Emotional roles of modern media culture

Lobanova Yuliya Vladimirovna ORCID: 0000-0003-2970-7520 PhD in Philosophy Associate Professor of the Departments of "Humanities", Moscow Polytechnic University 107023, Russia, Moscow, Bolshaya Semenovskaya str., 38, of. Moscow lobanova_diss@mail.ru Other publications by this author

The media culture, which was formed in the 20th century under the influence of mass media, significantly influenced the patterns of human behavior, their values, ideas about the norm, habits and views. Moreover, it is not only about an individual lifestyle, which is influenced by television, the Internet and social networks: thanks to mediatization, other spheres of public life are involved in this process: politics, business, education ^{[7; 8]}.

American sociologist David Alteid, the creator of the term media logic, believes that this is due to the special mechanisms of the media environment: in particular, stories that are either already dramatized or have such potential often become "suitable" news for the media space. D. Alteid writes that this demonstrates the nature of communication of the social order – it is supported with the help of a number of communications, including those with a special property of becoming sensations or catastrophic news ^[6]. It should be noted that D. Alteid already attributes the increased importance of the emotional element to medialistics. In this regard, he refers to cases of misinterpretation by the mass media of certain events: these include a state of "moral panic" (D. Alteid calls it "media panic"), which can spread even faster due to the availability of such means of communication as cell phones or the Internet.

The last feature of the modern media space has been repeatedly noted by researchers as a cardinal update of the concept of the "public sphere". This term, according to the creator of the concept, the German philosopher Yu. Habermas, a product of social interaction, as a result of which there is a space for the exchange of opinions, the identification of a new culture of reasoning; there is the possibility of an egalitarian dialogue, to which all subjects of the public sphere are equally admitted ^[13]. For subsequent critics of the Habermasian concept, it was obvious that neither the Middle Ages nor the bourgeois European society of the turn of the XIX–XX centuries actually provided such an opportunity: women, people with low social status or wealth were often excluded from this group by default ^{[22; 12]}.

Yu himself. Habermas, despite the high availability of information and the low threshold for entering the discussion as a full-fledged actor, evaluates social networks rather negatively: in his opinion, they lack political potential and are strongly influenced by the interests of the state and the market. However, researchers of the younger generation disagree with this: according to a whole group of scientists researching social networks, the ability of any user to send messages and connect with a large number of people "democratized the publication of content: anyone can publish content, and anyone interested in content can receive it" ^{[21, p. 687]}.

Another consequence of the accessibility of the media space is the increase in ways of self–expression, both creative and communicative. This became possible, among other things, due to the anonymity of social networks - researchers believe that although different sites allow users different levels of anonymity (and the user himself can also take part in this), the increase in popularity of resources where the user is not required to specify personal data is becoming a noticeable trend of the last decade ^{[10, p. 71]}. The ability of social networks to publish content with as much anonymity as possible (the authors of the study call it anonymity sensitivity) was appreciated for various reasons: security, building an alternative identity, the opportunity not to risk their own work, relationships and other social ties ^{[15, pp. 2657-2666; 9, pp. 33-48; 18, pp. 99-112]}.

Anonymity provides a less personal level of contact between users – they know almost nothing about each other and may not say anything about themselves. Despite all the advantages described above, this often leads to the opposite effect: the inability to see the interlocutor reduces the level of empathy for him. Without worrying about the consequences of their own words and actions, the user can not only dehumanize the interlocutor due to his "invisibility", but also not expect any public sanctions. This phenomenon was investigated even before the popularity of anonymous messengers and applications in the early 2000s, when many people anonymously registered on thematic forums. Of course, not all forums were places exclusively for venting negative emotions: researcher Sarita Shonbeck also presents Internet cultures in the form of an empathic spectrum, where at one end there are sites where users are provided with emotional support, and at the other there are "degrading" sites such as 4chan, where the user can be played, to insult or make a mockery of. Studying the website for mothers YouBeMom, Schonbeck comes to the conclusion that anonymity on such sites can work both ways: she allows you to complain about your spouse, keeping secret the specific details of their marriage, and brag about the success of the child, receiving support from unknown women. Anonymity facilitates the outburst of negative emotions and does not condemn mothers to problems in marriage, provided that they remain undisclosed ^[19].

The ability to speak negatively about family and other people with impunity has created a special emotional role for modern media culture – hater (hater – hater). Since the accessibility of social networks allows them to be used as platforms for insulting different categories of people, the need to find a "balance between freedom of expression and protection of human dignity" becomes especially important for researchers of the online space ^{[21, p. 687]}. In this regard, in 2016, a number of social platforms decided to regularly monitor the manifestations of such statements (hate speech) in order to remove them. Currently, most Internet platforms have a function for complaining about hate speech and insulting users.

What role does hayter play in the modern media space if not only the site administration is fighting against him, but also larger organizations – for example, UNESCO, which is releasing a study that will help combat hate speech, or the Council of Europe, which is launching the No hate speech movement?

According to sociologists who study mediatization from a constructivist point of view, there is no one logic of media that Alteid wrote about; rather, there are many such logics and they depend on the discursive situation and the context in which media culture interacts with other spheres of life and individual representations of people. According to theorist Andreas Hepp, media culture and the media are not the "driving force" of social change, but rather the "framing" of social change. In this case, we are faced with the need to study the meta-processes of changes in society and the communicative structures of the media ^[14]. It's not that the anonymity of certain online platforms allows people to become sources of hatred and intolerance: this function responds to and simultaneously forms a social request, transforming people's behavior habits on social networks.

The reason for hating another user or group of people becomes a trigger – a news item, image or word that triggers an emotional reaction mechanism (we wrote above about the importance of an emotional element in modeling the discursive dimension of media culture) associated with anger, irritation, delight or panic. The researchers, using quantitative analysis of the components of the "portrait" of a potential victim of hatred on social networks, concluded that most often users use potentially "hateful" statements (starting with "I can't stand", "I hate", "I'm sick of") in relation to people with another race, physical characteristics or unacceptable behavior for them ^[2].

It is important to note that over the past few years, the word "trigger" has become more often psychologized – this is the moment of sudden psychological trauma experienced by people with post-stress traumatic disorder. Avoiding content related to traumatic experiences (content of this kind is also called "trigger" or "trigger", "triggering"), people may ask to put "Trigger Warnings" (Trigger Warning, TW), designating content as potentially dangerous for users with severe experiences. Interestingly, often even the very encounter with "haight" as such can be read as a difficult experience and a trigger – in this case, from a moral point of view, hayter becomes not only a producer of dangerous harmful content, but also a violator of public peace.

Note that with the weakening of "natural" empathy due to the impossibility of direct non-anonymous interaction with another user, a high level of emotional involvement, compassion and highly specialized knowledge is required from all participants in communication ^[5]: what trigger warning should be put on a post about a sick animal? How should I support a person going through a breakup? The variety of communication rules requires the user to quickly adapt, familiarize himself with the instructions of the media culture.

If a hater hates another user directly, without trying to justify himself for violating the rules of the Internet environment, a troll, another role of modern media culture, can taunt and mock others without violating the rules of the platform. His goal is not to express anger, but to provoke a response. The very process of trolling (social provocation) can be more inventive, and the more difficult it is to achieve sanctions for such a user – ban, de-platforming (depriving them of the opportunity to register and write something on a certain social network). Due to the frequent perception of the anonymity status as a binary status (complete anonymity/ complete non-anonymity), the punishment from other users may be deanonized: the dissemination of information about a person in real life, including passport data, address and phone numbers. This, moreover, is a fairly old measure of the same Internet hatred or a kind of hate crime (hate crimes).

The role of the troll is also directly related to anonymity – a group of social psychologists believes that deindividualization, along with impunity, leads to intemperance on the Internet ^{[16, pp. 1123-1124]}. However, trolling can also be considered as a norm of behavior of a certain social group, rather than an individual strategy of provocation. We have previously written about humiliation platforms such as 4chan, and in similar spaces charged with negative emotions, trolling is a normative way of communicating. On such sites, it is often perceived not even in a negative way: 4chan in most cases does not promise users social support, on the contrary, deprives them of any illusions of finding an emotional connection and the depth of trusting communication.

All these roles and terms are inextricably linked to the emotional dimension of human life ^{[3; 20]}. Hayter vents anger, hatred or irritation; a trigger causes people the strongest feelings (and its marker, on the contrary, protects people from an emotional explosion); a troll, on the contrary, tries to evoke such emotions.

Most neologisms-memes (mem is a media object, often witty, quickly gaining popularity on the Internet) are emotionally colored or directly related to emotions: "pichalka" (an ironic assessment of what should cause sadness, but does not actually cause), "aggrandize" (from the English aggression – aggression; angry, to get angry), "facepalm" (facepalm is a non–verbal expression of shame, which, however, is used verbally and, as it were, replaces the impossibility of a gesture in the network space). Why are so many terms related to emotions? Media culture is probably really transforming along with the public sphere and, according to Hepp, is at the same time a "formative force." Linguistic and discursive analyses of these interactions must necessarily include an emotional element as an essential component not only of communication, but also of the logic of dissemination and popularization of information.

Ten van Dijk, one of the largest theorists of discursive analysis, argues that "mass media also show that they are an integral part of the structure of social power, the symbolic aspect of which they control," and only media professionals are allowed into the news production processes who can reproduce ideologies and strengthen public opinion, for example, in the "underdevelopment" of certain cultures or the "laziness" of migrant workers and refugees. ^{[4, pp. 77-78]}.

Can the emotionality of modern media culture resist the power structures? ^[17] On the one hand, emotionality is successfully used by many charitable, philanthropic projects – with the help of a complex mixture of guilt, a desire to help and the need to feel good, "right", they can find a successful financial and emotional response from a large audience, helping people, animals, environmental initiatives and so on (although ethical the aspect of such intentional stimulation of shame, of course, also occupies a place in public and academic discussions) ^[11]. On the other hand, the high importance of the emotional element, which prevails over the cognitive one, leads to the rapid spread of moral panic, misconceptions and rumors: an example is the wave of fears caused by the installation of 5G towers and their alleged connection with the spread of coronavirus infection. In all these contexts, both trolls and haters are successfully using the opportunities of media culture. They use anonymity as a tool to evoke (or vent) negative emotions; they provoke and "ask for it"; they tear apart the social fabric, often going unpunished. Obviously, some social media users need emotional release, which such a role allows them to do. In other cases, haight becomes a form of resentment, envy, which it is impossible (shameful) to express directly. Taboo emotions find an outlet in the form of a role-playing game, a mask that people with a wide variety of social status, economic status, and background can put on.

On the other hand, the need for protection from such people (as well as protection from any disturbing, disturbing content in general) finds realization in the adoption of new rules of behavior and regulation of social networks by the community administration, and among users (users) – in developing warning markers (trigger warnings) and special ways of talking about trauma, difficult experiences and violence. Supervisory capitalism, according to Zuboff, is adapting to the new requirements of modern media culture.