Assessment of Conflict Categories in Media: Media Texts and User Attitudes

The accelerating digitalization permeates every sphere of modern society, inevitably causing various conflicts: between the virtual and the real, verbal and visual, universal and culturally specific. The current paper sums up a series of studies conducted within the framework of MSU Program of Development, Project No. 23-Sch02-16 “Conflict and Media: Theoretical, Historical, Socio-Cultural and Communicative Aspects”. It reveals a high level of media and information technology involvement in all areas of social life and the process of mediatization of social conflicts. The study of user behaviour in social networks showed that students and PhD students of Russian universities (n=112, aged 19–32) tend to explicitly express their opinions on social media, even if these contradict popular views; the cohort demonstrated a tendency to realistic self-presentation, and the aim to create a positive virtual image. Overall, the survey confirms a predominant match between the real image created by young social networks users and their virtual identity. Research on young users’ attitudes to gamification in key social spheres (n=53, aged 19–27) revealed an overall positive evaluation of this process ongoing I socialization and communication, though were reluctance to accept total gamification of education. An analysis of the use of evaluative vocabulary in media texts – one of the indicators denoting conflict emerging – showed a tendency that the texts include generally moderate lexical units comprising the category. Finally, a study on how native and non-native audiences perceive and interprete such polycode texts as memes showed that the congruence of the visual component appears to be the main factor ensuring the understanding and appreciating for a text created in a different linguistic and cultural paradigm.