Media Person As The Basic Notion Of New Communicative Reality

Abstract

Contemporary epoch is characterized with a rapid obsolescence of knowledge. The speed of appearance, spread and disappearance of information is fast and greatly influences the formation of communicative, behavioural strategies, cultural and value orients. In this violent flow the common language person is transformed and the language media person appears, for which it is character to demonstrate digression of analytical processes and informational accumulation, and progression of search and knowledge submission processes. It is reflected firstly in the system of education, when well-known educational practices significantly go behind the changes, happening in real life (economic, technological, social etc.) and do not take into account the development of new formats of communicative system (virtual communication, polylanguage environment and many others) and new stylistic of the Russian language, preserving the ability to communicate in these changing conditions. So, we may suppose, that within this communicative reality we must teach not the things which are important or acute today, but the things which will be acute and demanded in four years, when a bachelor receives his diploma of professional education. We need new approaches to educational standards and tools of their realization, considering the effective use of media resources, including the purpose of preservation and promotion of the Russian language as the national property. That brings the problem of understating of media person’s demands and mechanisms of the development in front, and we need to get the point that the common language person both in national understanding and in professional realization inevitably changes.

Keywords: Media personnew communicative environmentlanguage transformationlinguocreative process

Introduction

The modern society may be called the society with the so-called “pre-figurative culture” (the term is introduced by the anthropologist M. Mead over 30 years ago (as cited in Maguire, 2015)), when suddenly young people of different countries have an opportunity to gain the same experience due to the development of communicative net, which could not be imagined before, and as the result, we see the generation gap. In this new world a person builds his life and develops it in accordance with his laws, the person dives into new conditions of existence. The contemporary man must know and understand the new rules of the game, especially when the common communicative space under the influence of virtual environment changes and, as the result, there are significant changes of language person of participants of the communicative process. Language person becomes media person, which is studied by a new science – media linguistics, developing their own tools to analyze the functioning of the language in media sphere, or contemporary mass communication, represented with printed, audiovisual and net media. Besides, there are changes in the educational system, for example the approach to the formation of communicative competences changes, because the traditional pedagogical models of processing and submission of knowledge do not take into account the happening mental and language transformations in society and are not able to form the proper media person.

Problem Statement

The Russian linguistics gradually starts demonstrating the semantic delimitation of the term “media person” with the same content which exists in the Western science, and the term “media person”, which, in our opinion, has a more universal appliance, meaning a person involved in a process of production and consumption of media content, functioning in the conditions of parting informational galaxies. The articles of contemporary researchers, who study media linguistics and media pragmatic, contain the idea that the surrounding media reality may influence our inner “self”, rebuilding and transforming it in such a way that the limited process of adjustment to the informational environment goes into the complete dissipation (Gukasova, 2016). These statements lead us to the idea that the term “media person” may be applied to any human who is a consumer or a source of media information, because in interpersonal and professional communication it is the information from various media sources that forms the communication: news (political, sport, cultural etc.), topics of various talk shows and entertaining programs, social network lines, analytical programs, publicly discussed scandals, event reviews etc.

Research Questions

1) What is a media person within the development of contemporary society?

2) Can any human being become a media person?

3) How can we describe media person and what key parameters of description must be defined?

Purpose of the Study

The key object of the study of contemporary communicative processes must be not a language person, but a media person, whose transformation is practically finished in the new generation. The given term (variants of writing “media person” or “media-person”), according to the statistics of GoogleScholar, is practically not developed (the total is 3990 references on 22.02.2019) and has only several authors’ interpretations, not allowing to draw the conclusion about the fixed scientific understanding, so the analyses of semantic transformation of the primary sources helps to correctly pass over to the description of the definition of the modern term “media person”. It is important to notice that in the Western media practice the term media persona (or media personality) is actively used, which means a significant person in the center of world events, press attention, for example, such a media personality is a politician, a show man, a TV news presenter in prime time, a popular actor, a singer etc. In the scientific literature we may meet this term in researches of the philosophers (Marlon, 2017); sociologists (Perse & Rubin, 1989; Polonskiy, 2018) who focus their attention on social and parasocial interaction of mass media with recipients (mass media persona); specialists in the field of IT (Farnandi et al., 2016); psychologists (Bandura, 2008; Golbeck, 2016) and psycholinguists (Hassanein, Hussein, Rady, & Gharib, 2018), who think about the role of mass media in understanding of psycho sociological mechanisms, which make the symbolic communication influence the human thought; linguists, specialists in mass communications (Corner, 2007; Xing, Ke, Zongyuan, & Jian, 2018; Ukhova, 2016), who study the influence of various media on the communicative practices of a person (mediated persona) etc. In our mini-research we try to define the key moments for the description of the phenomenon of media person from the point of view of the realization of his language abilities, because we believe that any language person may be a potential media person.

Research Methods

The research methods include the structural typological analyses, the method of description and comparison, the semantic analyses of the contemporary linguistic term system, the analyses of speech works of Internet users, who are simultaneously makers and consumers of media texts.

Findings

In our opinion, the notion “media person” is the result of cognitive transformations, beginning in the basic notion “person”, as the wholesome structure of socially significant qualities, gained by an individual during interaction and communication with other people and defining his individuality. From the point of view of contemporary communicative practices, the term “media person” is better for description of person’s participation in these processes and demands certain content and functions. It means that on the positions of contemporary notions of the system of linguistic knowledge the term “language person” is filled not only with general, philosophical, social. Humanitarian, linguistic content, but with media one as well, which places accents are transferred from the system of social relations (the term interpretation through the system of social relations) to the means, which are necessary for realization of this communication in the epoch of contemporary informational technologies (we speak about the line of transformations: person – language person – media person under the influence of various social Internet resources and multiple media Internet practices). So, media person is both a person making media texts and their consumer; this is a professional person (PR specialist, blogger, journalist), and it is a secular person (an active user of Internet communities, not having professional skills of text creation), or media person is a person, whose language consciousness obeys the laws of media society and forms his informational field in accordance with the consumed media texts (on the one hand, content – I speak what I hear; on the other hand, instrumental – the same words, the same images). We may suppose that media person is a contemporary shape of language person, reflecting the tendency of social informational support and appearance of digital form of speech existence (along with oral and written, the so-called speech digitalization), which takes the leading role on the verbal semantic level of language person and rapidly influences the other, deeper, levels.

We think that the formation of media person goes through several stages: 1) understanding of individual peculiarities of speech consciousness of the speech activity subject (language competences, ability to communicate); 2) acquaintance with precedent texts and prototypical scenarios; 3) practice of making own texts and their presentation in public language space.

Conclusion

We can state that the means of communication have significantly changed for the last several decades. Besides the very form of the information submission significant changes may be seen in the content structure of messages. At present we face the stylistic transformation of the Russian language, which can be described through the analyses of speech situations and the search for the stereotyped speech forms, building the foundation for the new language reality. The brightest manifestation of contemporary transformational speech practices may be noticed by the example of mass media which, in our opinion, include social networks (for example VKontakte, Facebook etc.), initiating and accumulating large amounts of speech situations (a kind of BigData). The main bearer of this speech stylistic of the new time is a media person who differs by 1) the degree of maturity of language abilities, necessary for a communicative situation. In this case we speak about the level of media literacy ( we may evaluate the verbal semantic level – a variety of language means, ability of speech-making; we may evaluate the cognitive pragmatic level – understanding of links between phenomena, acquaintance with precedent texts; the discoursive practical level – quality characteristic of texts, the degree of correlation to the informational moment). 2) the degree of inclusiveness into the public language space (in this case we may speak about the professional and secular media person).

In other words, a media person is a person who possesses the combination of verbal and non-verbal competences, allowing creating and perceiving texts in informational communicative environment and providing the inclusiveness of an individual into the public language space.

We also believe that technologically rich communicative environment dictates the necessity to develop the general literacy, though the Russian educational programs with almost no exception are meant to work with knowledge, focused on the present and the past, so the most part of what is done by a student lies within the repetition of the known material (Singer, 1974), i.e. we may claim that in social consciousness there is a certain crisis, expressed through the fact that single government and private initiatives, preserving and developing new technologies of knowledge transfer in education (Fedorov & Levitskaya, 2017; Kokhanova, 2018) in accordance not with the present social demands, but with the future ones, face the reluctance of educational system, which go behind the active processes of transformation on all the levels of social development.

Acknowledgments

The authors are grateful to the Fund of Perspective Scientific Researches of CSU for the financial support of the research.

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