DEINDIVIDUALIZATION OF MESSAGES IN THE BLOGOSPHERE

Abstract

Electronic communication has become the leading means of transmitting information in the 21st century. However, the specificity of this type of communication has not yet been comprehensively studied. One of the characteristic features of electronic communication is the loss of personalized characteristics of forwarded messages, what is proposed to be termed as “deindividualization”. In this paper, deindividualization is understood as a model of communicative behavior with special principles of presenting messages and participating in the exchange of information. The electronic content has been analyzed with the help of descriptive and introspective methods and two main trends of the “mass character” of communicative behavior in the blogosphere have been discovered. The first type is de-individualization of a general nature and the second type is de-individualization of a particular addressee that exists in partial and complete forms. It has been concluded that the boundaries between public and personal spheres in digital information space are blurred and most news rating messages are de-personalized. The novelty of the presented research is in the fact that for the first time the psychological phenomenon of “deindividualization” (which has been introduced by G. Le Bon) is applied when considering the features of modern communication processes. The proposed approach is thought to be a scientific contribution to the theory of mass communication.