Russian Media: Targets, Strategies and Technologies for Influencing the Audience. Article Two: Empirical Research

The article presents the results of a study of the interaction of various social institutions with audiences. The main research methods were content analysis and intent analysis, i.e., analysis of communicative intentions. At the first stage of the study, texts with clear institutional characteristics were selected. At the second stage, master's students from the Higher School of Economics were involved in the research - a total of 69 people, divided into groups of three to four. They worked with texts related to a particular social institution, using specially developed techniques. To examine the target attitudes of the participants in communication interaction, the material of television talk shows was used. The analysis has shown that talk show participants most often use emotional impact, proof, and evaluation, and rarely command and coercion. This demonstrates that an orientation towards positive strategies dominates in conversational dialogical relations, although they can be used for manipulation. Further, the social technologies of influence various institutions use were analyzed. The analysis has shown that the most common technologies are aimed at forming a picture of the world, political and ideological ideas. Xenophobia and discrimination technologies, although they are much less common, are used by institutions of culture, upbringing, and education; by institutions of the social sphere; by communication and political legal institutions. The communicative technologies of influence - both “symmetrical”, suggesting the subject-subject relations of the communicator and the addressee, and “asymmetrical”, suggesting the subject-object relations of the communicator and the addressee -were also analyzed. It has been revealed that only slightly more than a third of social institutions actively use the “symmetrical” technologies of informing, persuasion, and dialogue. Among the “asymmetrical” technologies of influence, the management of the communicative situation, psychological manipulation, and technologies of social induction are most often used. Technologies of provocation, domination and aggression, disinformation, imitation, neurolinguistic programming, and pseudological technologies (black rhetoric) are used much less often, but they aggravate the overall picture. The study has shown that there are obvious priorities in the repertoire of impact goals and in the social and communication technologies used, and these priorities significantly depend on the type of social institution. Among the strategies of communication influence, the strategy of cooperation and development is most often employed. However, strategies aimed at covert control of the behavior and consciousness of the addressee also do not give up their positions.

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