Historical consciousness in internet memes: towards a problem statement

Abstract

The article examines the forms of historical consciousness that are present in the digital environment, more specifically in Internet memes. With the universal spread of the Internet, civilization received not only a new tool for communication, but also entered the phase of fundamentally new communication formats. One of them is Internet memes – understood in the article as predominantly mutable templates, in which the picture is static and the text changes. Internet memes function as two-tiered utterances. At the first level, the Internet meme is an ironic part that allows you to grab attention and go to the second level, where the utterance is made. Communication through Internet memes is the realization of everyday representations and thought structures. These structures include, among other things, historical consciousness, which can be understood as all cases of the presence of the past in everyday life. If the historical memory in the Internet culture is widely studied: narratives, symbols that are realized in various kinds of content are analyzed, then the historical consciousness still remains outside the analysis. The article raises the problem of the implementation of temporal representations, the role of the past in the processing of present events, conceptualization of the past in communication through Internet memes.