Development of internet psychology in Ukraine and in the world

Abstract

The article is devoted to a new branch of psychological science that is the Internet psychology. The current state of the psychology of the Internet, some prerequisites for its development, main directions, achievements and unresolved problems are analyzed. The purpose of the research is to analyze of the current state of Internet psychology, outline the prerequisites for its development, main directions, achievements and unresolved problems. For this purpose, methods and techniques of generalization, analysis and synthesis were used to prepare the theoretical part, also elements of conceptual analysis (definition of meaningful structure, isolation of keywords) were used to classification of the mentioned studies. The author comes to the conclusion from the theoretical analysis that the Internet psychology in the meaning of a branch of psychology unites the methodology, theory and researching practice of the types, methods and principles of people using of Internet services. It appeared almost immediately after the Internet and develops in parallel with it. Now this branch is still at the stage of formation and requires significant revision of the terminological apparatus and the development of its own methodological base. Her active development will depend directly of increasing amount of time that modern man spends in cyberspace. In addition, the article identifies some significant discoveries in the area of the Internet psychology, classic works, main research problems and their representatives, and also the technical and psychological specifics of the Internet in their interconnection. The key directions of the modern Internet psychology developing are the psychological analysis of human-internet interaction, the psycholinguistic specificity of Internet genres and discourses, the peculiarities of Internet communication, the specificity of virtual world existence (psychology of hypertext), personality on the Internet. The technical specificity of virtual technology causes some psychological features on the Internet, in particular the restriction of sensory experience only visual and auditory, different from the real world sense of space and time, the emergence of negative emotions with limited accessibility to cyberspace, the constant fixation of cyberspace results, virtual identity, online self disengagement, status alignment, unlimited contact availability, changing priorities.