Scholarly record

REFLEXIVE SPACE OF POLICY: THE EXPERIENCE OF APPLYING RELATIONAL METHODOLOGY IN THE ANALYSIS OF THE ONLINE SPACE USERS DISCURSIVE PRACTICES

I. Miroshnichenko, N. Ryabchenko, A. Gnedash

Abstract

Background. The political space is permeated with diverse types and kinds of discourses, which operate simultaneously and which concurrently function as autonomous, heterogeneous and continuous information flows. By applying language filters, geo-positioning data, markers of discursive practices to the online space, it is possible to identify the areas that are characteristic of a country, a city, a certain group of people, a political partyВ’s electorate, etc. The communication and the formation of social practices or social action takes place in these areas within the framework of various social networks and network communities. The Internet social network users act within certain roles: "Opinion leaders", "Sensors", "Implementors", "Readers" and "Reputation players". "Opinion leaders" start the wave effects of information dissemination, thus, changing the information and the news field. "Sensors" collect relevant information within a particular semantic concept; they constitute the context of the information generated by the opinion leaders. "Implementors" start blog-waves through the online space. "Readers", who are the majority, are always online and do not virtually generate public messages. "Reputational players" are the representatives of business and government. "Opinion leaders" and "sensors" produce and reproduce a system of socio-cultural attitudes, which are accepted and replicated by all the participants of a social network. This system of attitudes describes and defines the political reflexive space. Methods. In order to study the political reflexive space, it is necessary to analyze discursive practices generated by social networks. Users of social networks endue their discursive practices with markers and triggers, through which is possible to identify and study the socio-cultural attitudes of users and to assess their impact on the development of socio-political systems. One of these markers is a hashtag. All social platforms are interconnected by a unique set of hashtags, which users use to mark up their political reflexive space. The importance of hashtag analysis lies not only in the ability to group the messages which are similar in terms of topic, but also to conduct a research into the dependent entity, formed by means of folksonomy. Results and Conclusions. We have developed and approved the methodology for the discursive practices analysis, based on hashtag modeling, wherein hashtags are viewed as relational networks. It allows us to shift the focus from considering the subject of politics as an element of a polydisperse, rather than the element of a monodisperse system. Not only did we identify the quantitative indicators of the political reflexive space, but also we analyzed its qualitative characteristics.

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DOI resolver: doi.org/10.5593/sgemsocial2018/1.2/S01.027

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