Stereotypical Representation of a Cybervictim in Russian Students’ Language Consciousness based on the Material of the Chain Associative Experiment

Abstract

Currently, the study of victimization and victim behavior as phenomena of modern cyberspace in the aspect of their stereotyping in the language consciousness of young people is a topical problem due to some extralinguistic reasons, such as massive involvement of young people in virtual communication, anonymity of cybercommunication and lack of legal liability for deviant behavior on the Internet, people’s ignorance of the need to correctly configure the privacy settings of their personal accounts, etc. This research is aimed at revealing the stereotypical representation of a cybervictim in the language consciousness of Russian students. The novelty of the phenomenon of cybercommunication and the insufficient scientific research data within the framework of psycholinguistics indicate the theoretical and practical significance of such studies. To solve the tasks set, the chain associative experiment in the form of an online questionnaire was conducted among students of all educational specializations of Kemerovo State University. The study of the respondents’ associative reactions with the use of methods of morphosyntactic analysis and semantic gestalt analysis made it possible to identify the semantic domains, on the basis of which the associative field was modeled, which characterizes the stereotypical representation of a cybervictim in the linguistic consciousness of Russian students. The results allow the authors to conclude that, from the viewpoint of young people, a cybervictim as a participant in the Internet communication does not evoke associations related to nationality, sex, age, profession. With a generally positive attitude to a cybervictim arousing sympathy, respondents point out the inability of such a person to take actions, which makes it possible to interpret the stereotypical image of a cybervictim as of a person without their own life philosophy or unable to defend it for physiological or psychological reasons, that negates the possibility to influence the communicative situation of this type.

Keywords

• cybercommunication
• victimization
• victim behavior
• cybervictim
• linguistic consciousness
• associative experiment