Self-Media as a Model for Monetization of Knowledge Code

Abstract

The accelerated development, convergence and integration of
information and communication technologies open up great opportunities for
social actors to express themselves, motivating amateur artists to produce media
products. The essay discusses the principles of the functioning of "self-media", a
new type of media model in individual entrepreneurship which is developing in
China and analyzes its advantages and disadvantages in the testing of innovative
business models.
The essay explores the problem of the importance of screen communications
for civilizational development and their possible influence on the processes
of collective cognition, mentality and behavior patterns of social actors,
groups, communities and cultures. Screen communications demonstrate the
inextricability of the linking of the media and social systems which undergo
fluctuations (unstable fluctuations) in digital time at the stage of digital
reforming. The author notes that this development of a social system is most
often built not on collectively-consolidated but on individualized solutions
resorted to by people forced to rely on their own choices in difficult situations,
on their intuition and imagination.
Social actors master digital technologies and create various kinds of projects
that encourage the masses to acquire new knowledge. The “self-media” project
began to be implemented in China in 2010-2013 on the basis of the new WeChat
platform, both a social network and a messaging application. In a convergent-
integration form, a functional of differing target technology platforms was
implemented, providing typological signs of self-media. This attracted a large
number of consumers to media projects.
Self-media are based on the idea of learning new things - in other words,
a knowledge code (a set of signs / symbols and a system of certain rules that
define a process of cognition) which is implemented by the creators. Initially,
it is presented in the form of informative and historical texts, illustrations
and videos dedicated to art, a chosen topic complemented by the attributes of
material symbolic things and various kinds of organizational services. Materially
embodied ideas motivate the media consumer to replenish knowledge of the
unknown.