The Provocative Potential of Glocal Online Media Discourse as a Space for Modifying Social Values

Abstract

This article examines the provocative potential of glocal network media discourse based on an analysis of the use of conflict-generating communicative tactics in social media posts from Dagestan and Stavropol’. Using contextual and semantic analysis, the authors identify conflict-generating units of provocation. Using a discourse-modus analysis, the most frequent and effective communicative tactics and speech devices implementing a strategy of negatively positioning the sociocultural foundations of identity are detected. It is established that the main conditions for the formation and dissemination of provocative potential in glocal network media discourse are depersonalization, the speed of information delivery and dissemination, openness to information leaks, and a high degree of verbal expressiveness. Conflict-generating topics in the regions under consideration demonstrate maximum ethno-confessional determination. In both regions, the use of communicative tactics of division and negative presentation predominates. To foster negative assessments, producers employed pejoratives, ethnophaulisms, and obscene language. Appeal and conflict mobilization tactics were used less frequently; in the vast majority of cases, their implementation mechanism was innuendo. Modification of value attitudes in some cases leads to a radical shift in the positivization–negativization poles of core global axiologemes during the discursive territorial and topical determination of content. An analysis of the empirical material revealed statements containing invitives in implicit and explicit forms: appeals, slogans, committal constructions, etc. The authors conclude that social media is highly effective as a tool for provocation and conflict mobilization in glocal network media discourse, offering increasingly broad opportunities for the use of conflict-generating communicative tactics and the production and dissemination of destructive content.