Dispositions to Mythmaking Within the Framework of Social Media Activities

Abstract

This paper offers a framework for the philosophical understanding of how modern mythmaking is facilitated by social networking, specifically it reveals the preconditions for the proliferation of social and personal myths through social media. The dispositions to mythmaking become manifest in many forms of social networking activities which involve self-presentation and computer-mediated communication and this trend is considered in correlation with the fact that social network services allow their being used as virtual platforms for constructing identities, simulating relationships and thus transcending realistic institutional contexts. The diverse forms of virtual interaction, communication and association in networked communities provide favorable conditions for the initialization of symbolic codes and cultural archetypes which tend to be expressed a quasi-mythological form. This paper considers cognitive trends and identifies factors which strengthen the dispositions to modern mythmaking and enhance susceptibility to the myths distributed through social media. Among the prominent changes in cognitive sphere are the cultivation of computational thinking which accords with technological externalization of the methods of information processing and the actual transformation of cognitive style associated with the emergence of 'mosaic', or 'clip-like thinking'. There is also a correlation between the activation of myth-generative structures of consciousness and the development of a specific language of on-line communication which is characterized by semantic aberrations reflecting the diffusion of the boundaries between the real and virtual worlds. The dispositional properties of social-network relations manifested in the processes of decentralization and self-organization seem to be relevant to the context of mythmaking insofar as mythological creativity can be displayed in building up multidimensional social cyberspace on the basis of bold combinations of realistic and utopian images of sociality.