Media Conflictology as a Field of Interdisciplinary Analysis of Social Conflicts

Abstract

Studies of conflicts in socio-humanitarian knowledge have traditionally focused attention on the research of conflicts themselves, less attention has been paid to the features of their media representations depending on their types, types of media, as well as subsequent audience effects. In the context of increasing mediatization of social space, it seems relevant to analyze media-centric approaches to the study of conflicts, which may explain the formation of media conflictology as an autonomous area of research. Since the beginning of the 21st century, the study of the coverage of social conflicts in the media has become a prominent area of interdisciplinary research, complementing and combining the subject areas of conflictology and media studies that emerged in the 20th century. The emerging academic field has included the study of actors involved in the creation of media representations of conflicts, including traditional and new media, as well as various online communities of the digital media environment; analysis of the stages of the conflict and its consequences presented in the media; study of the influence of media communications on the “life cycle” of a conflict; consideration of a set of reasons for the representation of certain characteristics of the conflict in the media, including political, ideological and ethnocultural factors of the external environment; analysis of the intra- and extramedia context of the representation of the conflict and its features; research into the relationship between media representation of the conflict and the model and traditions of the national media system, regulatory conditions for media activity, the professional culture of a journalist and the communicative culture of society; studying the media-axiological aspect of the conflict.