Social Network Movements as a Metaphor of the Artificial Intellect

The article is devoted to the contemporary context and features of the new social movements' inner communication. The authors pay special attention to the conceptual meaning and consequences of the activists' use of the digital communication. Judging upon the theoretical and methodological approaches to the study of the activists' communication, the authors note that protest activity is seen as a reaction on the failure of communicative practices. But such an interpretation negates the constructive components typical for the current civil activity as a subject of communication of a new type. It is noted in the article that contemporary civil activity is based on the principles of a personal initiative inclusion rather than on a formal organizational membership like during the pre-digital era. Based on the ideas of the systemic communicative theory, the authors propose to consider civil activism as invariant communicative structures and note that activity's coordination is ensured by the discourse of activists' discussion or action. The authors claim that such a mechanism of coordination of the activists' organization could be interpreted as the priority of quasi-artificial intelligence in which specific "neurons" (that are represented by activists or discussion communities) communicate with discussion centers (these are network associations) through quasi-synaptic mechanisms (that are represented by the reaction to problems or events indicated in social networks). As it is noted in the article, if the reaction variety to "digitally discussed" events intensifies, several quasi-neural levels are formed (these are the levels of the network reaction to external network events, of the reaction to the reaction to non-network events, of active discussion). In turn, if activist unions are regularly disturbed by low-weight quasi-synaptic mechanisms (message of an insignificant or fake character), the protest communication reduces. The authors note that the horizontal rhizomatic structure of traditional activist movements, their decentralization and the low formalization of protest mobilization during the pre-digital era were objectively limited by the weak internal consolidation of associations. Asking a question about the conditions of network communities' coordination of their activity, the authors propose to reconstruct the activity of social networks by analogy with the structure of the organic nervous system or with the work of a complex mechanism. It is noted in the article that the "network" formed by the activist communication moves the internal logic of the participants' communication into a new more ordered format. It mainly concerns the making of collectively-binding decisions. The network mechanism of decision-making that is used by contemporary activist associations helps to compensate the deficit of central governance structures that was typical for the pre-digital era. As the authors note, the "self-learning" of the communicative system becomes possible due to the activist network's response to non-network events. That thus corresponds to the classical mechanisms of a positive feedback when more participation in activist actions generates a more active network's discussion of the actual context.

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