A Communicative Image of Social Network Audience: Psycholinguistic Perpective

Abstract. In the paper, anthropocentrism is proved to be the basis of psycholinguistic research of Internet social communities; net-centricity is viewed as a cognitive basis of network communications; as exemplified by social networks VKontakte, YouTube, Odnoklassniki, and Facebook communicative portraits of audiences in psycholinguistic dimension are proposed. It was determined, that social network communities are becoming a platform for interpersonal communications, producing Web-waves, mobilizing communities for actions in reality. Social network communities have the following characteristics:  identification of personality based on the principle “Tell me, to what social network you belong, and I will tell you who you are”; shift from vertical to horizontal dimension of communications; segmentation of audiences, individualization of communications and actualization of the role of opinion leaders in each network; producing Web-waves which trigger a cognitive pattern “interest – participation in communication – making a decision”; possibility of monitoring and analysis of communications effectiveness; change of status of an information consumer. New subject of research (social networks) stipulated appearing of a new field of psycholinguistic research – psycholinguistics of social networks communications, tasked to:  identify the characteristics of language functioning in new technological conditions; study the psychological basis of producing and functioning of discourses as the reflection of new communicative patterns, focused on collective authorship in reproduction of contents; analyse the formation of personal and collective identity in discourse practices of social network communities.