Peculiarities of interaction with media in the process of the community adaptation to the conditions and consequences of military conflict

The article presents an empirical study that revealed the basic peculiarities of the community interaction with media. There are revealed five psychological peculiarities of community interaction with the media, which have different levels of expression depending on age, material security, most used media, and so on. Interaction with the media through the “paternalistic-negative” peculiarity is characterized by a negative attitude to the consumption of media content and the transfer of responsibility for it to the government. The “avoidance” peculiarity is based on the desire of a person to deliberately limit him/herself to using media to avoid getting into a media content that is related to a military conflict. The displaying of such peculiarity is more common to communities with a low level of material support and those who use such media as Russian television and social networks VKontakte and Odnoklassniki. Such peculiarities of interaction with the media as “rational-empathy” and “observed” are characterized by the operation of a wide array of media content, rational assessment of the consumed information or its accumulation to form a further attitude. Such features are more common in medium and high-level material provision communities where the use of the Internet for news search, Facebook and Twitter social networking, and online TV viewing are the leading media-habits. The “emotional and intuitive” peculiarity is based on the steady habits of the media which produce emotional responses to the consumed media content in the form of pity, compassion, and empathy display. This peculiarity is inherent in a community that uses national TV and does not have a life experience of interaction with vulnerable groups of the population (internally displaced persons, combatants, etc.). The basic vectors of community adaptation to the conditions and consequences of a military conflict in the process of interaction with the media are defined. A productive vector characterized by rational use of the media and the empathy of internally displaced persons, as well as a contemplative position that manifests itself in the use of various media for the accumulation of information and in a neutral estimation of consumed media-content. The vector of adaptation has destructive manifestations and is determined by the paternalistic attitude to media content, its chaotic consumption, the negative attitude towards the displaced persons, and the transfer of responsibility to the state institutions. An intermediate adaptation vector has such features as the emotional and intuitive position, which is displayed in the intuitive search and interaction with media-content, and the attitude to socio-political events in the country is based on emotional factors (empathy, compassion, and pity)