FEATURES OF THE SOCIOLOGICAI DIAGNOSTICS OF THE MEDIA FIELD IN THE REPUBLIC OF BELARUS

The article considers methodological approaches to the study of the media field transformations under contemporary changes and presents the results of the annual sociological monitoring conducted in the Republic of Belarus (2003-2017). The authors claim the redistribution of influence on the audience from traditional media in favor of Internet resources and other forms of network communications. Traditional mass media and communication media undergo radical changes, the subjects of which are professional editions and journalists together with the consumers of mass media information, who reproduce and disseminate the meaningful for them content in the Internet through the networks of virtual media communications. The sociological monitoring allowed to identify the level of influence of different types of media at the certain period of social-political and social-economic development of the Republic of Belarus. At the first stage of the media field studies (2003-2005), traditional mass media held leading positions, but from 2006 the Internet has rapidly increased its impact, and in 2014 a fundamentally new segment - the social media - stood out from the Internet and became a new actor of the media field. In 2017, the Internet together with television play a decisive role in the development of the media field. At the same time the interest to sociological studies of the features and content of mass media functions has increased, and there is also an obvious request for developing new methods and improving the existing techniques for the sociological study of the contemporary media field.