Communicative Aggressions and Negative Concepts of Propaganda

The article develops the results of studies of communicative aggressions, which are understood as the property of conflictogenic media discourses of the mass society. The actualisation of the problem is determined by the intensification of communicative aggressions in the media of the countries and of the world community as a whole. Aggressive intentions of the media can resonate with the sentiments of the media audience; that is why manifestations of aggressiveness in society sharply increase, or a critical attitude towards the media grows in it. The study is based on the results of an international project of researchers of Saint Petersburg State University (Russia) and the Adam Mickiewicz University (Poland), which analysed the fragment of consciousness of the media audience represented by students. The analysis of their ideas about the degree of media aggressiveness allows assessing the conflict in the intercultural environment in the context of Polish-Russian relations. The study aims to analyse the aggressive intentions of the media and the students’ sentiments they formed, and reasons for the growth of the ideas about media aggressiveness. The anlysis of the role of the stereotype “Russophobia” (as arousing aggressiveness in the audience and in the media) the media use determines the scientific significance of the study. The conclusions of the article are based on the results of surveys of the youth audience, on series of focused interviews, on the content analysis of publications in online versions of federal Russian newspapers and in online publications on relations between Russia and Poland. The fundamental difference of communicative aggressions from previous forms of information wars is determined by the participation of not only media actors, but also the mass society as a whole. An event covered by the media becomes aggressive as a result of not only the work of the media, but also the involvement of the audience. The audience’s perception of aggressive intentions in the media is intuitive and needs to be substantiated; therefore a corpus of media texts (1999-2019) with signs of aggressiveness is compiled in the study using the “Russophobia” marker. However, modern students as an audience do not perceive concepts promoted by the media directly, they tend to assess information critically. In this connection, the study came to the following conclusions: (1) there are opposite tendencies in the media and in their student audience; (2) there is a danger of an excessive usage of concepts with a sharply negative connotation because these concepts can cause aggressive reactions in society in case of escalations of political conflicts. In this context, the semantic stereotypes of texts which the audience perceives less rationally and more emotionally gain greater significance.

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