Comparative study of emotional attitude manifestation in the digital environment and reality (using the example of ageism)

This article presents a new look at the organization and methodology of the study of individuality and its emotional components in the digital environment. An example of the study is the analysis of the manifestation of ageism and emotional attitude towards the elderly in the social network Vkontakte and in real life. The upload of statements from the Vkontakte network was obtained during a research work organized by the educational company “Academy of DATA-DIVING” (Tomsk), the Institute of Social Sciences of the RANEPA (Moscow), the University Consortium of Big Data Researchers, Tomsk State University (TSU). Data on the manifestation of ageism in real life were obtained using psychodiagnostic tools. The article describes in detail the course of the conducted research, which involved 100 respondents in real life and 100 statements of people represented on the social network. The researchers developed a program for encoding emotional attitudes towards the elderly, which later made it possible to compare and identify statistically significant differences in people's attitudes towards this category of people in the digital environment and in the real world. As a result of comparing the data obtained and identifying the predominance of negative emotions and manifestations of ageism in the social network, the authors proposed a general outline of technology that would potentially be able to identify negative triggers and throw in positive ones. It seems possible to the authors to use a “swarm” of bots, one of which could fix negative triggers, while the remaining ones would act as “extras” giving positive comments. According to the authors, this technology could help improve and stabilize the expression of emotions in the digital environment.