Sociocultural and psychoemotional features of digital communication

The article is devoted to the psychological evaluation of the role of the virtual environment in the life of a modern person. This theoretical study examines the need to understand virtual communications as a new type of social interactions, the main processes peculiar for the Internet communications, as well as the emotional context of an information message. The authors reveal the phenomena of interpersonal communication in a virtual environment that affect the form and content of social interactions, such as: the phenomenon of “weak connections”, based on the emergence of a new type of social relations and due to the reduction of social responsibility of interacting subjects of digital communications. The features of horizontal connections, which are formed against the background of the weakening of the social status of the actors of virtual interaction, are described. The article analyzes the formation of a special type of information interaction, which gives color to information interaction, including tools for the richness of the Internet messages: "emoji", stickers, "smiles", and other ways of encoding emotions. The prospects for further research are the creation of new theoretical constructs based on search empirical slices by means of content analysis and a number of diagnostic questionnaires, which allow determining the symbolic content of the actors of virtual interaction, its saturation and color, as well as the specifics of information interaction in a particular information environment.