FORMS AND COURSE OF THE COGNITIVE PROCESS

In the practice of the press, the journalistic work, as we know, exists in several varieties, denoted by the concept of “genres”. While fulfilling the general purpose of a journalistic text, its genre versions are nevertheless focused on different goals and therefore need a different measure of comprehension of reality. In accordance with this, the cognitive activity of the correspondent has acquired three forms, largely differing from each other in the scope of tasks, in their composition, and in the specific conditions in which they are solved.

The simplest version of the cognitive process shows us news journalism. This concept refers to the entire set of genres, focused on the communication of operational event information. True, the news must first be found, and this in itself is a great difficulty. However, as a stage of the creative act, cognitive activity in news journalism is still the least lasting and most similar to what is called the collection of facts, although in reality it is not reduced to this. The bottom line is that the subject of knowledge here is exactly the news - a fact that has actually happened, essentially changing the situation. Accordingly, the target cognitive task of the journalist is. to establish this fact within its defining boundaries (in practice they are understood as answers to the questions “Who?” “What?” “Where?” “When?”) and determine how significant changes in the state of affairs it causes (for this you have to answer “Why?”, “Why?”, “What follows from this?”). The latter implies intensive mental activity, in which all the basic logical operations are used: correlation, recognition, discrimination, analysis, synthesis, evaluation. However, there is no need to deeply penetrate unobvious connections: it can be quite compensated by the cooperation of a journalist with more competent persons - participants of events or experts who agreed to give their comments on what is happening. The cognitive process in this case proceeds as familiarization with the situation, takes relatively little time and relies on common sense - the inherent ability of man to think.

Much more difficult tasks confront a journalist if his creative act is focused on preparing problem-analytical material designed to reveal the essence of the events that take place, to determine the trends of their development, to discover the roots of the arising difficulties and possible ways to eliminate them. Here we are dealing with another kind of cognitive process - with journalistic research of the situation. It is a phased cognitive activity, directed by clearly aware tasks and implying not only the establishment of facts. The subject of knowledge in this case is the situation as a whole, taken from the point of view of a broader problem concerning many people. Mastering such a subject is impossible without identifying the unobvious links of the facts that make up the situation, first of all - the relationships of cause and effect. Therefore, common sense is not enough here, we need a work of a different nature, a different degree of tension, which does not boil down to intuitive insights (although the role of intuition is great) or to the above-mentioned logical operations (although they are all found here). The same can be said about cases where the attention of the correspondent focuses on the person with whom he is going to introduce the audience.

The third variant of the cognitive process in journalism is due to the special circumstances of reality, namely, the presence of negative aspects in it that harm society, but not only not obvious, but hidden, disguised as prosperous. This may be, for example, an unseemly essentially, but successfully camouflaged, scammed activity or bribery among representatives of power structures. If a journalist needs to understand what is happening and expose his participants, the usual research is not enough. The subject of knowledge in this case is a situation consisting of facts, much of which are deliberately hidden, and the connections between them, if they are revealed, are far from being in their true light. The target cognitive task turns out to be extremely difficult here: to extract hidden data and understand their essence, their meaning. The solution of such a task proceeds as a journalistic investigation , during which the author of the future material has to repeatedly encounter non-standard (“abnormal”) conditions and make non-standard decisions, the responsibility for which he must take.

But no matter how significant were the differences between these three variants of the cognitive process, the mechanisms of the psyche, through which they are carried out, are the same: perception, memory, and intuitive thinking, visual-figurative thinking, verbal-logical thinking, and imagination participate in processing the informational signals of reality. Fundamentally one and the composition of technological operations (procedures), forming the act of knowledge. Each of them is complex, that is, it is a solution to a set of three types of tasks: empirical, implying the establishment of facts, theoretical, aimed at identifying internal and external relationships between facts, organizational and practical, aimed at optimal organization of progress. The specific number of tasks, as well as the degree of complexity, depends on the variety of the cognitive process, but to some extent they are always present in journalistic knowledge. This determines the stability of the operational structure, which forms, as it were, a four-step ladder, along which the journalist “descends” into the depths of life.

The first “step” is the development of an application for a topic when the address of the desired real situation is revealed (a specific object of reality deserving of the attention of the press) and the extent of the problem is presumed to be determined in the context of which the desired situation may be significant; At this stage, the planned work.

The second "step" - the collection of preliminary data. The meaning of this operation is to increase the level of competence of the journalist, enriching his knowledge about the object to work on, and about the relevant problem at the expense of information already recorded in documentary sources, as well as clarify the plan of activities and specific practical actions.

Another "step" - the definition of a specific subject of study , carried out during the initial direct acquaintance with the object. At this stage, the correctness of the “homework” - preliminarily elaborated assumptions (hypotheses) about the state of the object, the nature of the relationship with the problem that the journalist intends to consider it - is checked and the activity plan is specified again, the necessary practical steps are specified.

The cognitive process ends with a directional study of the subject - the operation of the most complex and most developed: it provides for the solution of the main tasks of journalistic knowledge in a particular creative act. It establishes all the facts characterizing the situation; the work of thought reveals all their essential connections and attitudes toward the problem; conclusions are made about the essence of what is happening; are aware of - and discussed with competent persons - solutions to the problem [7].

The result of the cognitive stage of the creative act is the journalistic concept of the situation studied - an idea of ​​what is happening, interpreted by the journalist in accordance with his worldview, with his system of values. On the basis of this concept, the specific idea of ​​the future work is then formed . The theme of the text, its idea, the principle of organization, already clearly appear in the structure of the concept - this is the concept that differs from the concept.