NEW THEORY OF TRADITIONNAL AND SOCIAL MEDIA PRACTICES: FEATURES AND RESTRICTIONS IN TODAY’S UKRAINIAN SOCIETY

Abstract

The paper deals with new theoretical understanding of communicative and media practices as background social practices, non-reflexive everyday routines, as ways of consumption of media and participation in them and also as constructors of private and public sphere. Such theoretical approach enables to disclosure ambivalent communicative and social shifts engendered by globalizing and crisis processes in contemporary Ukraine. The ambiguity role of social media in today’s Ukrainian context is following: on the one hand they can be considered as creators of new communicative environment, new sociality that favored to finding of personal and national authenticity and on the other — they is transformed into the social field of information wars, political games and realization of economic interests of great Internet corporations. Thus, on social micro and macro levels such discrepant implications can be revealed: 1) False adaptive strategy of overcoming social atomism and personal isolation by virtual communicative practices: communications in social media generate new types of social ties: «weak social ties», as long as they don’t further the creation of long personal relations for which a modern individual hasn’t time and emotional energy; 2) Escapist model of «flight into communication» by means of TV media practices, Internet communications and mobile phones; 3) Emergence of «phatic» communications keeping up social ties and interactions without transfer of information, but only as a way of social support and joining; 4) Hiding or transformation of self-identity by authentication with a «significant» person in the situations of personal and social crises by means of Internet communications; 5) Processes of «thingification» of media and «mediation» of things; 6) Constantly «keeping in touch» by means of new communicative practices also provides to modern narcissistic person to avoid close emotional contacts and meanwhile to satisfy a need for continuous demonstration of self and continuous search of love from others.