Media psychology: Modern man and nonlocality of psyche

Abstract

IntroductionThe relatively new concept of psychology[1] is steadily gaining ground in modern science, as well as in the minds of researchers, despite skepticism on the part of those who are used to the division of into the traditional branches, one of which is the of mass communication. However, more and more scientists are beginning to realize that psychology is not just a buzzword or a handy term but the name of a new phenomenological field, which goes beyond the boundaries of traditional classifications and concepts. In the past several decades, it has become clear that none of the existing disciplines can give a satisfactory answer to such questions as What is mass communication as such? and What are the patterns of its development? problem is that every time, depending on the position of the researcher, mass communication turns out to have different qualities and appears either to be in the technological or psycho-phenomenological sphere. It is impossible to limit ones research to only one approach because the accountability and controllability of technological processes are nullified by the intangibility and polyvalence of psychological processes, and psychological phenomena make complex causative links with technological ones. more advanced the communicative technologies are, the more unpredictable man's reaction is. Thus, attempts to control information flows lead to psychodynamic social processes going out of control and, in contrast, free stochastic communication leads to the processes becoming more streamlined. No sound explanation for the paradoxical phenomena of controllability / unpredictability, conditionality / spontaneity, openness / impermeability has been given so far. It seems as if we are dealing with an antinomy that cannot be resolved in the framework of the traditional linear-discrete model of mass communication, which implies the opposition of the speaker and the recipient, cause and effect, means and content. first man to go beyond the linear way of thinking typical of people working in this field was the Canadian philosopher and researcher M.McLuhan who expressed the essence of his ideas in the well-known formula The medium is the message (McLuhan, 1965), and even in the more defiant and seemingly illogical thesis The medium is the massage (McLuhan, 1967).Fifty years later, we see that the industrial era has given way to a digital age, which proves that McLuhans words were not a play on words but a clue, the elementary algorithm of the new paradigm of thinking created by mass communication itself. There is no doubt that electronic technologies have facilitated new thinking and the emergence of a new man and that people who lived in the days that the new technologies were introduced are different from those who see and hear the world through them today.The electronic mass media have changed the psycho-technique of perception, thinking and behavior and expanded man's mental abilities. Within the global information processes, mans thinking has acquired new qualities that could be defined as net-thinking[2]. It is a special form of psyche, rather independent and self- contained, with its own phenomena, paradoxes and system of self-regulation.Until recently, these phenomena were not considered to be a subject for serious scientific study, leaving only bold guesses, hearsay and much vagueness. Scientific publications were full of new terms, such as internet-dependence, virtual reality, virtual self (Gumanitarnye..., 2000), which marked, similar to milestones, flashes of research enthusiasm every time a new fact was discovered. However, most of the academic community looked on them as simply local phenomena that did not affect the existing system of concepts and the structure of knowledge.A global digital space, with its unprecedented possibilities, opened up so suddenly and without fanfare that, at first, nobody realized that a transition to a new stage in the development of science had occurred. …