Agenda-setting actors in the Web 3.0 era: on the impact of digital technologies on the formation of media-political discourse

The subject of this research is a description of the structural and technological patterns of media-political discourse formation in the context of the global transformation of the internet space. The author focuses on the process of changing roles, subjectivity, and form based on key communication factors – traditional information flows, professional financial figures, internet users, and IT corporations. The historical and technological transition of media environments from the centralized and hierarchical paradigm of Web 1.0 through the decentralized user ecosystem of Web 2.0 to the qualitatively new stage of the generative web – Web 3.0 – is explored. Particular attention is paid to the study of new factors influencing the structure of discourse. These include generative search engine optimization (GEO) technologies, autonomous AI agents, large-scale language model algorithms, and IT platform recommendation systems. Technological changes are analyzed in terms of their direct interactions with security societies, the sustainability of national political systems, and the risk of traditional political actors being limited in their use of distributed attention systems in current digital worldviews. Literary analysis and case studies are used. The concepts of Web 1.0, Web 2.0, and Web 3.0 serve as the technological framework for this study, describing the evolution of digitalization. The novelty of this study lies in the potential rethinking of the structure of media-political discourse formation, taking into account the current development of artificial intelligence technologies. While the Web 1.0 era retained a one-to-many class hierarchy, Web 2.0 decentralized the agenda through citizen journalism and microtargeting, the Web 3.0 era carries the risks of increased funding and atomization. The algorithms of large language models and digital bubbles fragment public opinion and completely exclude from digital worldviews those actors whose media production volume exceeds global narratives. As a result, the role of digital evolution in the development of political civilization has shifted between the core actors (politicians and media) and the relay processes (IT platforms and AI algorithms). This suggests the need for a theoretical understanding of new models of political communication in general.