Political content management: new linguistic units and social practices

Abstract

Continuous transformations of the socio-political space are affected by digital technologies, which are created by the representatives of the “digital immigrants” and communicated by the “digital natives” as various social projects. This trend offers new implications and innovative forms to conventional technologies (political, social) by transforming them into complex multicomponent systems; besides, this requires from the researchers revolutionary innovative analytical methods and tools, based on hybrid research approaches. Socio-political and linguistic methods in particular, are to be developed in order to analyze the current reality. Political culture transformation as affected by the digital technologies results in post-truth politics and fake news dissemination, which demands that the researchers study particular linguistic units (neologisms and hashtags produced by digital personalities), capable of modifying the information and news space which determines the socio-political agenda, and of inducing social action offline. Regarding new linguistic units from the point of view of political science and linguistics would allow for identifying the principle of the revolutionary new relationships between citizens, truth and social action. Many people using the online space as a primary source of political content reject critical thinking regarding the sources of this information and are affected by the “filter bubble,” which results in destructive practices of social engagement and manipulation of mass consciousness. Thus, there is a strong demand for modern mechanisms of political content management, since the causes, methods and mechanisms, as well as the participants of the process of information production and dissemination are very different from the ones that existed before the revolution in the information and communication technologies and the onset of Internet and social network technologies.

Keywords

• political content
• political neologisms
• hashtag
• linguistic discourse analysis
• social networks
• “digital personality”
• post-truth
• “digital immigrants”
• “digital natives”
• fake news