New Global Conflicts: Factors of Mediatization and Personalization

Introduction. The relevance of the study of the mediatization of the public sphere and the contradictions of personalization in it is determined by their impact on social conflicts. Methodology and sources. Official sources, data from news agencies and mass media, analytical materials from IMEMO RAS, RISI, RIAC, and foreign online publications were used. Content and discourse analysis of the media agenda are applied. Academic research on the mediatization of social conflicts has been taken into account. The analytical potential of the concepts “new wars” and “deep mediatization” is involved. A comparative historical approach and categorical analysis are used. Results and discussion. The change in conflict conditions in the 21st century is seen as a symptom of the fading of the historical waves of social evolution over the past 400 years. The characteristics of the latest global conflicts are highlighted: the impact on global energy, finance, and the environment; attempts by participants in conflicts to establish control and introduce admission regimes in the areas of universal conditions (oceans, space); the inability of the parties to the conflict to reach agreements; the lack of strategies for resolving old regional conflicts and ending new wars. The mediatization of the conflict is traced on historical examples and the conclusion is substantiated: the state monopoly of political and ideological control of the media is challenged by the oligopoly of digital platforms. Public trust as a pillar of the legality of the authorities is fundamentally violated. The concept of victory in conflicts is blurred, the priority in the media is shifted to the personality of the winner. The concept of modern mediatization is proposed: “a system of global personal communication”. Personalization in the system is considered as a key mechanism for analyzing and controlling the social subject. The contradiction of personalization is revealed: traditional personal or group identification based on recognition and acknowledgment now exists independently of the person himself in an autonomous and anonymous sign-transformed space. In political and corporate leadership, this contradiction is expressed in the fact that media public action requires successful identification from the leader, i.e. the trust of citizens, which begins to be delegated to the platform algorithms of network communication. Conclusion. The directions of updating conflictology are outlined, dictated by the media logic of presenting the image of victory, i.e. a new global world order.

Authors: Alexandra V. Shcherbina, Anna M. Ogorodnova

Direction: Sociology

Keywords: global conflicts, mediatization, personalization, mass media, global personal communication system, personal identification, victory, trust, leader

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