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2PSYCHOLOGICAL AND PEDAGOGICAL ANALYSIS OF COMMUNICATIVE DESTRUCTION IN THE INTERNET SPACE AS A SOCIO-CULTURAL PHENOMENON
Abstract
The paper deals with the questions of the destruction of communication in the Internet space as a kind of verbal aggression. An analysis of the causes and internal motives is offered for the destruction in communication. The article poses the features of the destruction of Internet communication, on the basis of behavioral markers, forms a psychological portrait of the troll personality. Trolling as a kind of destructive communication is a multidimensional phenomenon of sociocultural space. The contents of this article will be useful for teachers, psychologists and sociologists.
Keywords
psycho-pedagogical analysis, aggression, destruction, communication, bullying, Internet
AUTHOR
Evgenia V. Konkina
PhD, Associate Professor, Department of General Pedagogy Orenburg State Pedagogical University. 19, Soviet st., Orenburg, 460014, Russia
E-mail: evgeniavk2@gmail.com
Irina A. Savinova
Master's student,
Institute of Pedagogy and Psychology, Orenburg State Pedagogical University. 19, Soviet st., Orenburg, 460014, Russia E-mail: irene098@mail.ru
1. Introduction
1.1. Relevance of the problem
Modern society is immersed in the Internet environment - the space of information and freedom. The Internet has changed its original function of the communicational instrument. Now this is a real functional environment. The audience of social networks is constantly increasing and now it reaches several billion people. Social networks now offer its users a number of options: messaging in a private format, posting their news directly on the page in free access, sharing various files (photos, video, audio, documents), commenting, publishing and saving other people's records on its page, due to which there is lightning spread of information.
Through social networks, we can use the range of possibilities and instantly disseminate information. Diversity of possibilities makes the Internet attractive for different age groups, especially for young people (Feldshtein, 2010).
1.2. Main risks
Great opportunities entail significant risks and threats to security. The attention of humanity is focused on cybercrime, when only by using the possibilities of Internet communications hackers - malefactors from different countries, kidnap confidential information of civil servants and personal data of ordinary citizens. Also crimes are committed against individuals (adults and children) who often remain defenseless one-on-one with danger. When communicating in a network, text with an increased emotional charge makes it possible to compensate for the lack of tactile and emotional interaction. Corresponding with someone, people are deprived of the opportunity to observe the body language, facial expressions and other non-verbal signals. This limits the perception of the exclusively emotional component of the text. On intense emotions, most often negative, parasitizes a special type of manipulative communicators - "trolls". This is one of the varieties of online threats - trolling, which can manifest itself as destruction of communications, the humiliation of the individual or an entire group of people. It is important to understand the motives of Internet aggressive persecution of children and adults, deprived of any commercial benefits, to make forecasts and carry out preventive work. Information and psychological safety of children is a state of children's protection, which minimizes the risk of harm to the health of children, their moral, physical and mental development (Ratiner, 2014). Education of information culture, rejection of suspicious information becomes one of the intents of modern psychological and pedagogical work.
2. Methodological Framework
2.1. Purpose and tasks of our research
The main purpose of our research was to conduct a psychological and pedagogical analysis of communicative destruction in the Internet space as a socio-cultural phenomenon. We analyzed the psychological characteristics of aggressive persecution in the network, excluding its varieties (like bullying, etc), as business trolling, whose target is making money. Because the business trolling there is no internal motivational component, which represents the greatest value for our research. We formulated several tasks:
- to clarify the semantic content of the term "trolling", as a descriptive construct of Internet communication;
- to analyze possible psychological and pedagogical reasons for the desire to destroy Internet communication;
- to determine the possible purposes of communicative destruction as an orientation toward a certain result;
- to compile a psychological portrait of a person who is interested in the destruction of Internet communication, bullying and persecute;
- to describe the characteristic behavioral markers, which exhibit trolling, in order to prevent possible destruction of communication.
2.2. Literature Review
Elements of communication destruction can be found even among the ancient philosophers. For example, a widely known the Socratic irony, by which he could bring to the frenzy of his less witty companion and make him certain actions (Arhangelskiy,
39 Modern European Researches No 3 / 2017 2017). For the first time, "trolling" as the general term denoting the destruction of communicative Internet space, was recorded in 1992 in the Oxford dictionary, but is firmly established in the lexicon since 2000. At the same time, linguists still differ in understanding the origin of this word. One version contains a mention of fishing for a spoon-bait. Another version is focused on Scandinavian myths that mention a troll as a character eternally angry and sullen, he is causing trouble to ordinary people. A very precise definition is given by Akulich, M.M.: "Trolling is a form of manipulation, and such remains, no matter how erudite and prepared troll" (Akulich, 2012).
The dialogues in the Internet there are often people who try to destroy the dialogue, deconstruct ethical norms in order to provoke conflict and cause aggression. These people are called "trolls" - this is a real virus that can destroy not only communication, but also the whole community from the inside. They do not recognize the norms worked out by the rules of self-regulation, which is why they preserve invulnerability (Arhangelskiy, 2017).
Digital sciences researcher Yang Vandeyk, offers a more relevant approach: trolling - it is a situation of speaking, the articulation of one's position online. The specificity of the digital space makes it possible to trace that the network intensifies and radicalizes those phenomena and habits that are offline (Moroz, 2015; Dementiev, Dubrovin, 2015).
Human perception causes people to respond to provocative questions, since it implies effective communication, and to "declassify" destructor takes time. When provocation is evident, other interlocutors give an advice "not to feed the troll" - to stop the communication.
There are several key targets for the implementation of the communicational destruction in the Internet space:
- use it as a tool to achieve your target;
- satisfaction of personal ambitions through mockery;
- depreciation of a person who evokes envy;
- dissolution of the discussion in verbal garbage;
- falsifying information: slander and compromising.
2.3. Types of communicative destructors
Two classical trolling situations can be distinguished. One person interacts and annoys an opponent or a whole group of people. In the second situation, the whole group is going to sabotage the discussion or harm a person, possibly several people at once. The reason for this may be mockery of his ideological enemy, a man who has clearly manifested himself in some kind of activity, on the net, hatred for certain positions, spelling or factual error made by the author of any text, video, and much more.
Gradually, the society formed an idea of the true causes of bullying on the Internet. People, who are attacked in social networks, now simply bring provokers to the "black list". As a result of these changes, trolling begins mutate and disguise itself.
Based on her research, Akulich M.M. developed a classification of people who practice in aggressive persecution in the network, dividing them into 3 categories:
Unconscious. People act under the influence of their own emotional impulses.
Conscious. A person realizes that acting wrongly, but continue to operate as a sense of inner necessity.
40 Modern European Researches No 3 / 2017 Provocateurs. They deliberately, purposefully and subtly strive to involve people in the conflict, to evoke vivid emotional reactions.
3. Results
3.1. Personal portrait of communicative destructor
Psycho-pedagogical analysis of trolling as a multidimensional and interdisciplinary phenomenon allows us to present a personal portrait of a young person engaged in bullying, persecute and destruction.
1. It is often uncertain and bound in living communion people who are afraid to express their opinions. Inability to cope with accumulated aggression and the usual stress pushes a person to the stress relief available to him - go to an anonymous network and express accumulated negative. The reason for this strategy of self-regulation is especially education in the parents' family, when the child instills the idea that it is forbidden to get angry, shouting to protest. Because of this, a habit of constraining negative emotions is formed, but not for long. At some point the child discovers the opportunity to safely and secretly dispose of the accumulated emotions on weaker: animals, small children, unfamiliar people on the network, etc. This habit is fixed for a long time. Later, a person engaged in bullying, persecute and destruction begins not simply remove your stress, but also to have fun, he feels his strength.
2. Provocateur seeks to manage communication: destroy, direct, manipulate, trigger certain actions provoke certain actions. Because of this, behaviors can be very different. Some, due to the limitations of intelligence, are only capable of a flat, one-syllable dialogue, others will be characterized by a demonstration of erudition to humiliate the opponent.
3. The feeling of comfort in the process of conflict in the network. For the troll, conflict is a form of life, a form of emotional feeding. Conversely, provocation and conflict in Internet communication is perceived by the average user as a danger, discomfort, from which he wants to get rid of. Despite the obvious negative halo of trolling, there is a constructive component in it. Provocations perform an important syntactic and educational function. If this potentially conflicting way of communication were completely absent in our life, we would have met with the infantilization of the media audience and the Internet environment, which lacks resistance.
4. The presence of pathological changes in the psyche, and as a consequence, a potential danger to society. This statement is confirmed by a series of multifactor research of Canadian scientists (Golbeck, 2014). They conducted 2 online surveys, in which 1200 people participated. Complex psychological tests allowed researchers to discover the relationship between the need for Internet provocations and a number of psychological pathologies: narcissism, Machiavellianism, psychopathy and sadism - "Dark Tetrad". The most pronounced was the pathology of sadism, and to a lesser extent is expressed narcissism. Consequently, this tendency to sadism stimulates the inner need for violence. Such actions have already caused a lot of crimes, including online community where teens incited to commit suicide.
5. The presence of a strong sense of envy. The troll has no ability to constructively overcome feelings of envy due to a feeling of inferiority and a lack of sense of self-worth. The struggle with successful people becomes the purpose of life to create an illusion of control. When a successful person gets involved in a conflict - it gets the best reward for the provocateur, because now communication takes place on an equal footing without status differences.
41 Modern European Researches No 3 / 2017 6. The desire to gain significance and glory. For provocateur is important to receive a portion of attention to his personality, because in his everyday life they are deprived of this. In real life, someone writes books, someone sews beautiful clothes, because of that people feel successful and meaningful. The main achievement of the troll is the response of his opponent in communication, the disruption of the entire communication system.
Discussions
The problem of aggression in the field of communications is a subject of research not only in the psychological and pedagogical sciences. If we consider trolling as a social phenomenon, we find an abundance of possible causes: economic, political and socio-cultural needs and interests. Social psychologists and culturologists simplistically consider bullying and persecute in the network, as an online phenomenon associated with the construction of a speech and communicative situation, indicating a habit of sadism (Pavlov, 2014).
If we turn to the psychodynamic approach, we will find out that the desire for power over another person is often dictated by the compensatory nature of prestige. Possible manifestations of this intention: the desire to bring your "I-Real" closer to the "I-Perfect", desire even illusory touch the aspirational position, to get a sense of well-being at the expense of self-affirmation over others.
According to Max Weber, the prestige regulates compare one person to another and becomes the measure of a person's social status (Komleva, 2000). Parvenu effect fullest describes this state. Parvenu (from the French parvenu.) - an upstart, a man of humble origin, broke into aristocratic society and imitate the aristocrats (Zaharenko, Komarova, Nechaeva, 2003). In today's context, the upstart is a person who desperately wants to succeed in society, despite the internal feeling of weakness and uncertainty. Especially clearly striving to stand out markedly from other modern schoolchildren. Children are also affected by changes in the social aspects of society: increased competition; planting of attitudes about the decisive importance of success and public recognition, etc. (Guryanova, 2014). At the same time, the lack of internal resources to implement a constructive plan for success, not knowing their abilities and hidden talents, low self-esteem, the presence of fear. This contradiction creates a space for the emergence of the desire to find the most accessible and simple way to stand out from the others. Children every day become participants in the race for prestige among classmates. The desire to stand out in a crowd of peers makes them turn sometimes to extreme ways of attracting attention - so the effect of parvenu arises. We can observe how interpersonal relations in schools are imbued with disregard from children from high-income families who are not burdened with upbringing and "aristocratic manners". Children have an attitude that it is necessary to become better at all costs than others, so that you can humiliate others in response to their insults. This becomes an incentive to trolling, as the most accessible and low-cost way of self-assertion.
However, according to Susan Hering, there is a serious problem in the allocation of markers, which can identify provocateur in time (Zagidullina, 2013). It is unclear how to distinguish the expression of sincere disagreement from hidden trolling. To save communication, participants must find in time a provocateur, who is capable of destroying communication.
Despite the lack of clarity, we have found 3 reference points, which will signal about the danger of communicative destruction:
- imitation of sincerity: the participant tries to demonstrate himself sincerely, emphasizes this fact in communication, but other participants of communication are biased;
- the existence of provocation: the provocation, which is aimed at conflict and fomenting emotions in the opponent;
- departure from the original topic of communication: the abundance of messages that do not relate to the original topic of communication, there is a "blunder" of the participants in the discussion.
Conclusion
According to the results of our research, we arrive at the following conclusions.
Trolling as the destruction of communication in the Internet space remains undervalued threat. You can call it a form of trolling - manipulation in the online space; and cyberbullying - psychological violence in the Internet environment, right up to the suicide. It is necessary to draw attention to the solution of this problem by all available means.
Psycho-pedagogical analysis of the communicational destruction in the Internet space proves that online communication has firmly entered into the everyday life of children and adults. Therefore, to abandon the Internet for security is impossible. Abandonment means deprivation. It will be much more constructive work on the development of children's and adults' skills of safe behavior in the network. For this work it is necessary to involve parents, teachers, psychologists, representatives of law enforcement, etc. For example, in Moscow the training program "Stop Threat" is already being implemented, aimed at teaching children the skills to prevent dangerous situations in the real and virtual world.
Recommendations
Parents, teachers, psychologists should pay attention to the formation of a positive self-relationship and adequate self-esteem in the individual, actively develop cognitive processes, expand the horizon and increase erudition.
It is self-development that will help all communication participants anticipate possible problems. For people inclined to provocations, all-round development will allow them to show their talents and abilities in real life, gain recognition and authority in society by constructive methods. For ordinary users, self-development will provide insight when communicating in the Internet environment and will form a resistance.
At the legislative level, it is necessary to provide for the possibility of protecting the emerging personality of the child from intruders in the Internet space, while preserving all the positive functions of the Internet environment. It is possible to predict the disappearance of rude bullying and persecute in the future.
There are some programs of media and digital literacy. There is an idea of civilian control in the Internet environment, when people come together in communities and try to react to radical cases of humiliation, breakage of communication. However, certain forms of aggression in the Internet space are transformed and preserved, there will appear witty forms. Trolling like language game will develop at the same pace with modern society.
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