Publications

The article is devoted to the analysis of the problems that arise in the system of social networks in connection with the intensification of the struggle of law enforcement bodies of the Russian Federation with phenomena that are referred to in the legal field as “extremism”, “incitement to hatred” and “insulting the feelings of believers”. The goal of the project is to analyze the problems of regulating social networks and author’s content in the context of world and domestic experience in the struggle for “network neutrality”. An interdisciplinary analysis was used in the work. In the modern Russian media space, the role of an expert and expertise on which the assessment of the content of social networks depends. The analysis performed in the article indicates that the traditional methods of examining web texts need substantial updating. The question was also raised about the need to clearly describe the qualifications of an expert and to regulate the selection of experts and the boundaries of their functional activities. Keyword: Network Сontent; Net Neutrality; Psycholinguistic Expertise.

This chapter presents the case of Russell Brand in order to look at how the most fundamental antinomies of the type of celebrity activism put in tension some prevalent theoretical frameworks around the field. In November 2013, Brand gave an interview to the journalist Jeremy Paxman for the BBC show Newsnight where he advocated, among other things, a ‘revolution’ and a ‘massive redistribution of wealth’. The chapter explores how the devotion to the revolutionary cause was embodied in the ethos of anarchist and Marxist revolutionaries of the past. Brand’s identity both as a superstar of creative Britain and a revolutionary agent of anti-austerity movements displays the in-built conflicts, tensions, and discrepancies that the figure of the activist celebrity embodies. The tensions that the activist celebrity enables may renegotiate dominant regimes of understanding by offering visibility to new vocabularies around social concerns without necessarily being perceived as a reaction against available electoral politics.

This chapter  analyses the evolution of the relationship between centralized control over local media media systems and local interests at the regional level in Russia. It demonstrates that during the post-soviet period the soviet hierarchical control was reproduced as a result of the dominance of the so called “central media” over the regional media. As the political balance between federal and regional powers evolved,  so did the model of media control. From this point of view the local policy during Yeltsin’s period was shaped by the shift of power from the centre, allowing the regions to develop high levels of autonomy.  This  transformed local media into powerful agents of local politics and contributed to the high pressure on local media from different political and elite groups. Such pressures paradoxically formed more pluralist model of the press. After 2000 the power of local media was weakened, which dissociated retired local media from elite group political processes and contributed to the monopolization of local media by local authorities especially on the basis of commercial contracts between such authorities and the press. Such contracts shape considerably the control of local media by the local authorities paying media for loyal coverage of their policies.  

The paper addresses the questions of data science education of current importance. It aims to introduce and justify the framework that allows flexibly evaluate the processes of a data expedition and a digital media created during it. For these purposes, the authors explore features of digital media artefacts which are specific to data expeditions and are essential to accurate evaluation. The rubrics as a power but hardly formalizable evaluation method in application to digital media artefacts are also discussed. Moreover, the paper documents the experience of rubrics creation according to the suggested framework. The rubrics were successfully adopted to two data-driven journalism courses. The authors also formulate recommendations on data expedition evaluation which should take into consideration structural features of a data expedition, distinctive features of digital media, etc.

This article looks at the so called curatorial statements in global art biennials, that is to say the discourses that independent curators put together so as to interpret, justify, and explain what their exhibitions are about to art professionals, experts and the public. It asks, through which value systems curatorial branding hails and crafts middle-class, educated and self-reflective lifestyles and publics with high cultural and often symbolic capital? I will be arguing that these statements constitute a form of writing genre that follows recurring linguistic patterns, involving strategic gestures of negating dominant culture, refusing idiosyncratic straw-man narratives and blending expert with populist vocabularies. While seemingly written by socially engaged and critical ‘auteurs', these gestures of curatorial self-presentation can be read as tools for producing surplus value in line with creative economy's celebration of uniqueness, difference and unconventionality. I analyze several statements from recent large scale biennials in terms of the binary oppositions they fabricate, the both mass and specialized audiences they address and the confessional, self-reflective politics they employ. The writing and reading of these statements correspond to forms of acquired cultural capital, for instance through education or through the experience of belonging in art milieus. Contemporary biennials thus remediate the arena of cultural distinction as the ‘cultivated’ in these settings are not expected to be out-and-above-of-society experts similarly to the modern art of the past but amateur polymaths and cultural omnivores who are able to discover uniqueness and unconventionality within the total realm of cultural production.

In his recent book The Discursive-Material Knot, [Carpentier, N. (2017). The discursive-material Knot: Cyprus in conflict and community media participation. New York: Peter Lang]. Nico Carpentier identifies three nodal points of antagonistic discourse: the need for destruction of the enemy, homogenization of the self as opposed to the enemy, and the radical difference of the enemy. The latter appears when the self and the other are thought to be irreconcilably at odds, and the enemy is presented as inferior. In the more extreme cases, this radical othering leads to a dehumanization and demonization of the other, which makes the destruction of the enemy easier. Using post-Maidan social confrontation within Ukraine and its Facebook discussions as a case study, this paper analyzes how exactly the radical othering and subsequent dehumanization of the enemy is discursively structured, and describe the conditions under which such extreme manifestations of conflict could be eliminated with the ultimate goal of transforming antagonistic into agonistic discourse.

This study proposes the interventionist and the detached orientations to watchdog journalism through the conceptual lens of journalistic role performance. Based on a content analysis of 33,640 news stories from sixty-four media outlets in eighteen countries, we measure and compare both orientations across different countries using three performative aspects of monitoring: intensity of scrutiny, voice of the scrutiny, and source of the event. Our findings show that the interventionist approach of watchdog journalism is more likely to be found in democracies with traditionally partisan and opinion-oriented journalistic cultures or experiencing sociopolitical crises. In turn, the detached orientation predominates in democracies with journalistic traditions associated to objectivity. Although both orientations have a lower presence in transitional democracies, the detached watchdog prevails, while in non-democratic countries the watchdog role is almost absent. Our results also reveal that structural contexts of undemocratic political regimes and restricted press freedom are key definers of watchdog role performance overall. However, the type of political regime is actually more important—and in fact the most important predictor—for detached than for interventionist reporting.

An innovative development based on the use of modern media and communication technologies requires a certain level of competence in how to use such technologies. These competencies are united by the concept of “information literacy”, proposed by Paul Gilster in 1997. The tradition of studying digital literacy in Russia is the subject of the following chapter. The different approaches to understanding digital literacy are as follows: ICT, psychological and pedagogical, media and information and industrial approaches.

Special attention is paid to the four-component digital literacy model, proposed in the framework of the project by ROCIT and the Higher School of Economics. This model is based on two substantial oppositions: firstly, the opposition “technical-technological/socio-humanitarian” and, secondly, the opposition “opportunities/threats”. It was used to construct the Index of Digital Literacy in the Russian Regions, measured since 2015.

The results of a series of media literacy measuring surveys by the ZIRCON Group from 2009–2016 are also presented.

It has been argued that by allowing users to unfriend, unfollow, and block political and cultural ‘others,’ Facebook facilitates the discouragement of dialog between those holding different views on political issues. Using a case study of a civil confrontation in Ukraine, the paper analyzes the reasons for unfriending political ‘others’ reported by 699 respondents of a qualitative survey. Its findings are in line with researchers who have also found that the likelihood of selective avoidance is higher among people who are more politically active, emotionally involved, and who have more online friends. The paper also discusses an interesting discovery that has not been previously considered. The respondents often shunned political ‘others’ out of suspicion that they were trolls. As this paper suggests, whether real or imagined, trolling has turned out to be a real force influencing people’s decisions to withdraw from communication on the most important issues of public life.

Cultural diplomacy has traditionally been a strategic instrument of national governments to achieve foreign policy objectives. Nation states have supported the international missions of museums to promote national cultural ideas and values abroad to pursue strategic geopolitical interests. However, in the twenty-first century the complex process of neoliberal globalisation and political decentralisation have transformed traditional cultural diplomacy based on exclusively national projections. There are new forms, channels and narratives of cultural diplomacy that emerge with the appearance of new types of cultural institutions, such as franchise museums, like Guggenheim Bilbao, Hermitage Amsterdam or Louvre Abu Dhabi. This article explores the case of Louvre Abu Dhabi to exemplify the phenomenon of ‘glocal’ museum diplomacy that rests on global ambitions of the local Abu Dhabi government and at the same time draws on national aspirations of France to strengthen its geopolitical presence and influence in the Middle East. The article identifies multiple museum narratives that transform museum diplomacy from a bilateral, state-initiated strategic activity into a multilateral and multidirectional endeavour engaging stakeholders and audiences on local, national and global levels.

The title of the book refers to the sociological survey, conducted by the "Public opinion" Fund in 2000. It is focused on the representation of Internet as a complex phenomenon in modern Russia. First, the Internet is considered as part of the media system that not only rapidly developing, but also significantly transforming the system as a whole. Second, it contains the analysis of main online markets in Russia. Thirdly, the Internet is analyzed in political, social and cultural contexts.

This article examines how disability and sexuality are represented in today’s Russian media, and how disabled people navigate these understandings. Drawing on online storytelling and frst person stories about sexuality told by disabled people in the public sphere, the article provides a qualitative account of people with disabilities, journalists and civil rights advocates, analyzing how contemporary Russians with disabilities narrate their own lives in public forums. The focus of their stories, as well as the accounts of eyewitnesses, volunteers in the institutions, is on the constraints and limits of sexuality and intimacy spheres imposed by the professionals, families and wider society. This article also interprets the narratives behind disabled people’s sexuality circulating in contemporary Russia through digital networks, in combination with qualitative data from primary sources: disability activists and two journalists with and without disability in Moscow. It is argued that the telling of these stories in a public forum is a political act. In personal stories about sexual, bodily experiences told in the interviews or autobiographical texts, self-presentations and discussions in social networks, the voices of people are heard, permitting emancipation from previous categories. However, disability always remains with them, playing an important role in social lives of these people and in their sexual experiences and identities, becoming the cornerstone of the personal and collective re-defning of themselves. Using ideas of “visibility politics” (Arendt), queer/crip kinship and intimate citizenship (Plummer), the authors demonstrate how someone might choose to speak publicly about a topic and how this understanding develops cultural understandings of contemporary Russia.

25 years after the first publication of Media Events: The Live Broadcasting of History (Dayan and Katz 1992), not only has the concept of media events firmly taken root in media theory, but it has also been developed considerably as a result of multiple critical interpretations. Going beyond a neo-Durkheimian ritual perspective, which emphasized the integrative role of ceremonial media events, has allowed a number of authors to identify such genres as ‘disruptive’, ‘traumatic’ or ‘conflictual’ media events, including, first and foremost, terror, disaster and war (Cottle 2006; Dayan 2008; Hepp and Couldry 2010; Katz and Liebes 2007; Mitu and Poulakidakos 2016). However, there is another type of events targeting social and cultural change, which do not exactly fit the ‘integrative/disruptive’ opposition, even if these events take the form of protest, for ‘protests and strikes are agreed forms of sanctioned disruption’ (Katz and Liebes 2007: 159). Until protest grows into a revolution and civil war, it is an instance of ‘ritual’ chaos, constituting a part of the order. Events of this type show some features of social drama and cultural performance (Turner 1974, 1982; Alexander 2006, 2011). Nevertheless, not every ‘transformative media event’ (Mihelj 2008) has such radical goals and sweeping scale.

‘Transformative media events’ are initiated in public spaces by citizens, whose disagreement with certain social conditions and/or a call for change they express. The transformative power can be an inherent element of the event (for instance, in the case of a protest action), or can emerge as a result of public response to a published opinion or document (such as a YouTube video recording police abuse). The latter case includes practices of ‘sousveillance’ (Mann et al. 2003) or ‘citizen witnessing’ (Allan 2013) directed at the democratization of social relations. A key feature of ‘transformative media events’ is their tight connection to the ‘citizen media’, by means of which they become visible and powerful. In this context it seems useful to consider media events as ‘user-generated media events’ (Mitu 2016), ‘new media events’ (Neverson and Adeyanju 2017), ‘transmedia events’ (Bacallao-Pino 2016), etc.

Internet memes, which constitute a significant portion of social-media content and an important vector of users’ communicative exchange, have by now turned from mere entertainment to a news source. However, they are still approached rather uncritically by young audiences. A survey was conducted among Russian students (N = 138) at the National Research University Higher School of Economics, and it identified not only the “problem spots” of the Russian memosphere but also a number of skills in decoding information, which are necessary today as part of “Meme Literacy.” These skills range from an adequate assessment of the type of message and verification of the news topic to the fact-checking of the verbal and visual content the meme is based on.

The article discusses the mechanisms of constructing leaders of public opinion in a modern neo-information society. A set of methods has been applied: the authors’ study using the focus group method ‘Bloggers=influencers?’ (n=10); the secondary analysis of ZIRCON research group sociological study by the personal interview ‘The image of a journalist in the mass consciousness of Russians’ (n=1604); frame analysis of the construction of hype as a social phenomenon in the media discourse; authors’ research using the case study method ‘Phenomenon of Diana Shurygina." The chronological scope of the study: 2017-2019. It is concluded that the strengthening of the actors of the blogging institution in the media became possible as a result of a ‘crisis of confidence’ to the ‘traditional’ media, in particular to television, with a politicized media agenda leading to the acquisition of a propaganda vector, thereby determining the trend of media piarisation. Being the influencers (mainly for the young generation who are exceptionally loyal), bloggers affect the construction of the system of norms, values, and attitudes of their audience. At the same time, the functioning of bloggers as leaders of public opinion promotes to the inspiration of marketing strategies: the sales of different goods and services through native advertising and product placement, the so-called influencer marketing. Besides, by constructing such social phenomena as hype, bloggers become drivers of hypononomics (or the economy of hype).

This chapter compares the Russian national legislation on online freedom of expression with the Council of Europe’s (CoE) legal standards on this issue to investigate the extent to which the Russian legislation has been consistent with the CoE vision. The chapter first examines the CoE perspective, including the European Court of Human Rights case law and non-binding documents of the other main CoE institutions. It then analyses the Russian national legislation and the perspectives of the highest Russian courts. The chapter compares the CoE and Russian legal visions of key principles in the governance of online freedom of expression, the new notion of media, editorial responsibility for users’ comments, the right to anonymity, and the protection of journalists from surveillance. The chapter concludes that the Russian legislation on online freedom of expression needs a considerable revision to comply with the CoE standards and suggests that Internet companies and international organisations should drive this process.

Stereotypes are ideological and justify the existing social structure. Although stereotypes persist, they can change when the context changes. Communism’s rise in Eastern Europe and Asia in the 20th century provides a natural experiment examining social-structural effects on social class stereotypes. Nine samples from post-communist countries (N = 2241), compared with 38 capitalist countries (N=4344), support the historical, socio-cultural rootedness of stereotypes. More positive stereotypes of the working class appear in post-communist countries, both compared with other social groups in the country and compared with working-class stereotypes in capitalist countries; post-communist countries also show more negative stereotypes of the upper class. We further explore whether communism’s ideological legacy reflects how societies infer groups’ stereotypic competence and warmth from structural status and competition. Post-communist societies show weaker status-competence relations and stronger (negative) competition-warmth relations; respectively, the lower meritocratic beliefs and higher priority of embeddedness as ideological legacies may shape these relationships.

Issue 20 celebrates ten years of Digital Icons. As an integral part of this celebratory issue we want to paint a broad picture of the changes Runet underwent in the last decade. In order to achieve this goal, we asked leading scholars in the field—among them most of the authors of Digital Icons 1—for short statements: Did Runet change in the past ten years, and if so, how? Has this change affected the academic or professional field in which you work? Did the field itself change? Have your methods and theories of study evolved? Based on the answers we received from Olena Goroshko, Tatjana Hofmann, Ekaterina Lapina-Kratasyuk, Sudha Rajagopalan, Ellen Rutten, Robert A. Saunders, Henrike Schmidt, Elena Trubina and Vera Zvereva, we compiled a panorama of ten years of Studies in Russian, Eurasian and Central European New Media.

Drawing on the discourse theory of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe (1985), this chapter discusses how the popular memes ‘jumper’, ‘kolorad,’ ‘maidown,’ ‘panhead’, ‘sovok’, ‘and vatnik’, which had been created or activated during the Euromaidan revolution in Ukraine, contributed to the intensification of its internal social conflict. To analyze how these and similar significations deepened old societal divisions and created new ones, the chapter refers to Nico Carpentier’s theory (2017) of the Discursive-Material Knot (DMK) and its conceptualization of the antagonistic discourse characterized by three nodal points: (1) the radical difference of the enemy, (2) homogenization of the self as opposed to the enemy, and (3) the need for destruction of the enemy. Analyzing discussions of the Maidan and its developments by Ukrainian users of Facebook, the chapter argues that all three points of Carpentier’s antagonistic discourse were evident in the ‘anti-other’ discourses of both pro-Maidan and anti-Maidan Facebook users.

This article is devoted to the analysis of the politics of the past in Russian cinema. This research is conducted within the scientific field of public history, this approach sheds light on the existence of a compromise in the reconstruction of the past between the authorities and society. One identifiable trend was toward the transformation of classic historical drama into the heroic past: comic-style blockbusters about the super heroic past have been created.

In recent years scholars have called for more attention to local net histories, work that demonstrates how networked computing developed in specific geographical, material, and social contexts. Research carried out in this spirit stands in contrast to a canonical and popular history of the (singular) “Internet,” and thus sets up an opposition or dyad between “local” net histories and the “global” or mainstream history of ARPAnet, the Internet Protocol, and the World Wide Web. This article takes up the call for local net histories by focusing on Tonet, a local network that was developed in the Siberian city of Tomsk and which peaked in usage in the early 2000s. However, rather than assuming an opposition between local and global Internet history, this article interrogates how the local net and global Internet were articulated by Tonet’s computer scientists and regional journalists at the time. The article thus enquires into symbolic connections between a local net and the global Internet, unsettling this opposition while also drawing at