Subjectness of Digital Communication in the Context of the Technological Evolution of the Contemporary Society: Threats, Challenges, and Risks

The purpose of this article is to identify the risks, threats, and challenges associated with possible social changes in the processes of digitalization of society and transformations of traditional communication practices, which is associated with the emergence of new digital subjects of mass public communication that form the pseudo structure of digital interaction of people. The primary tasks of the work were to identify the potential of artificial intelligence technologies and neural networks in the field of social and political communications, as well as to analyze the features of “smart” communications in terms of their subjectness. As a methodological optics, the work used the method of discourse analysis of scientific research devoted to the implementation and application of artificial intelligence technologies and self-learning neural networks in the processes of social and political digitalization, as well as the method of critical analysis of current communication practices in the socio-political sphere. At the same time, when analyzing the current digitalization practices, the case study method was used. The authors substantiate the thesis that introducing technological solutions based on artificial intelligence algorithms and self-learning neural networks into contemporary processes of socio-political communication creates the potential for a wide range of challenges, threats, and risks, the key of which is the problem of identifying the actual subjects of digital communication acts. The article also discusses the problem of increasing the manipulative potential of “smart” communications, for which the authors used the concepts of cyber simulacrum and information capsule developed by them. The paper shows that artificial intelligence and self-learning neural network algorithms, being increasingly widely introduced into the current practice of contemporary digital communications, form a high potential for information and communication impact on the mass consciousness from technological solutions that no longer require control by operators – humans. As a result, conditions arise to form a hybrid socio-technical reality – a communication reality of a new type with mixed subjectness. The paper also concludes that in the current practices of social interactions in the digital space, a person faces a new phenomenon – interfaceization, within which self-communication stimulates the universalization and standardization of digital behavior, creating, disseminating, strengthening, and imposing special digital rituals. In the article, the authors suggest that digital rituals blur the line between the activity of digital avatars based on artificial intelligence and the activity of actual people, resulting in the potential for a person to lose his own subjectness in the digital communications space.

SOCIAL NETWORKS AS A MODERN CHANNEL OF POLITICAL COMMUNICATIONS: COMPARATIVE CONTENT ANALYSIS OF PUBLICATIONS IN RUSSIAN AND FOREIGN SCIENTIFIC MAGAZINES (2020–2021)

Social networking sites as a new, modern channel of political communications have been the subject of interest of researchers for the last several years. The acceleration of digitalization of all spheres of life, including political, was largely provoked by the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic. The article presents a comparative content analysis of publications on this topic in Russian and foreign scientific journals. It is established that the interest in the problem among domestic and foreign scientists is approximately equal. At the same time, it was found that the angles of view of scientists differ: for example, Russian authors are more interested in considering the influence of social networks on the behavior of ordinary users than politicians and government officials, like their foreign colleagues. In addition, there are terminological and methodological differences that allow us to say that in our country the study of social networks is still in the process of formation and development.

Corporate Citizen in Political Discourse Amidst the Pandemic

The wisdom of reviewing corporations, which execute strategic programs of corporate sustainability, as an important actor of political communications in postindustrial society is justified in the article. The basic features of corporate sustainability, corporate social responsibility, and corporate citizenship concepts, the role of strategic communications under international ESG-discourse are outlined. The comparative analyses of Russian companies, participating Global Compact Network, social investments during COVID-19 pandemic is based on case studies, transparent nonfinancial reporting, and expert interviews. Social projects and programs of X5 Retail Group, Severstal’, Norilsk Nikel, United Metallurgic Company were studied. These companies’ basic business activities were established in industrial society. As the result of the research, based on process sociology (N. Elias), mediatization (A. Hepp), and communicative rationality (Ju. Habermas) approaches, the role of corporate citizens in communicative figurations of the network society formation and their subjectivity in political communications acquiring. The focus is made on COVID-19 pandemic influence on communication infrastructures with the studied companies’ stakeholders transformation.

Economic and Higher Education Partnership of Hungary and Kazakhstan

The aim of our research was to describe, compare, and analyze the development of business and educational co-operation between Kazakhstan and Hungary over the past 19 years. The research was prompted by the university-level co-operation between the two countries that star ted in 2018, which was made possible by the strategic partnership that is the topic of the present article. We started from the hypothesis that both business and educational co-operation has developed linearly and significantly during the last 19 years. Our research methodology was based on gathering and analyzing secondary macroeconomic, trade, and educational co-operation data in the period between 2011 and 2020. The data were obtained from publications, national offices (statistical, commerce, and education), and international bodies (like TempusPublic Foundation, Eurostat, International Monetary Fund [IMF], and the World Bank). In this paper, we intend to link the main political, social, and macroeconomic endowments with business and educational developments of partnership in the two countries, trying to map out prospects for co-operation. One conclusion is that, although in the political communications of the two countries we were able to identify significant governmental efforts on both sides to support and enforce economic and educational co-operation, the data indicate a decrease in the size of business investments. At the same time, however, the educational co-operation between the two parties continues to develop further.

On Special Issue «The Politization of social problems in mass media»

The thematic issue of the magazine is devoted to the problems of politicization of socially significant topics in the media space and ultimately touched on a very wide and diverse range of issues, which, nevertheless, revolve around the role of the media and social media in modern politics. In this context, politicization is interpreted as the process of involving non-political issues in political communication. That is why the choice of political problems discussed in the media can reveal the essence of the political regime in a particular country, reveal the adequacy of political institutions to the needs of society and assess the effectiveness of political governance. Most of the articles are in the nature of empirical research, which investigate important problems of modern political communications in Russia and abroad. The range of research methods is also very extensive and includes polls, questionnaires, focus groups, content analysis, discourse analysis, case studies, etc. Following the problem of "politicization", among the most important concepts are the ideas of "media literacy", “network leadership”, “political mobilization”, “personification of politics”, “corporate citizenship”, etc. Research shows that social media has become an important factor in the politicization of socially significant topics. This thematic issue is aimed at specialists in the field of applied political science and political communication.

Political Communications in the Public Sphere Student Protest in Indonesia 2019-2020

The government and the parliament have decided to pass problematic bills, such as the Corruption Eradication Commission Bill (RUU KPK), the Criminal Code Bill (RUU KUHP), and the Omnibus Law (RUU Cipta Kerja) into laws. The reasons behind the passage of the bills irto laws are to make bureaucracy easier and facilitate foreign investment inflows to Indonesia. However, the decision-making process failed to involve elements of the community, such as academics, workers, working class, press, and related stakeholders. Consequently, students staged rallies to protest against the passage of the bills into laws in 2019 – 2020. This researchuses an approach qualitative methodology with a critical paradigm. The goal of critical theory is to change a reality that is always unbalanced and dominated.This research tries to encourage change towards a better society and emancipations. The data analysis technique comprises analysis of information sources from the mass media and analysis of research documents. The results of this study find that students had two strategic political communications during the protest. First, the social media movement sent hash tagged messages such as #Reformasidikorupsi #Gejayanmemangil and #Mositidakpercaya. Second, student staged demonstrations in front of the Presidential Place and the House of Representatives Building. When the government and parliament conspire with oligarchs to make policies to maintain power, then conflicts of interest with society, and student protests will be inevitable. As a result, the students have declared a motion of no confidence for parliament in a non-parliamentary participatory democratic system.

Sex professionals in Latin America: Observing stakeholder participation through the form of legal/illegal/non-legal differentiation

We researched political and legal communications about the sex profession through the Inclusion/Exclusion Form. The theoretical content is based on Niklas Luhmann's theory of society as a social communication system and Luis Antônio Marcuschi's theory of language as a social work. In this research we explored dates of Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay. The corpora were made up of data catalogued on institutional websites, documents obtained from directors of associations and unions of sex workers, in addition to e-mail exchanges and online conversations with directors and sex professionals via virtual meetings. In the area of political communications, we observe inclusions and exclusions at the same time, as regulation has promoted several exclusions. The participation of workers in the discussions, when that had happened, was not reflected a posteriori either in public policies or in the implementation of regulations. As for legal communications, we observe that those who practice the profession experience inclusions and exclusions at the same time, since the profession is criminalized at the same time that it is recognized as a profession. The conclusion is that the inclusion/exclusion form broadens the spectrum of observation by allowing inclusion to be observed at the same time as exclusion.

Deep Link Entropy for Quantifying Edge Significance in Social Networks

Through online political communications, fragmented groups appear around ideological lines, which might form echo chambers if the communications within like-minded groups are dominant over the communications among different-minded groups, potentially contributing to political polarization and extremism. The antidote is the interactions between individuals who constitute social bridges between different minded groups. Hence, exploring the significance of connections between the individuals of a network is a center of attraction especially for the global connectivity and diffusion in networks. Based on the divergence of probability distributions of pairs of nodes, Link Entropy (LE) is a recently proposed method outperforming the others in quantifying edge significance. In this work, considering that the adjacent nodes of the two nodes of an edge are also in charge in determining its significance, we propose the Deep Link Entropy (DLE) method for a more precise quantification through taking into account the uncertainty distributions of the adjacent nodes as well. We show experimentally that DLE significantly outperforms LE especially in large-scale complex network with several groups or communities. We believe our method contributes to not only online political communications but a wide range of fields from biology to quantum networks, where edge significance has an operational meaning.

Post-deliberative Democracy

Within any adversarial rule-governed system, it often takes time for strategically motivated agents to discover effective exploits. Once discovered, these strategies will soon be copied by all other participants. Unless it is possible to adjust the rules to preclude them, the result will be a degradation of the performance of the system. This is essentially what has happened to public political discourse in democratic states. Political actors have discovered, not just that the norm of truth can be violated in specific ways, but that many of the norms governing rational deliberation can also be violated, not just without penalty, but often for significant political gain. As a result, the level of noise (false or misleading communications) has come to drown out the signal (earnest attempts at deliberation). The post-truth political condition is the cumulative result of innovations developed by actors who adopt an essentially strategic orientation toward political communications.