found on stock sites, seem to exist outside of time and can become interesting to the audience at any time.

Routine memes – reflect or make fun of the intricacies of the routine familiar to each of us.

We are used to not taking memes seriously, seeing in them an exclusively entertaining purpose, but you can look at this phenomenon from different angles. Such Internet content is used to spread news, which can be skillfully used as a mass media format.

After talking with my acquaintances and analyzing myself, I discovered that a really large amount of news is learned from memes, especially when it comes to global events. However, it did not take a long time to look for an example of a national informational humor ─ the famous Chornobayivka, which shook the Ukrainian Internet space, immediately comes to mind.

In addition, memes can have an educational purpose. Progressive learning is necessary in modern realities. The use of technologies and the electronic format is already commonplace, but the genres of Internet literature are an untrodden path. Because memes contain visual content, they are easily remembered. A few such thematic images in the teacher’s presentation – and the interest of the class is already in his or her hands. This practice was sometimes used in my school, and I remember that it made it much easier for the teacher to explain a new topic and created an informal (in a positive sense) atmosphere.

So, a meme is a multi-faceted and gorgeous genre of Internet literature that has not yet been fully explored, which makes them relevant both in a scientific and, undoubtedly, in a social sense.