Abstract:

The new media age enforced the pace of everyday life and changed people’s communication. The meme phenomenon is the research subject of different sciences. The aim of the article is to create a conceptual and methodological basis which could help to research a meme as an element of the intercultural communication. The Internet is an efficient media comparing it with the previous ones. The Internet is full of millions of websites, blogs, ads, forums, etc. that have been created by an individual, a group of people or organizations. It forms a limitless location of information and entertainment units. The important Internet features for the spread of memes are interactivity and hypertextuality. Interactivity is the feature that allows synchronous and responsive communication between users. Interactivity means that a number of participants interact with each other and their actions must include an element of reciprocity, i.e. the change occurs on both sides: the actions of one party trigger responses from the other which lead in turn to changes in the first. Hypertextuality is when information is linked systematically in nonlinear, web like fashion. A hypertext refers to the use of hyperlinks to present a text, images, and videos. People who spread and receive internet memes can be considered as nodes in a (social) network. The chain of transmission of a meme through the internet users results in the eventual spread of the meme across the net worldwide. The absence of space and time differences on the Internet communication the distinction between communities lessens. Because of the intensive and scale-free structure communication, any Internet unit (sentence, phrase, text, tune, picture, video, etc.) can become a meme. Memes could fit into the model of communication in order to interact and successfully infect new users. Does it mean that memes infect internationally? The memes have the same lifecycle similar to parasites. In transmission phase the following meme features are important: ability to reproduce; copying fidelity; non-alteration policy; structure cohesiveness; simplicity; repetition; survival, abstractivity, and decodability. The intercultural communication of memes can be effective or non-effective according to their communication life-cycle. The article outlines the conceptual basis, methodological background and the methods for researching memes in the intercultural context.

Keywords:

meme, Internet, intercultural communication