Publications

This paper explores, mainly from a legal perspective, the extent to which the Russian regulations of traditional TV and online audiovisual media policies have been consistent with the Council of Europe (hereinafter CoE) standards. The study compares between the CoE and Russian approaches to  specific aspects of audiovisual regulation including licensing, media ownership, public service media, digitalization, and national production. The paper first studies the CoE perspective through examining its conventional provisions related to audiovisual media, the case law of the European Court of Human Rights as well as the CoE non-binding documents. The paper then considers Russian national legislation governing audiovisual media and the Russian general jurisdiction courts’ practice on broadcast licensing. The paper suggests that the Russian audiovisual regulations are insufficiently compatible with the CoE standards and more in line with the Soviet regulatory traditions.

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.

Traditionally, regional mass media has been the least-studied component of the Russian media system; however, beginning from the 2000s, transformations in the nation's political and economic spheres have influenced the position of local media. This paper provides a deeper investigation of the processes and patterns underlying the development of regional mass media in modern Russia. The research is grounded on an analytical review of secondary sources, which is supported by 14 in-depth interviews with media professionals from 5 regions in Russia. The results reveal that Russia's regional media outlets operate both as commercial actors and public service actors. This duality is rooted in several multidirectional and controversial changes in the nation's economic and political systems, as well as in a journalist culture which causes media outlets to have a vague understanding of their places and functions in society.

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.

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.

In this paper, we propose an alternative approach to analysing the current duality of the Russian media system, which for a long time was regarded as transitional. We propose to interpret the current Russian media system in terms of institutional conflict between norms, which were artificially implemented and the grounded informal rules embodied in everyday practices both from market agents and audiences. Mainly implemented after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the norms were based on a neo-liberal representation of the media system, involving financial independence of the media from the state, a ‘news culture’ instead of a ‘propaganda culture’ and so on. At the same time, the informal rules were based on the paternalistic role of the state, the accessibility tradition and the fragmentation of the public sphere. The interaction of such elements forms the dualist or ‘uncertain’ character of the media system.

What is hybrid warfare?  And what role does information play in today's conflicts? In the context of the technological/information revolution of the last two decades—which has greatly amplified the danger posed by nonmilitary means of political struggle—Hybrid Conflicts and Information Warfare addresses these questions from the perspectives of both Western and Russian experts. Incorporating both theory and contemporary realities, including the case of the Islamic State, the authors offer a unique dialogue on the nature of conflict in the second decade of the twenty-first century.

Political internet memes are a little studied contemporary phenomenon situated at the nexus of digital culture and political communication. Meaningful as a unit of cultural transmission of information in the network, a meme can be seen, on the one hand, as a spontaneous product of the creativity of the masses, political participation mechanism, and on the other – as an instrument of political PR-technologies. The article is devoted to the results of a study of memes posted on Russian social media during the presidential election campaign – 2018; the purpose of this work was the formation of ideas about the essence of the political meme in Runet and the study of the specifics of its application in Russian election communication. On the basis of the data obtained there are analysed the leading functions of political memes of the Runet, their main varieties, semantic characteristics of memes that form the image of Russian politicians. The study of large arrays of memetic messages made it possible to judge which thematic "accents" of election campaigns of candidates are in demand by producers and distributors of memes, and also what are the features of the transformation of information into memes.

The study shows that the 2018 Russian presidential campaign is characterized by changes in communication technologies, caused, among other things, by general changes in the media landscape and the arrival of "new digital" generations. At the same time, memes, which make up a large share of social media content and a predominant vector of their users' communication exchange, in recent years have increasingly changed their character from entertainment to political and become an important aspect of Web 2.0 policy. As a result, we should note the strengthening of entertainment  and "carnivalization" of electoral processes as well as the transformation of the Internet into a kind of network battleground of various political actors for a place in the news agenda. The relevance of the study is given by the fact that, unlike foreign researchers who actively interpret the role of memetics in electoral processes, the political potential of the Internet meme has been studied in the Russian scientific tradition only in the very first approximation.

Philosophical aesthetics is routinely grounded upon a binary opposition separating art, a reflective and contemplative activity, from popular culture, the brute and philistine cultural expressions of the masses. While art is expected to have a broadly conceived educational mission, it has to simultaneously denounce such popular culture forms that involve propaganda, didacticism and immediacy in order to legitimize itself socially. This paper explores the social and political implications of art and left-wing populism through the work of the British artist and taxi driver Mark McGowan and his project Artist Taxi Driver. Employing a direct language and an aggressive anti-neoliberal rhetoric grounded on widespread populist binaries, such as the ‘elites’ and the ‘people’, McGowan enacts a militant artistic persona in his series of YouTube videos. His daily commentary on subjects such as the Greek crisis, the Scottish referendum and the Jeremy Corbyn election both challenges the split between art and popular culture and mobilizes this split as a populist negation of prevalent forms of governance.

This paper examines Russian defamation law and judicial policies to identify the extent to which they have been influenced by international legal standards on media freedom put forward in Europe by the Council of Europe (CoE). The main research method employed in this work is a qualitative comparative analysis of the CoE standards and the Russian national law as well as judicial practice. This paper suggests that the CoE standards have mostly an insufficient influence to the Russian legislation of defamation, and the discrepancy between the Russian and the CoE’s perspectives on defamation has increased during Russia’s membership in the CoE, especially because of the recent amendements on online defamation. The paper also argues that the CoE standards on defamation has had diverse impacts on the Russian judicial practice. The paper suggests that international organisations have the potential to become the main social platforms for resisting “weaponized” defamation but new effective measures should be devised for this.

A persistent representation in Aki Kaurismäki’s cinema renders the members of the working class as longing for an ‘ordinary’ life, a life involving secure employment, conventional love and a middle-class lifestyle. Rather than pursuing a rationally calculated career, goal-oriented plans or competitive positioning in the marketplace, however, Kaurismäki’s heroes inhabit an emotional tonality marked by the opposite values; humility, compassion, solidarity and an underdog eccentricity. The customary modalities of subaltern bonding sketch here a working-class culture that does not rely on reasoning and careful planning but flourishes on the spontaneity, solidarity, counterintuitiveness, musicality and poetic inspiration of the characters’ lives and wandering. 

This article presents a historical-sociological analysis of dynamics of moral panic emergence in the Western and Russian society. On the secondary analysis ground of sociological research data 1980-2000s and their correlation with the historical facts it has been established that the focus of moral panic is around vulnerable groups: young people and children. Youth and children can be a subject as well as an object of moral panic, since they are either “victim” or “offender” in different contexts .The author explains this pattern from the point of view that the younger generation is taken as the “successor” of the current socially active group. Therefore, it causes the concern for the moral health of the society future“basis”.

Expressive social movements, which are getting more popular among young people, constitute a particular danger regarding the society future “basis”. Joining a certain subculture, the individual adopts its behaviour patterns and value system. Attracting more and more participants, this process becomes natural and widespread, it is seen by the society and the media as a moral decline, the total deformation of values and worldviews.

According to the results of the research, it has been concluded that moral panics produce ambivalent social changes. On the one hand, a control and sanctions are toughened, on the other hand, the archaic values and norms are eliminated and individuals are adapted to the contemporary social reality.

Since the advent of digitization, the conceptual confusion surrounding the semantic galaxy that comprises the media and journalism universes has increased. Journalism across several media platforms provides rapidly expanding content and audience engagement that assist in enhancing the journalistic experience. Exploring Transmedia Journalism in the Digital Age provides emerging research on multimedia journalism across various platforms and formats using digital technologies. While highlighting topics, such as immersive journalism, nonfictional narratives, and design practice, this book explores the theoretical and critical approaches to journalism through the lens of various technologies and media platforms. This book is an important resource for scholars, graduate and undergraduate students, and media professionals seeking current research on media expansion and participatory journalism.

This study examines the development of Russian anti-extremist legislation with the purpose to identify the extent to which it correlates with the legal standards of the Council of Europe (CoE) on the right to freedom of expression. Apart from Russian national legislation, the article also considers judicial visions of extremism – for the first time in the field.  The analysis goes beyond the issue of compliance and non-compliance and shows the fundamental differences of Russian and CoE legal visions of the issue. It is suggested that the differences have considerably increased over the last few years which is mainly explained by the shift of priorities of the Russian political establishment, rather than by pressing social needs. It is concluded that the Russian concept of extremism has the worrying potential for further expansion both in Russia and beyond it, including in what we call “alternative” international law.