№ 3 - 2007
Alekseyenkova Ye.S.
Cognitive Mechanisms of Social Networks Integration

The analysis of social networks is now rather popular in political science, though it appeared quite recently. Nevertheless, the basic mechanisms, lying at the foundation of social networks formation, still fail to constitute scientific matter at issue. The author of the article tackles the problem of cognitive integration of social networks, analyses its reasons and mechanisms: what integrates individuals, who often have different social positions, interests, backgrounds, levels of education etc., into one social network, inside of which just the number of common cognitive constructions, that determine the shared world-view, are circulating? The article offers a hypothesis, according to which the basic integrating mechanisms are “virus-images” that form the world-view of social networks. New interpretation of researches in the fields of ethology and cultural anthropology allowed the author to empirically corroborate the presupposition that integration through images is the most deeply rooted and the most stable as compared with other types of integration. The article also proposes a new methodological approach to the investigation of integrating images by means of text-analysis.