Home – Home – Jornals – "Philosophy of Education" 2016 number 5

Ontemporary sociocultural technologies have a powerful impact on the individual’s personality thus triggering the issue of personality preservation. The authors have reviewed only one aspect of this problem: the aspect directly related to specific features of visual information products of social networks. The research relied on the fundamentals of the youth sociology, the general concept of visual culture and some aspects of the general communication theory. The work has also extensively used the methods of theoretical and empirical research. Visual self-representation of a personality in Instagram has become the actual subject of this research. According to the authors, communication in this network is based on the three-component model of a sociocultural mechanism of information impact: a producer (addresser) of information - a network user; an information product - posted pictures; a consumer (addressee) of information - as a rule, unidentified. In order to analyze the target audience of addressers (producers) of information products, a poll was conducted via a special online questionnaire. The results of the poll show that the main audience of the network users is young people between 16 and 25. Pictures have become a unit of analyzing the information product in the Internet. However, we were not able to use the method of content-analysis in the full due to the huge number of posted pictures and insufficient storage capacity of the PC. Therefore, only several elements of the content-analysis have been used. Over 3000 pictures posted in Instagram have been analyzed. Selfies are prevailing among them (over 1000), followed by pictures of food and animals (over 500) and nature (over 200). The research has revealed two fundamental controversies: publicity of the posted pictures, which sometimes are very personal and even intimate, along with rather harsh and negative response to any attempt of intruding into the personal space of a network user; an acute loneliness of young people and a great need in communication, accompanied by the intentional communication avoidance in the real world. The research has resulted in the following conclusions. The Instagram information product is a means of self-presentation for the young people in the social picture network. The real world fragments on pictures can be either real or staged (installation and performance, where animals can become main characters). Selfies are aimed at representing the user’s self by the principle: «Look! Here am I!». The posted images range from ordinary pictures of real people to the overt provocation beyond the bounds of decency. This self-representation is virtually a self-simulacrum. A visual image at the posted picture is a code that carries an information message. A producer of information product and its consumer can belong to different subcultures; in this case, the coded information will be deciphered according to the laws of intercultural communication.