Social Degeneration through Social Media: A Study of the Adverse Impact of ‘Memes’

By Prithvi Jyoti Bhattacharya. 2019

In this day and age of omnipresent electronic social media, ‘memes' have become a widespread means of communicating ideas, opinions and even news. Such memes are widespread and often produced by groups and organizations on social media. However, the credibility and impact of such memes is under-investigated in the literature. The intention of this paper is to evaluate such memes to study its impact on society. This paper reviews the literature on the ill effects of social media and particularly the use of memes in it. The paper, then, based on literature and logic posits that such memes can often be detrimental to society in a number of ways; which it identifies as ‘effects'. This paper attempts to explain in detail how memes can adversely impact our society through the abovementioned effects and the future of the society going forward with such memes. The primary contribution of this paper that it investigates a dark aspect of a popular tool used widely in social media for communication and explains how this tool can be seriously detrimental for the development of society. In a future paper, the intention is to test the hypotheses using empirical data using a survey of individuals using social media from different sections of the society in terms of age, gender, nationality and occupations, to find evidence of support for the claims posited in this paper. It is also intended to find mechanisms to monitor and censor such memes to avoid the adverse impact they may have on the society.

Subfields: Social Sciences & Humanities

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