Social aspects of human-computer interactions in the media: tendencies and threats

Abstract

In today's world, all the most important events and changes in economic and cultural relations take place within the information community. It is impossible to gain authority and a place among the partners of this community without the development of democracy in each particular state. It is also impossible without the use of computer technologies, but such use should not contradict international standards of human-computer interaction and standards of information protection. Special attention of researchers in the field of mass communications sociology and media psychology is attracted by the pervasion of human-computer interaction problems into mass media discourse, which accumulates a significant part of public discourse as a whole. The paper presents the results of an online expert survey of professional journalists discussing the impact of computer networks on their "actors", groups and communities. In the mainstream of interdisciplinarity, using the anthropocentric and sociocommunicative approaches, the social aspects of human-computer interactions in the media are studied. The chosen methodology allows to focus on the most relevant of them, such as: the need for humanization of communicative contacts in networks and mass media, recognition of changes in the structure of audiences, increasing the role of subjectivity and personification of contacts. The problem for future human-computer interactions (HCI) research is that the further computer science - and therefore technology - advances, the more often we have to think about the balance between benefits and harms caused to humans by active interaction with the computer.