Deconstruction of a text in network communication: Hypertext as a new mechanism of social communication

The article presents the analysis of the transformation of texts as mechanisms of social communication, in particular in digital social reality. The transformation of social reality is updated in various spheres of human life – social communication, self-identifi cation, sociocultural codes and rituals. Any text (statement), being a social action, is an institutional construct and correlates with the structure of the social reality of its generation. The sociological perspective of the study of texts is based on the combination of two methodological approaches - solidaristic and critical, which, however, assume the primacy of social structure and the secondary nature of language (text). In the context of the methodology of symbolic interactionism, it is shown that the meaning of any text is determined by the sociocultural context. The theory of speech acts considers all texts as sets of social actions (speech acts), the adequate interpretation of which is determined by their compliance with established social norms and traditions. The modern social reality of the digital community is characterized by uncertainty, instability and many risky situations. Under these conditions, all texts as social constructs also changed their functions. This is especially true for the texts that provide social communication in the virtual reality of the Internet. The shift in the communicative function of the text towards pragmatics led to the changes in text structures and the emergence of a new format – a hypertext. The specifi city of hypertext is actualized in its nonlinearity, fragmentation and uncertainty. Network social communication, as an indirect environment remote from the communicants in time and space, operates with hypertexts containing, in addition to the primary text, evaluation comments, links and allusions. This property of hypertexts (intertextuality) provides large-scale social communication between countless numbers of communicators. The social consequences of the functioning of hypertexts are to ensure and maintain social equality between users of the Internet space.