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Визуальные репрезентации "проблемы вагонетки" в интернет-мемах: политекстуальный тематический анализ
Internet memes devoted to the «trolley problem», a moral dilemma first formulated in 1967 by P. Foot, are investigated in the article. Moral dilemmas, including the trolley problem, cease to be something theoretical and hypothetical, go beyond the actual scientific discussion, and become "closer" to every thinking, feeling person, are included in everyday reality also thanks to their embodiment in various cultural artifacts - movies, games, pictures, memes, as well as Internet memes. The research task of the study is to reconstruct and systematize part of the diversity of meanings embedded in tasks of this type and expressed using visual imaginative means – Internet memes. The creation of a meme for a particular moral dilemma is a manifestation of personal agency. Portraying a moral dilemma in the form of a meme, creating this complex symbol, one seeks to identify a certain contradiction and tries to unite conflicting thoughts, feelings, experiences, states. The author of a meme, being a subject – a social actor, assumes the personal agency of those who will consider, distribute, comment on the meme.
As a result of a polytextual thematic analysis, 9 topics for which it is possible to combine most of the memes issued when searching on the Internet according to the words «trolley problem memes» on English and Russian were identified. These are classical «trolley problems»; existential «trolley problems» (philosophical questions and individual human life); alter-altruistic «trolley problems», or the concept of individuals; dilemmas with nested dilemmas; «trolley problems» refracted through the prism of a mathematical/philosophical problem, theory; «trolley problems» reflecting the current world situation – economic/social/political, etc.; inverted «trolley problems» (a choice between good); «trolley problems» in the context of modern culture and «political and religious trolleys». Various visualizations of moral dilemmas, including Internet memes, can be considered as a direction of proactive civilizational work on the problematization and understanding of existential problems in a complex, contradictory world and the place of moral choice subjects in it.