Dysfunctional Influence of Advertising and Information Activity in the Contemporary European Space: Legal and Social Factors

The article argues the importance of the sociological study of the dysfunctional influence of advertising as a specilized type of the contemporary European space information activities. Today advertising and information activity has significantly evolutionized as a social communication form. From the simple function of promoting goods and services, advertising has transformed into a powerful industry having penetrated into all the ontological mechanisms of the public life. At the beginning of the XXI century, advertising became an important functional component of the modern information space. According to the social science scholars opinion, modern societies witness a significant increase of globalization advertising practices, grow a direct and hidden institutional influence of advertising on various aspects of the individual and collective actors life. Obviously, the global prevalence of advertising, its progressive internationalization and direct involvement in innovative information technologies serve as an important cognitive incentives for the revision of the established traditional views on advertising and information activities. Taking into account these circumstances, the main objective of this article is to characterize the social and communicative peculiarities of the advertising as an information activity in the contemporary European space, to researsh the dysfunctional influence of the advertising under the identification aspects of the following influence regulative legal and social factors. Within the framework of this article the author comes to the conclusions which reflect the innovative scientific approaches for understanding advertising in a broader context of its comprehension – namely, as a special information activity with both constructive and destructive influences upon the processes of constructing certain individuals and social groups life styles. Also the article argues the globalization process intensification to be the important ontological and cognitive stimulus determining the need for further scientific research of the advertising activity legal and social factors, taking into account existing resource inequalities between the European industrial and post-industrial societies interacting in the common information space