The internet-meme and the ethics: A review of scientific research for 2018–2022

Abstract

The article accumulates, systematizes and qualifies the most significant modern and relevant scientific works in the field of digital ethics and memetics over the past five years by means of a semisystematic analysis. This method allows us to consider various areas of research for a specified period and provide an overview of scientific sources on issues of digital ethics and memetics. The studies reviewed by the author were selected on scientific and technical bases as eLibrary, CyberLeninka and CORE according to the following keywords: Internet meme, memetics, digital ethics, ethics of a journalist, social networks. The author’s focus is on identifying gaps in research on both internet memes and digital ethics. The author aims to identify different aspects of the relationship between the Internet meme and the ethics of its creation and distribution, as well as to outline the prospects for further research of the problems raised. The presented article specifies the range of existing semantic gaps in scientific concepts and identifies the main lines of development of the problem. As a result of the study the author notes that the study of creolized texts comes down to three problematic issues: how they influence the user’s picture of the world, how they become popular and who creates them. At the same time, the ethical side of the issue is not touched upon by the authors in their works. Most scholarly articles on digital ethics and journalism ethics boil down to three areas: analysis of codes of ethics, analysis of user behavior on social networks and analysis of the spread of fake information online. Thus, the author concludes that digital ethics scholars almost never consider Internet memes as a subject of study, and vice versa, researchers of Internet memes rarely address ethical issues in their works.