Spontaneity as an illusion: internet meme in the structure of political communication

The article is devoted to one of the most interesting phenomena of modern communication - political Internet meme. Meaningful as a unit of cultural transmission of information in the network, a meme can be seen, on the one hand, as a spontaneous product of the creativity of the masses, and on the other - as an instrument of political PR-technologies. The article examines the nature of this communicative phenomenon and given it an operational definition. There are allocated specific features of Internet meme and offered thepossible approaches to its classification.