The accelerated development, convergence and integration of information and communication technologies open up great opportunities for social actors to express themselves, motivating amateur artists to produce media products. The essay discusses the principles of the functioning of "self-media", a new type of media model in individual entrepreneurship which is developing in China and analyzes its advantages and disadvantages in the testing of innovative business models.
The essay explores the problem of the importance of screen communications for civilizational development and their possible influence on the processes of collective cognition, mentality and behavior patterns of social actors, groups, communities and cultures. Screen communications demonstrate the inextricability of the linking of the media and social systems which undergo fluctuations (unstable fluctuations) in digital time at the stage of digital reforming. The author notes that this development of a social system is most often built not on collectively-consolidated but on individualized solutions resorted to by people forced to rely on their own choices in difficult situations, on their intuition and imagination.
Social actors master digital technologies and create various kinds of projects that encourage the masses to acquire new knowledge. The self-media project began to be implemented in China in 2010-2013 on the basis of the new WeChat platform, both a social network and a messaging application. In a convergent-integration form, a functional of differing target technology platforms was implemented, providing typological signs of self-media. This attracted a large number of consumers to media projects.
Self-media are based on the idea of learning new things - in other words, a knowledge code (a set of signs / symbols and a system of certain rules that define a process of cognition) which is implemented by the creators. Initially, it is presented in the form of informative and historical texts, illustrations and videos dedicated to art, a chosen topic complemented by the attributes of material symbolic things and various kinds of organizational services. Materially embodied ideas motivate the media consumer to replenish knowledge of the unknown.
