Cancel culture: cognitive mechanisms of meaning transmission in media discourse
- DOI
- 10.5922/2225-5346-2026-1-10
- Pages
- 143-159
Abstract
This article investigates the phenomenon of cancel culture as a contemporary manifestation of social ostracism and a mechanism of discursive manipulation within English-language media discourse. Particular emphasis is placed on its interrelation with wokeism, which operates as an ideological and axiological framework shaping a system of values centred on equality, inclusivity, and social justice. Cancel culture, in this context, functions as a pragmatic instrument of value enforcement, realised through public condemnation, boycotts, stigmatisation, and symbolic exclusion. Both phenomena are conceptualised as interdependent components of a unified conceptual-cognitive mechanism facilitating the transmission, consolidation, and normalisation of axiological meanings in the media sphere. Drawing on contemporary English-language media discourse, the study identifies and analyses several cognitive mechanisms underlying the construction, interpretation, and stabilisation of meaning within cancel culture narratives. These include conceptual framing, which structures discourse through binary oppositions and evaluative schemata; scripts, representing the recurrent event “violation — exposure — punishment”; emotional construal, in which affective responses such as anger, indignation, solidarity, and moral satisfaction act as cognitive catalysts enhancing entrenchment; and multimodal integration, which combines verbal, visual, and digital semiotic resources to increase salience, emotional resonance, and persuasive force. The interaction of these mechanisms gives rise to a stable CANCEL frame, instantiated in a prototypical cognitive scenario: norm violation → public exposure → accusation → media amplification → audience mobilisation → sanction → outcome fixation. The dynamic interplay between the affirmative strategies of wokeism (foregrounding justice, equality, and inclusivity) and the sanctioning strategies of cancel culture (boycott, exclusion, ostracism) constitutes a bidirectional cognitive process. On the one hand, it ensures the reproducibility and legitimisation of emergent moral norms; on the other, it contributes to the entrenchment of collective cognitive patterns that delineate new boundaries of social identity, moral evaluation, and ideological differentiation within the digital public sphere. The findings contribute to a broader understanding of how multimodal media discourse functions as a site of axiological framing, collective conceptual alignment, and cognitive regulation of social values, offering analytical perspectives relevant to the study of digital communication, manipulative discourse strategies, and critical media literacy.