The Digital Scholar: Philosopher's Lab

Volume 1, Issue 1, 2018

The Meme of Revolution in the Media Space of Contemporary Societies

Contemporary world is a world of memes, minimal units of information, which drift around societies and, in a large number, have a tremendous potential for resonance in social systems, penetrating language and space borders. The circulation of everyday’s memes of revolution test the society’s “immunal system.” The purpose of this article is to identify the general ways in which the government system tends to resist to the meme of revolution in the context of democracy and the lack of censorship in the dissemination of information. Our tasks include determining the potency of the media in spreading the idea of revolution and the capacity of discursive power. It is especially relevant in the conditions of usurpation of power while maintaining democratic rhetoric. For this, in our study we use a comparativehistorical approach, the philosophy of "cultural hegemony" by Antonio Gramsci and the theory of the dissemination of minimal information units proposed by Richard Dockins. Our conclusions embrace three points for preventing the turning of the revolution meme into the practice of civil disobedience: the promotion of prostate communication platforms in real and virtual spaces, the expansion of funds for financial support of research containing the necessary rhetoric, and increased political control over education institutions.