Internet meme in virtual communications: a methodology for creating an intellectual monitoring system

The current state of IT development allows us to talk about the formation of a new type of society, not only informational, but also digital. Virtual communications plays important role in its development. The network of these communications creates a new space of being — virtual. When we talk about virtual space, we primarily mean Internet. Internet memes are one of the important phenomena that embody the features of information and virtual processes of the XXI century. They are subject to comprehensive research due to the fact that these communications and their content significantly affect social processes and require monitoring and decision-making. The Internet memes considered in this paper represents a completely objective reality. The authors proposes an interdisciplinary approach to research at the intersection of the Humanities and exact Sciences: sociology, semiotics, computer science, management, etc., with access the tools in the form of appropriate software. It is obvious that the developed methodology and methodic open up the prospect of applying them to other similar entities and processes in the virtual space. The article describes in the detail both the methodology (developed during three research stages of studying the Internet meme: in static (synchrony), dynamics (diachrony) and artificially intelligent automated mode.), and the methodology for studying the influence of Internet memes on Internet users. This creates problems-issues that need to be resolved:
— revealed the essential characteristics of the Internet meme with the possibility of their formalization;
— describes the mechanism and parameters of Internet meme distribution in social networks;
— describes a mechanism for monitoring the impact of an Internet meme on communication in social networks on the Internet, based on formalized criteria and a software product;
— these mechanisms are designed as self-learning neural networks (software product) with minimal participation of experts who calibrate their work mainly at the initial stage.
As an object of research, we consider a large array of weakly structured data — memes identified through search engines.