On the Issue of Conflict Potential of Socio-Political Discourse in the Russian Blogosphere

Abstract

This article examines the features of socio-political discourse based on the texts of online blogs of public opinion leaders —I. Varlamov, Yu. Latynina, R. Kadyrov, N. Mikhalkov, S. Mikheev, and M. Simonyan. The purpose of the article is to determine the degree of conflictogenicity of the texts of the Russian blogosphere, specifically the blogs of media personalities, public opinion leaders; the results obtained will provide for predicting and preventing the occurrence of conflict situations by establishing and reducing the conflict index of the text, the main indicator of which is frequency of the corresponding lexical markers. The authors distinguish several subtypes of socio-political discourse and their features. The genre specificity of such new media phenomenon as Internet blog is considered. There is a high degree of conflictogenicity in analytical texts, signaled by specific lexical markers identified with the help of the content analysis method. Foreign policy texts, regardless of their authors’ personal views, appear to have the greatest number of conflict markers, which means that political analytics, the object of consideration of which lies in the plane of international and intercultural communication, has a significant degree of conflict potential. In the Internet, as in journalism in general, the addressees of texts and the addressees of conflicting vocabulary are not the same due to the specificity of discursive space, in which direct recipients of information are blog subscribers, who as a rule have a political orientation close to that of the author. The very same conflicting vocabulary refers to persons who occupy the opposite position. The manifestation of conflictogenicity in blog texts is analyzed at three levels: stylistic, semantic and pragmatic, which makes it possible to identify all the features of conflictogenicity markers in the liberal, patriotic and official subtypes of socio-political discourse. The specificity of such features is revealed in each of the three main subtypes of the Internet discourse: liberal, patriotic and official. In the authors’ blogs under analysis, the highest index of conflict is characteristic of texts belonging to the liberal subtype of socio-political discourse due to the greater frequency of use of the units related to lexical markers of conflict, their stylistically reduced modality—up to obscene words. At the same time, the conflict nature of the patriotic and official subtypes is closer to the traditional journalism style and shows less expressiveness in the use of metaphors, irony, phraseology, words with a seme of direct negative evaluation.