Memes as Instruments of Social Influence

Join CREES for a brownbag lecture by Dr. Alex Kalinin (Center for Cyber Social Dynamics) on October 6 at 12pm. Dr. Kalinin’s talk is titled “Memes as Instruments of Social Influence: A Theoretical Framework.” Internet memes are not merely vehicles for popular humor: they can also serve as indicators of public sentiment, emerging themes, and contested social norms. Memes can disseminate and reinforce propaganda as well as challenge it, while politically engaged users deploy them as discursive weapons. This presentation examines how memes function within the contemporary Russian media landscape. Alex is a linguist specializing in syntax, with a focus on the comparative analysis of Russian and Germanic languages. He received his MA in Linguistics from the Russian State University for the Humanities and completed his PhD in Linguistics at Queen Mary University of London. His research interests include syntactic theory, corpus linguistics, and the linguistic dimensions of large language models, with particular attention to Slavic languages in comparative and computational perspectives. He integrates computational methods into his research, working primarily with Python and Java for corpus analysis and data-driven linguistic inquiry.