Information on the thesis

Permanent transformations of sociocultural reality require rethinking of a modern
communicative situation. The society needs appropriate communicative strategies,
management tactics and methodologies for analyzing communication processes. This can
help us perceive and produce new discourses and to control their impact on civil society
development. Penetration of communication in all spheres of social life, emergence and
development of a qualitatively new type of communicative structures require a profound
review of the social reality’s communicative nature. This objectifies the problem of
studying the communicative discourse of social networks in modern social philosophy.
The study objective is to find out principles and pragmatics of the social networking
discourse as a source of social capital for the information society in order to establish
democratic values. The object of research are social and communicative Internet-networks
as a formation factor of social capital and functioning of civil society. The subject of
research is the discursive pragmatics of social networking in the information society.
The theoretical and practical significance of the study is to reconstruct the
paradigms of communicative philosophy and apply the principles of discursive ethics for
communicative practices in a new environment – Facebook. It can become a source of the
social capital, as the structure of a network is uniquely favorable for strong ties. Facebook
makes interpersonal interaction open to the recognition of the Other, and to forming of a
single discourse. Rational justifications of such interaction opens many other perspective
directions of this study. Nevertheless, their implementation requires a theoretical
legitimization of new standards of behavior in the information society.
The current study forms the methodological basis of social network communication
discursive pragmatics. This is a new branch of philosophical research, which aims to
develop a methodology for analysis of the subjective factor (primarily social) in the
intersubjective interaction of individuals in the social network. For practical realization of
such a philosophical analysis it is necessary to interpret the existence of an actor in the
network as a practical embodiment of the idea of discourse openness for the social capital
formation on the basis of mutual trust through communication.
The scientific novelty of the study can be specified in the following theoretical
positions: the conceptual vision of social network communication discursive pragmatics is
given in the philosophical and social knowledge of Ukraine for the time; the
methodological basis of the discursive pragmatics of social network communication is
formed; the philosophy of communication is structured on the basis of three paradigms of
its development: self-understanding, discursive practices and mutual understanding, where
the paradigm of discursive practices is used for interpretation of Internet communication
discourses, and the paradigm of mutual understanding is essential for achieving consensus;
actor’s being in the virtual social network is interpreted through the formation of user’s
own legend and discourse, as well as enrolment through the communicative action to
micro and macro narratives; it is proved that the theory of the public sphere can be
practically applied to the analysis of socially significant network discourse due to the
duality of its dimensions: spatial and axiological-communicative; the structure of the
Facebook is considered as a basis for the social capital accumulation and means of
spreading the narratives of the civil society in Ukraine; for the first time a number of
sources dedicated to studying the field of openness and social networks that have not
previously been used in the Ukrainian scientific discourse are introduced into the thesis.
Conclusions are made about the possibility of implementing a project of deliberative
democracy in the space of virtual intersubjective interaction, provided that the discursive
pragmatics of social network communication is applied to the analysis of narratives that
are verbalized on Facebook.
Key words: communication, discourse, narrative, deliberative democracy, social
capital, Facebook.