The individual strategies of Internet users’ media activity

Abstract

The article is dedicated to the analyses of actual strategies of Internet users’ media activity in the ecosystem of today’s social media (social networks, blogs, hostings, messengers, mobile applications, etc.). The base of the author’s approach that specifies the novelty of the research lies on the analyses of the users’ media activity as a complex of media consumption and production which make a dialectical unity, as well as on the problematization of subject oriented research optics which draws attention to the individual as a direct media subject. The interaction of the individual and media ecosystem is analyzed with the help of a system of incoming and outcoming activity markers. The incoming activity is understood by the authors as a total of institutional and environmental factors of media activity practices realization, the outcoming one is understood as the characteristic of individual’s personal activity in realizing media practices. It is shown that the configuration of the dominant types of incoming and outcoming activity forms the individual media strategy. It is theoretically based and empirically proved by the author’s sociological research with the use of factor analyses (online poll of social network users, N = 1000) that there practically exist four types of individual media strategies: inclusively open, exclusively open, inclusively conservative and exclusively conservative ones. It is found out that the majority of the Internet users (38,3%) use the exclusively open strategy, estimate modern media conditions as too liberal and thus needing control and restrictions. In the conclusion there are shown the perspective directions of the following scientific enquiry on the topic of the research.

Keywords

• internet
• media ecosystem
• internet users
• social media
• media activity
• media strategies
• media consumption
• media production
• communication
• adaptive potential