Social Interaction: Communicative Approach

The article focuses on the study of requirements for communication in the social sphere and justification of their specificity in comparison with other types of verbal interaction. The relevance of the stated problem is determined by the significant influence of social communications on society and the dependence of public safety on the effectiveness of social interaction. The study aimed at identifying the types of violations of commonly known maxims in the social sphere and substantiating the specificity of requirements for social communicative interaction. Two main methods were used in the research: projecting and modeling. The well-known communication maxims were divided into two groups. The first group contains those that define the requirements for organizing the content of the message and are aimed at ensuring the fullness of its perception by the addressees. The second group includes maxims, which establish requirements for the moral climate of communication and the implementation of the principle of politeness. The data of interviews given by representatives of governmental bodies to journalists of certain TV channels and blogs, as well as the analysis of Internet news videos revealed the types of violations of the well-known maxims of communication in the social domain. The main ones are: ignoring the maxims of the second group in interviews and non-compliance with the maxims of the first group in news programs. It has been proved that the well-known maxims of communication need to be revised taking into account the conditions of social contact discourse. The specificity of maxims in social communicative interaction was substantiated.

Exploring the Potential of Internet News for Supply Risk Assessment of Metals

The growth in demand for material resources is inevitable to maintain sustainable development. Especially for metallic minerals, this growth in demand increases the supply risk; therefore, its evaluation is essential to keep the resource supply stable. Supply risk assessment has a long history in both academic and practical studies, but there is no existing study using internet news as its main information source. In this study, we obtained related news articles from S&P Global Market Intelligence (SPG) and used them for the supply risk analysis. Using already topic-labeled articles and a gradient boosting framework, non-labeled articles are also labeled and categorized by topic. The articles were assigned to metallic minerals by SPG. We also scored each article using simple sentiment analysis. In short, we found significant potential in internet news articles as information for complementary assessments to existing methods, by providing in-depth information on regulatory or corporate financial activities, which are difficult to cover using the existing numerical indices. While it is useful, it should be noted that the volume of news articles depends on the interests of their readers, and many articles capture changes rather than states. As long as they are used with these caveats in mind, news articles can be very useful as a complementary source of information to existing analytical methods, especially for short-term supply risk assessment.

Internet News Headlines: Ontological and Orthological Aspects

The author presents the results of a multidimensional analysis of Internet news headlines based on the headings of the Yandex news aggregator. The issue of the text status of news headlines is considered. When solving this problem, special attention is paid to the formation of correlative paradigms of headings, united by a common denotative meaning. Methods of semantic interaction of heading paradigms based on different types of topic-rhematic deployment are described. It is proved that the paradigms of headings, complementing each other in informational and pragmatic aspects, form the discourse of Internet headings. It is concluded that this way of functioning of headlines enhances their semantic and visual autonomy from the news text, which allows us to consider Internet news headlines as minitext. The frequency methods of lexico-syntactic transformations of the original headings are analyzed, on the basis of which the constituents of paradigms are formed. At the same time, attention is focused on the orthological aspect of Internet headers. The author comes to the conclusion that the focus on the variability and efficiency of headings leads not only to the appearance of lexical and grammatical errors, but also to their replication and consolidation in the mind of the addressee as a result of changes in the structure of cognitive models.

Audience and Revenue Concentration in Lithuanian Media Markets (2008–2019)

The article examines the change in audience and revenue concentration in the Lithuanian television, radio, internet, and newspaper markets in 2008–2019, as well as discusses the factors that determined the changes in media concentration and market structure. The study revealed that without any special measures to regulate media concentration in Lithuania, all four media revenue markets (television, radio, internet, and newspapers) have become highly concentrated. In terms of audience (circulation) concentration, the concentration of newspaper and television markets was divided between un concentrated and moderately concentrated areas, the radio audience was moderately concentrated, and the audience of internet news websites was highly concentrated. The results of the analysis show a tendency for audience concentration in media markets to be generally lower than income market concentration. Therefore, when legally defining a dominant position in media markets, it is recommended to set a lower value for audience share than for revenue market share.

Hot topics: Denial-of-Service attacks on news websites in autocracies

Most authoritarian countries censor the press. As a response, many opposition and independent news outlets have found refuge on the Internet. Despite the global character of the Internet, news outlets are vulnerable to censorship in cyberspace. This study investigates Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks on news websites in Venezuela and details how news reporting is related to DoS attacks in an attempt to censor content. For this empirical test, I monitored 19 Venezuelan news websites from November 2017 until June 2018 and continuously retrieved their content and status codes to infer DoS attacks. Statistical analyses show that news content correlates to DoS attacks. In the Venezuelan context, these news topics appear to be not only on protest and repression but also on opposition actors or other topics that question the legitimacy of the regime. By establishing these relationships, this study deepens our understanding of how modern technologies are used as censorship tools.

The long-journeying poor cousin before the shut EU door: How the Western Balkans are metaphorically conceptualised in the context of the EU integrations

Summary In this paper we critically analyse how the identity of the Western Balkans (WB) has been metaphorically conceptualised in the latest stages of the EU integration processes in a corpus of internet news articles recently posted in Serbia, Montenegro and Bosnia and Hercegovina. Unlike the accession processes of the former membership candidates from Europe, the WB’s integration has proven to be a very long one, hindered by many, perhaps insurmountable obstacles and subject to a great deal of uncertainty regarding its final outcome. Although this process is predominantly conceptualised through the already established metaphors employed to depict such processes of the former member candidates (journey, house, circles/rings, family, etc.), their evaluative content is different, given that the roles and the positions of the EU and the WB are starkly asymmetrical, i. e. that the WB is deeply marginalised. We identified some new metaphors that this specific political situation has engendered, also reflecting the said asymmetry – the WB is perceived as a colony, self-imprisoned state, Trojan horse, victim of blackmail, immature person, experimenting ground and waste-collector for immigrants. These metaphors construct an image of the WB as that of the very inferior Other.

Refugee depictions in Dutch Internet news

Much has been written about the depiction of refugees in newspapers and television news, yet far less is known about how refugees are portrayed in Internet news. In this era of increasing Internet use, it is important to also study how refugees are depicted by Internet news websites. We used a quantitative coding sheet to investigate how Dutch news websites covered refugees. Our research found, first, that Dutch Internet news reports rather positively about refugees. This finding is directly linked to a conceptual decision, however, as we categorized references to victimization as positive coverage of refugees. Second, we found no significant difference between commercial and public Internet news sources in their depiction of refugees. Finally, we found a tendency towards depersonalization of refugees across all of the Dutch Internet news sources examined, which is reflected in the more frequent use of thematic over episodic frames.