Solipism as a factor in content personalization: practice of Internet journalism

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V'yacheslav Chornovil Galician College

SOLIPSISM AS A FACTOR IN CONTENT PERSONALIZATION: PRACTICE OF INTERNET JOURNALISM

Yuriy Finkler

Ternopil

Annotation

There is little research on how online journalists work to convince the public, on how online media technologies work. This article presents the research results of theoretical research on the possibility of convincing users in the sociopolitical and socioeconomic aspects of understanding content.

Therefore, many users are well aware of the creation and consumption of information within the functional boundaries of the Internet, analyzing the goal of identifying gaps in the individual meaning of the audience about the content. The objective of this article is to highlight the phenomenon of solipsism in online journalism as a standard postmodernist attempt of journalists to embed their own social experience in the individual space of man.

As a results of processing the material, we came to the following conclusions:

1. The hypothesis of solipsism in online journalism assumes a certain level of civic competence.

2. The formation of strong organizational and content links between Internet media and its regular audience is generally identified by the interests, programs and forms of such actions that have value.

3. The production of online media of its own content prefers a clearly defined sociopolitical line, which leads to the suppression of idiosyncrasy, diversity and dissent.

4. The context of solipsism establishes the freedom of the audience up to its right to neglect the activities of the media in general.

5. The author can react painfully and effectively in any available way to the activities of any Internet publication.

6. The audience can act as a separate author-each content, which evaluates the practice of any online publication, using, in particular, places of mass communication.

Key words: audience, author, content, interpretation, narrative, understanding.

Анотація

Юрій Фінклер

СОЛІПСИЗМ ЯК ЧИННИК ПЕРСОНАЛІЗАЦІЇ КОНТЕНТУ: ПРАКТИКА ІНТЕРНЕТ-ЖУРНАЛІСТИКИ

Існує небагато досліджень щодо того, як журналісти інтернет-видань створюють контент для переконання громадськості, як працюють технології мережевих мас-медій. У цій статті представлені дослідницькі результати теоретичної розвідки щодо можливості переконання користувачів у суспільно-політичних та соціально-економічних аспектах розуміння контенту. При тому, що багато користувачів добре обізнані в створенні та споживанні інформації у функціональних межах Інтернет-видань, аналіз ставив за мету виявити прогалини в індивідуальному уявленні аудиторії про контент. Метою статті є виокремлення феномену соліпсизму в Інтернет-журналістиці як стандартного постмодерністського намагання журналістів вбудовувати власний соціальний досвід в індивідуальний простір людини.

За відсутності офіційної, бюрократично оформленої великої державної обов'язкової комунікаційної політики і націоналісти, і ліберали, і консерватори, і анархісти, і соціалісти, і комуністи просувають свою власну ідеологію через інтернет-видання. Узагальнений контент усіх цих видань є внеском у демократичну практику функціонування інтернет-видань України як чинник суперечки за право на власний соліпсизм аудиторії. За подібних умов контент інтернет-журналістики буде накопичуватися в суспільстві, оскільки конструктивізм контенту входитиме у суперечність між чітко окресленими принципами інтернет-видань та практичністю аудиторії.

Питання про демократичність режимів у суспільствах, у межах яких працюють контенти інтернет-видань, набагато більш глибинні. Мається на увазі сукупність організаційних і політичних чинників функціонування конкретного суспільства. Якою ціною автономії мас-медій через їхню позірну спонтанність та реальну різноманітність спричиняють втягування масової аудиторії в ідеологію, партійне життя, економіку, спорт, вибори, культуру, патріотизм, державну політику?.. Комунікаційний соліпсизм - це про конкретний інтерес конкретної людини до конкретної проблеми, що висвітлюється конкретним інтернет-виданням, про досвід значущої демократичної участі аудиторії лише в невеличкому, але принципово важливому для цієї аудиторії сегменті ідеології, партійного життя, економіки, спорту, виборів, культури, патріотизму, державної політики...

Ключові слова: автор, аудиторія, контент, інтерпретація, розуміння, наратив.

Introduction

“On the dance floor, she dances by herself - it seems that such solipsism has become fashionable” [3, p. 133]

The functionality of liberal journalism, which (liberal journalism) is followed by the majority of online publications in Ukraine (Ukrainian researcher Olga Mitchuk, speaking about Ukrainian liberal journalism, writes: “Having a free-loving character, Ukrainian liberal journalism helped the mass reader to understand his everyday life, establish his role and connection with the production activity of all mankind, to help him to improve his work processes, to develop a view both on the culture of his own people and on the heritage of foreign cultures. The ideological struggle is followed, which should later be embodied in practical activities in order to achieve integrity as a condition for the security of information integrity could be violated by the following factors: the risk of late informational and cultural development, the loss of informational and cultural identity, the reduction of the role of information flows” [5, p. 192]) - and similar things happen in contrast to television journalism - it proves that in this practice and it is about the phenomenon of “false consciousness”[2]: Internet journalists offer topics that resonate with a mass audience and adapt the understanding of a problem to the audience's level of perception of this problem. Online journalists have a moral, professional and social right to do so, they demonstrate how their vision of the problem resonates with the everyday concerns of the mass audience. In general, Internet journalism exhibits a diversity of ideas, positions, and practices that identify content with realities, not to mention the ease with which audiences can participate in such content identities.

Formulation of the problem

Solipsism offers a sense of richness, but tends toward a more individual, personally consistent level of private communication interests and expectations. Solipsism in Internet journalism is considered by us as a personal communication constitutionalism, which leads each member of the audience to the conclusion that an ordinary person perceives social and political identities, as they correspond to any social ties of a person. Solipsism in Internet journalism is perceived as a marker not of communication, but of sociopolitical relations in mass communication. At the same time, the meaning of the content should not be entirely in the discourse of a person and should not be subject to his social hierarchy. On the contrary, any manifestations of the current media landscape can be read as cultural allusions, media texts of equal importance with respect to the symbolism inherent in the individual.

Relevance of research

Ukrainian researcher Professor Volodymyr Rizun believes that one of the key problems of journalism is the process of presenting facts, which is not completely engaged and accurate in reflecting reality [8]. Determining journalism as a field marked by subjective-emotional, trusting of the audience to the authors, author's unique, socially recognized and expected presentation of reality, included in the author's real life experience and endowed with a great vitality of persuasion, Professor Volodymyr Rizun claims that the informing process is the result of the interaction and dialectical unity of two components: contemplation, apperceptive reflection, subjective experience of reality; involvement of scientific methods of research and reflection of reality, scientific processing of facts. Therefore, according to Volodymyr Rizun, “one should be afraid not of evaluative, but of factually false judgments. Evaluative judgment, which is based on relatively reliable facts, is a journalistic classic and quality!” [8, p. 173]. But at the same time, Professor Volodymyr Rizun also points to “the natural psychological mechanism of massification, which is embedded in us and the essence of which is the need to identify oneself with others for a normal existence in society” [7, p. 12]. Communication precedes the formation of consciousness, which is why the presence of mass elements is an immanent characteristic of “consciousness in general” as an ancestral trait of a person, regardless of the types distinguished by various researchers: individual consciousness, group consciousness, public consciousness, mass consciousness. Ukrainian researcher Victoria Zolyak generally points out that “controversies in the activities of the mass media are related to the degree and level of readiness of the audience to perceive information. The text base of messages transmitted by mass communication always has a certain informational balance. This does not mean “newsroom” products. In addition to news value, which has an increasing weight in mass communication media, content convergence mitigates the negative aspect of messages. Content convergence determines the social value of information as a factor of the following content components: 1) the possibility of convergence with any other group of messages; 2) availability of knowledge necessary for making a particular decision; 3) the existence of opportunities for competitive expectation; 4) perspectives of the significance of information” [11, p. 8]. Historically, it is possible to follow how the fullness of the mass media became more and more dependent on those circumstances, which are difficult to call communicative. There, for example, with regard to printed newspapers, the weight and content significance of the US press increased significantly along with the development of the railway, the railway system, the railway industry, because it was precisely because of the expansion of the American railway that the newspaper empire began to expand and improve: from that time newspapers could reach more and more distant territory and serve the interests of an increasingly wide range of readers. Radio and television also experienced dramatic changes as a result of technical developments in signal distribution. Both technical developments and signals brought the television and radio industry both a larger audience and higher profits. This, in turn, made it possible to create new types of signal transmission technologies, further technical improvements in communication and, of course, new types and types of content (first of all, we mean, of course, genre innovations in news journalism, about which I very aptly wrote Ukrainian researcher Lyudmila Ryzhenko: that “the genre system of Ukrainian mass media has undergone changes under new socioeconomic conditions. Practical changes in the system of genre creation of Ukrainian mass media depend on both objective factors (development of society's institutions, socioeconomic changes, etc.), as well as from the self-development of individual components of the mass media system itself (changes in thematic content, owners, audience expectations, the ability to convert content). The development of the media witnessed the emergence of fundamentally new and improved trends in the development of the genre system” [9, p. 9]). In the context of solipsism, the content expanded through the use of Internet publications crystallizes sociopolitical boundaries and doctrines, factors of struggle in any field among radicals, liberals, conservatives, reformers and manipulators, etc., to control spheres of influence. And if either the media liberalism studied in Ukrainian science (for example, the dissertation of Ukrainian researcher Olga Mitchuk [6]) or media conservatism (for example, the dissertation of Ukrainian researcher Lyudmila Ryzhenko [9]) is a kind of “popular constitutionalism” with a strong emphasis on the rights of the mass audience to perceive, not perceive or ignore the content, then solipsism is a manifestation of a free-born person and related ideas. Thus, the problem of solipsism in Internet journalism is actualized as a phenomenon of breaking through supposedly indestructible barriers on the way to certain knowledge. And here, communicative participation means subjectivity - something like a sense of one's own social powers. Unfortunately, communication solipsism in the Ukrainian segment of communicative studies is not considered in principle, which emphasizes both the relevance of the analyzed problem and the expediency of its treatment in this article. As for Internet journalism, the direct connection between the content and the audience, and even more so taking into account the phenomenon of solipsism, has not been investigated in the intelligence of Ukrainian scientists.

solipsism online journalism content

Formulation of the purpose and objectives of the article

The purpose of this article is to single out the phenomenon of solipsism in Internet journalism as a standard postmodern attempt by journalists to embed their own social experience in the individual space of a person.

To fulfill the goal, we must complete the following tasks:

- characterize patterns of mass communication;

- to determine the level of explanation of the consciousness of the mass audience;

- justify solipsism as a problem of hermeneutics.

Presenting main material

The development of mass media clearly and quickly records significant shifts in content distribution systems and channels. But how does the phenomenon of solipsism really advance in modern mass communication, in modern Internet journalism? As a practicing journalist, editor of an online publication, the author of this article can single out at least two maneuvers of promoting solipsism at the stage of an unprecedented surge in Internet journalism.

The first: to promote the radical individualism of the audience.

The second: to sow doubts in the audience's environment about the possibility of adequately checking the relevance of factual material. Denying any experience of the mass audience in the field to which the specific content relates, the journalist of the Internet publication insists on the diversity and dispersion of the thesaurus of the audience. We mean, first of all, the style of presentation of the arguments themselves, and not the interpretation of the arguments offered by the journalist. The calculation is that the presentation of the content and its interpretation will be given to the complete redemption of the audience, which has its own social, political, cultural, educational and intellectual level of development.

Doubts in not so much one's own, but the public, ability to verify socially significant content are more reminiscent of the communicative philosophy of denying any knowledge outside of the individual experience of those in the audience who definitely know what the content is about. Such communication solipsism destroys any efforts of journalists to communicate, convince, explain, much less accumulate collective knowledge, face insurmountable obstacles. Ukrainian researcher Olga Leleka believes that “when faced with absolute magnitude as an idea of the mind, the imagination produces a regression, that is, a negation of the linear temporal form of perception. Thus, the imagination violently changes the temporal rule - it is violence over the internal form of perception, which allows one to instantly understand the integrity of the previously perceived variety of sensuality. At the same time, the sensation caused by direct contemplation of the sublime is the result of a conflict between mind and imagination. This is a feeling of “negative satisfaction” that arises as a result of the simultaneous appearance of both satisfaction from the contemplation of an uncertain wholeness and dissatisfaction” [4, p. 9, 10].

And yet, why do online publications privilege the written text in this way? At the end of the 80s of the last century, electronic publishing had already spread in the field of written press. Newspapers around the world have begun to invest in IT equipment and publishing software, allowing them to work faster and close later. As a result, when the Internet boom happened, newspapers were already digitizing their news, going online at virtually no additional cost and making the same news available as in print. Indeed, Internet journalism developed spontaneously, very much like print journalism, using the same news writing techniques as its print counterpart. However, Internet journalism could already benefit from a new element, hypertext, which does not require more bandwidth and allows the reader to have a more personalized reading experience, moving from text to text using links created by the journalist.

We mostly talk about the technology of building content delivery of a media product when we mean the technique of writing news [10] - but still this practice is a problem both in the scientific, theoretical, and journalistic, professional sense. The technology of composite construction of a media product usually refers to the action when the technique of specific presentation of content is used - or from the organization of information from the most relevant at the beginning to the least relevant at the end of the journalistic presentation, or vice versa. Adhering to your own criteria, of course. But how will readers react when faced with some optional, non-traditional ways of viewing content? Will they make certain operative conclusions and adapt to innovations, or will they try to adhere to a familiar pattern of reading? And maybe each of the classroom layers will have its own way of reading?

In order to specify the analysis of ways of potential reading of news on the Internet, it is necessary to investigate some kind of web model of news. This web model should contain multiple links to different information layers. What can give us a detailed analysis of which news delivery technology best meets the expectations of the audience? We will have the opportunity to obtain such data that will allow us to conclude whether there is an ideal technological model not so much for presenting news content as for reading this content by the audience, which, in turn, will emphasize either the necessity or its absence when adopting such a new technological paradigm of media formation news content, in which the information scheme would not depend on the use of any traditional technique of Internet journalism familiar to the mass audience.

Each audience layer has its own interests and habits of perceiving content. But often such interests and such habits do not coincide with the criteria chosen by journalists for writing news. This means that the journalist must adopt a news writing technique that is designed specifically for online publications - that is, a type of media in which the audience wants to explore the news for themselves. The audience cluster is formed by the intellectual resources of each representative of the audience, as well as ideas about the level of intellectual resources of each segment of the audience - both in relation to other members of society and at the individual level. That is why the phenomenon of solipsism is most fully manifested in Internet journalism.

Considering the content of analytical presentation as a subject of systematic analysis and keeping in their efforts - futile or not, the answer to this question will be given by sociology - to teach the audience their own interpretations of the event, the attention of such journalists will be focused not on their own analysis, not on their interpretation of events, facts, trends, but on issues of consciousness, on the certainty that different groups of the audience actually think differently than the potential authors of such analytical materials. Such processes lead to the fact that the audience is deprived of the freedom to think, to compare their knowledge with the content offered; such effects are blurred in time and space, which we call conscious deliberation by the audience of individual actions.

Hiding the will of the audience separates this audience from the usual historical parallels and modern narratives, within which a rather limited number of well-defined, motivated associative factors located in specific spatial and temporal coordinates operate. Expression of own ideas of interpretation lead to noticeable consequences, and these consequences are usually objects of explanation of the event. According to the Ukrainian researcher Natalia Haydur, “when analyzing the functional system of mass media, it is necessary to observe the interpretation of differences and how observations collide in diachronic analysis. It is not about finding the main motives of a journalist work, intentions and simple causes and consequences of this work, but about developing a strategy for such an analysis, which consists in creating and constructing discriminatory communication operations with respect to the realities; these operations allow you to manipulate facts, creating certain content” [1, c. 173].

Solipsism in Internet journalism not only complicates most of these elements, but also precludes alternative modes of social analysis. These are ways that require both less access to the audience consciousness, and the audience permission for content experiments on themselves, and the delineation of rights to continuous media actions, but all this requires a stronger concept of causality in the presentation and perception of content. In Internet journalism, either solipsism of the audience or denial of the freedom of social analysis of content is quite enough. Such an academic position erases the possibility of explaining the content, undermines the recognition of its reality, the primacy of analysis.

The purpose of academic efforts to use solipsism is to provide multiple perspectives on an ultimately indeterminate, virtual event. In this context, the audience presence in reality breaks with the unrealistic epistemology and ontology of Internet content. From a practical point of view, the utilitarian nature of the procedures is singled out: first, the definition of alternative discourses to acceptable, class discourses; secondly, the search for new evidence arguments to illustrate specific discourses. At the same time, none of the Internet publications, however, makes any public claims not to force the audience to believe only his results. Audience solipsism bears the burden of proof that what this publication is saying deserves more attention than the content of other publications.

At the same time, every Internet publication, offering certain narratives to the audience, remains open to accusations that these narratives are incorrect. But at the same time, any content does not completely close the public and political sphere of interpretation. This means that behind the content lies the possibility of using any arguments and evidence that can testify to the credibility or lack thereof not only in the proposed content, but also in competing materials.

And yet, two problems remain.

First, the explanation of the consciousness of the mass audience.

Secondly, the justification of this consciousness, and this is the problem of hermeneutics.

Any online publication must take responsibility for the strength of both its own arguments and practical example (authority, weight, name), be inclined to focus its own methodological discussions on the relationship between experience and consciousness. It is about the fact that the audience cluster does not reflect an individual state of mind and does not measure the collective mentality of a separate group - on the contrary, it captures dynamic, contradictory relationships between groups of people. Anyone who perceives content as an analytical basis for improving the level of his thesaurus becomes a participant in a specific social environment that is highly dependent on interpersonal contacts, and they, in turn, lead to the creation of new content.

The reduced resources of access to relevant content and the lower tension rank of media text in online publications create such contexts that limit the social outcomes of understanding this content for a mass audience. The reduction of resources only strengthens the contextualist tendencies of mass media hermeneutics; this means that the audience attention is focused on external, uncontrollable social contexts and narratives that ultimately influence the perception of the content. And, on the contrary: a large number of resources and a high level of tension of the media text create contexts that increase the personal freedoms of the audience and give rise to solipsistic socio-communicative cognitive tendencies; this means that there is an individualistic focus on one's own internal states, a focus on individual goals, emotions, and motivations.

Conclusions

First, the solipsism hypothesis in Internet journalism assumes a certain level of civic competence.

Second, the formation of strong organizational and content connections between Internet media and their permanent audiences are generally identified with interests, programs, and forms of such actions that have value.

Third, the production of Internet media content favors a well-defined socio-political line, resulting in the suppression of idiosyncrasy, diversity and dissent.

At the same time, the journalist public position gains its main strength from his concentration on subjectivity, on the ability to convey his own vision of a problem to a mass audience, or at least to find correspondence between his own visions and parts of current public interest. From this point of view, democracy is inherent in classroom self-expression.

If in Internet journalism it is customary to talk about a certain set of practical standards, then it becomes obvious that there are formal standards that level not the content, but as one of the results of the content - communication solipsism. These are the following formal standards of journalism:

1) the context of solipsism establishes the freedom of the audience up to its right to disregard the activities of the mass media in general;

2) the audience can painfully and effectively respond to the activities of any Internet publication in any available way;

3) the audience can act as an independent author of any content related to the assessment of the practice of any Internet publication, using, in particular, mass communication platforms.

Segregation of the audience by mass communication interests can be considered a certain manifestation of collective control over the content of Internet publications and an incentive to democratize the country media landscape. Under the conditions of the presence of various vector contents, which are filled with Internet publications, this statement becomes a priori, and the very factors of increasing the involvement of individual audience representatives in media practice are a real indicator of the growth of the level of democracy in the mass media.

But does all this solve the question of the relationship of content with solipsism in social communications? Of course, the questions about the democratic regimes in the societies within which the contents of Internet publications work are much deeper. It is about a set of organizational and political factors of society functioning. At what cost to the autonomy of the mass media, due to their apparent spontaneity and real diversity, do they involve the mass audience in ideology, party life, economy, sports, elections, culture, patriotism, state policy?... It is about the specific interest of a specific person in a specific problem that is covered specific online editions, about the experience of meaningful democratic participation of the audience only in a small, but fundamentally important for this audience, segment of ideology, party life, economy, sports, elections, culture, patriotism, state policy...

What are the prospects for studying the analyzed problem?

Any contradictions will be manifested in frequent fluctuations between solipsism and realism, relativism of the principles of media practice of Internet publications and constructivist exclusion of social paradigms of the audience. Communication solipsism outlines the dotted lines of the scientific and methodological aspects of studying the constructivist model of the practice of Internet publications: with the help of the use of rational theory in social communications and deductive understanding of the content by the audience, it will be possible to understand what are the relationships between the radical principles of Internet publications and constructivist ideas about the study the audience A similar substrate of such investigations will allow to form a realistic model of epistemological understanding of audience solipsism as a factor of social communications.

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