FEATURES OF NETWORK DESIGNS OF PERSUASIVE COMMUNICATION IN THE PROCESSES OF TRANSVERSAL POLITICAL SOCIALIZATION OF YOUNG PEOPLE

Abstract

The victorious march of digitalization of all spheres of life and the state contributes to the emergence of new forms of sociality, which develop according to their own laws. The Internet is becoming a social institution, and social networks very often replace real communication and real life. Consequently, the study of the phenomenon of network socialization of youth becomes an important area of social and political research. Of course, the study of socialization requires a longitudinal study, but in this case the focus of the study is to investigate the mechanisms of persuasive communication based on the identification of different network designs. We hypothesize that the optimality of persuasive communication is related to the transversal structure of the network, but not all networks possess this characteristic. Transversality in online communities is manifested where there is a large thematic diversity and a large number of active commentators with a non-zero betweenness centrality who are connecting links within the network. Thus, the purpose of this study is to identify the features of network designs of persuasive communication that influence the processes of transversal political socialization of young people online. The study conceptualized the concepts of transversal political socialization, network persuasive communication, constructed graphs of network communities, conducted a qualitative analysis of the texts of posts and comments to clarify the role of the most influential participants and their impact on individuation and solidarity, calculated the most important structural indicators of networks, and conducted a comparative analysis of networks using the method of hierarchical clustering. VKontakte communities were used as an empirical base, data from which were extracted using Python parsers with subsequent network analysis in specialized software.

Keywords:

NETWORK DESIGNS, TRANSVERSAL POLITICS, SOCIALIZATION, NETWORK ANALYSIS, SOLIDARITY, INDIVIDUATION, HIERARCHICAL CLUSTERING, NETWORK COMMUNITIES, PERSUASIVE COMMUNICATION