Soft, hard and smart powers differentiating in the media discourse: An experimental research

Abstract

The powers of discourse in the modern media Internet space are presented and differentiated on the examples of social, political, religious types of discourse. The methods used are interpretation, inference and linguistic experiment. The purpose of the study is to analyze the media addressee’s understanding of the smart, soft and hard powers of discourse. An online questionnaire was presented and tested in the Google-form to identify the degree of understanding of the terms and their practical application by a diverse addressee. In the course of the research, the hypothesis of the ability of a non-highly specialized addressee to differentiate the influencing powers of discourse was confirmed. The differentiation of the discourse powers is confirmed by 2/3 of the respondents who correctly identified the powers given as written examples. The strength of each example is justified by the proposed parameters. The research justifies the need for the discourse powers separation in connection with the strengthening of the intellectual potential of the media discourse to influence “smartly” on the addressee by purposefully constructing the discourse according to the given parameters. Response discourse, feedback with a potential addressee allows us to clarify the set of parameters necessary for a more accurate and unambiguous differentiation of discourse powers that can exert an effect in modern media space. Scientific novelty consists in conducting a linguistic sociological experiment, which allows you to understand better the effect of the discourse powers and their interpretation by the addressee. For the first time, a differentiating characteristic of the powers of discourse for communication control is given. For the first time, examples of powers from the social, political, religious types of discourse are analyzed and compared. A promising area of research on the potential of media discourse is to attract different types of discourse on the material of different languages.