Participative Media Practices in Ukrainian Social Media: Constructors of Personal Values and New Identities Versus Ways of Political Manipulations

The main purpose is to analyse the ambiguity role of social media in today’s Ukrainian context: as the creators of new communicative environment, new sociality that favour finding of personal and national authenticity and as the social field of information wars, political games and realization of economic interests of great Internet corporations. From here we can examine 3 major advantages of such participative practices. The first, social media are de-institutionalized that gives to users multidimensional features to create and modify voluntarily content, and also to share it with other users. At the same time de-institutionalization is always partial thereby main Internet resources are concentrated in hands of several big political players. The second, the consumer is considered as the producer of content and as his distributor, the term of “produser” emphasizes such a hybrid position. The third, communication in social media is always interactive and networking that causes both positive and negative consequences. We reveal the specific character of numerous types of communicative practices in contemporary Ukrainian virtual sphere subjected to “simultaneous/ non-simultaneous” character and number of interlocutors. Thus, we divide the audience of Internet users relative to their creation of personally significant meanings, values and purposes of communication. So, it is possible to allocate extremely active users or "insiders", "newbie" who are in process of training and searching and certain "lurkers" – followers of social networks without active participation and creation of own content. The other criteria of differentiation are formed by the axes "information dependence/ addiction versus information discretion", "tool orientation versus communicative orientation versus orientation to joining and belonging". We have observed some different configurations of political and information technologies which have been operating in the course of Ukrainian revolution of 2013-2014 and hybrid war continuing during 2014-2017