COMMUNICATION IN SOCIAL NETWORKS THROUGH FORMATION OF TOLERANCE

The article deals with the questions regarding the formation of tolerance/intolerance on social media. The purpose of the article is to identify the features of the cognitive mechanism as the formation mechanism for tolerance/intolerance on social media pages dedicated to mixed martial arts. So, the article is aimed at making a certain contribution to the study of the problem of cognitive processes and the problem of tolerance in the process of communication in social networks.

The study materials are 11,000 comments on the public pages that are dedicated to mixed martial arts from 2017 to 2020. Authors conducted a number of surveys among users of public pages that are covering mixed martial arts from the Russian social networking service VK.com. An experiment was used, which made it possible to obtain study material in a form of survey results. It seems that the research methodology proposed by the authors can be used to identify the properties of the communicative environment formed by any other content of social networks.

Authors found out that the communicative environment of social media is the result of reactions of users (interpreters) who correlate their position with the material or comment that they see on social media. There is an interaction of metalanguage representations of interpreted messages and existing metalanguage representations of past experience that’s happening at the cognitive level when users of social media pages interpret messages on social media. The process of interpretation on social media pages that are dedicated to mixed martial arts is reflected in the «Friend-Foe» opposition.

Authors also found out that at the cognitive level, communicative tolerance is defined as the coordination of mental representations of experience (knowledge that the subject possesses) with mental representations of the perceived message found by them on social media, which leads the subject to an expression of a friendly attitude towards the received information. Communicative intolerance is defined as the coordination of mental representations of experience (knowledge that the subject possesses) with mental representations of the perceived message found by them on social media, which leads the subject to an expression of a hostile attitude towards the received information.