The article presents the results of a comparative visual analysis of popular Russian and British music videos. The sample was based on the most viewed music videos on YouTube in 2019. The authors used the modern interpretation of Bourdieu's theory of capital as a theoretical framework for analysis. Bodily capital is considered as an independent type of capital that has physical, erotic, gender, and aesthetic dimensions. One considers that the capitalization of corporeality in a music video is connected with the plot visualization of the accumulation of bodily capital, i.e. the process of body transformation, by working on its physical features, constructing gender identity, modeling erotic behaviour, and aesthetic attributes of appearance. Moreover, the capitalization of corporeality in the video includes demonstration of obtaining direct or symbolic benefits resulting from the conversion of bodily capital into economic, cultural, or social capital. The crucial features of the capitalization of corporeality in Russian videos are the replication of markers of video characters' social status through body attributes, demonstration of aesthetically idealized bodies, and general irony over corporeality. In the British videos, there is less tongue-in-cheek narrative, especially associated with corporeal attributes; more unified body types are demonstrated.
As of July 2021, more than 153 million people have been diagnosed with COVID-19 globally. Russia has 5.5 million cases with more than 135,000 deaths; while Kyrgyzstan has nearly 132,000 cases and 2000 deaths. While the virus hit the two nations at different times and with different severities, the two nations, as with so many others, both experienced cases of prejudice toward minority groups blamed for the spread of COVID-19. Using integrated threat theory (ITT), this study cross-culturally examines the link between prejudice toward minorities blamed for the spread of COVID-19 in Russia (Asians) and Kyrgyzstan (migrants) and intergroup contact. Results revealed intergroup contact had a positive effect on realistic and symbolic threat. Additionally, results show Kyrgyz respondents had lower levels of symbolic threat than Russian respondents.
ABSTRACT This article explores and compares the visual images used by Channel One (Ch1), Russia’s biggest state-aligned television broadcaster, to justify Russia’s intervention in two major geopolitical conflicts in recent history: the armed conflict in eastern Ukraine and Syria’s civil war. The data reveal that while Ch1’s projection of Ukrainian conflict is anchored in compassion to the Eastern Ukraine population speaking the Russian language, the Syrian war is framed to fuel the feeling of national pride by focusing on the Russian greatness as a political and military superpower. This research, thus, extends the theoretical understanding of media representation of war, especially how the changing political context impacts which identities are represented and made potent through different emotional appeals. The article conceptualises visual images as affective anchors that can be used to reactivate collective memory and dominant discourses and construct emotional relationships between the audience and mediated events.
ABSTRACT In its cinematographic dimension, Soviet Constructivism turns the city into a stage upon which amazing deeds, burlesque situations and acrobatics are performed. The circus, music-hall and variety shows are the new genres that are incorporated first into the theatre, advocated by the Left Front of the Arts (LEF), and shortly afterwards into the cinema. At the same time, the urban space becomes the epitome of the technology propelled by the Soviet state, which drove the industrialisation of the country: factories, machines and engines, road traffic, telecommunications and, of course, the cinema. The present paper addresses these questions – the ‘technification’ and the eccentric view of the city of the Soviet cinema-makers – through the analysis of three period-defining works. The first of these is Glumov's Diary (S. M. Eisenstein, 1923), a satirical short film integrated in the mise-en-scene of Enough Simplicity for Every Wise Man, a play by Aleksander Ostrovski; the second is The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr West in the Land of the Bolsheviks (Lev Kuleshov, 1924); and the third work studied is The Adventures of Oktiabrina (Grigori Kozintsev and Leonid Trauberg, 1924), the first film by the FEKS group.
ABSTRACT New media introduce mechanics in the news consumption and deliberation of public agenda capable of disrupting the democratic process's normative assumptions (echo chambers, filter bubbles). However, most research has been concerned with cases from Western Europe and the US. In this paper, we examine the fragmentation of the Russian public sphere online. We build on previous works with evidence on networked connections between segments of the online public sphere. We collected news items (N = 210,197) and metadata of 12 news outlets with offline and online reach posted on the largest Russian-language platform during one year (2017). Following a computational approach based on topic modeling and qualitative reading, we match the network segments with their news agendas. Although we do not find evidence of fragmentation, we find divergencies in their agendas. We discuss these findings and their contribution to the discussion of fragmentation of publics and agendas in the digital environment.
Emotions are a sensitive theme in all languages, and researchers seek to understand and describe them cross-linguistically and according to the national traditions. The ‘emotional turn’ in the human sciences has touched on the educational sphere in an interesting way, where the traditional Soviet-Russian approach was replaced by the westernized terms of emotional intelligence. While applying these international schemes to the Russian psycholinguistic reality, scholars failed to do so in a consistent way. This study reviews the former and current approaches to emotional education in Russia and provides examples of the application of the authors’ attitudes to Russian-language material. Although some psychologists speak to children in a natural and suitable way, others just translate from English, which often seems inapplicable. Modern bookshops and websites abound with advice and prompts on how to develop the emotional sphere of personal life. The universal approach to emotional upbringing may ignore local language-specific traditions.
The mediatization of social practices has brought new trends and forms of activism to life in society. This paper seeks to explain the theoretical basis for and provide conceptual insight into the Russian practice of hashtag activism – a phenomenon that has become an integral part of contemporary media activism and is of burgeoning interest to both Russian and foreign researchers. Moreover, this phenomenon is equally relevant to the study of the mediatization of politics more widely. Thus, the aim of the paper is to measure the level of the hashtag activism in Russia. This paper presents the results of the survey on social and political issues among young Russians, compares real activism with media activism, and discusses the role of hashtags in social media activism through the lens of several high profiles, public political events that took place in Russia between 2019 and 2020.
The intensive transformation of literally all spheres of life in modern society stimulates the search for an adequate conceptual apparatus in order to understand these processes. The purpose of this work is to show the possibilities of applying semiotic analysis to social-cultural phenomena and processes, which involves going beyond the traditional limitation of semiotics with linguistic phenomena and the reduction of social semiotics to the pragmatic contexts of language use. At the same time, particular attention is given to approaches and developments obtained in the last quarter of the previous century by Russian-speaking authors such as Yuri Lotman, Georgy Bogin, Aron Brudnyj, Tamara Dridze, Aleksandr Portnov, Vladimir Sulimov, as well as their colleagues and students. The priority function and significance of the developments of the aforementioned authors and schools is specifically associated with the discovery of non-trivial possibilities of the semiotic approach, which goes beyond considering the peculiarities of using language in various social practices for the semiotic analysis of such practices themselves.
This collected volume brings together, under one cover, a variety of theoretically grounded and empirically rich contributions dealing with largely different aspects of linguistic pluricentricity i...
The edited volume is a serious academic work providing, for the first time, a broad picture of themes currently being debated by Russian (or, rather, Russophone, since some of twenty-one contributo...
This research uses the Social Network Analysis (SNA) method to determine the main actors in Twitter discussions around news topics. First, using the theory of networked authoritarianism (MacKinnon, 2011 MacKinnon, R. (2011). Liberation technology: China's "networked authoritarianism". Journal of Democracy, 22(2), 32–46. https://doi.org/10.1353/jod.2011.0033[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]), it conceptualizes the ways that authoritarian states may influence domestic media and the broader Internet, taking Russia as our case study. It describes Russia's media system and the incentives behind it. Next, it discusses the role of Twitter in authoritarian societies and defines Twitter's role in today's Russia. Methodology and results are followed by an exploration of the involvement of state-loyal actors in online discussions of the news, including those centered on social media in support of Russia's domestic and international priorities, aiming to set the agenda on sensitive news topics and, thus, support existing authoritarian elites while diminishing voices of opposition.
The article analyzes the role of the representatives of the mass culture and opinion leaders of the age group 18–25 years in the life of the youth of Russia and the formation of their political views, culture and actions by the influence of the Internet on the example of 2018 elections and summer protests. Subject of research: the role of the youth's opinion leaders in the political decision-making process. Objective: to reveal the influence of the leaders of the mass culture on the young people of Russia and their actions in the political sphere with the help of the internet communications. The author has made the analysis of the information about the happened situation and previous information flows. It is concluded that the youth's society of the Russian Federation has the tendency to the exposure of the internet communications and the opinion leaders who operate them.
This study aims to investigate the effects of web store colours (blue or red) on e-commerce. Specifically, a comparison is made between consumers from two cultures: Dutch and Russian. They participated in an experimental survey and expressed their trust in a web store and their intention to purchase a low-involvement product (a laptop sleeve). The results showed that initial trust and cultural background seem to influence online purchase intention. Higher levels of initial trust were related to higher purchase intentions. Interestingly, where the more uncertainty-avoidant Russian consumers trusted the web store, the Dutch consumers were more likely to purchase the product, regardless of the colour they were exposed to. It is recommended to unravel the degree of localisation of web stores’ atmosphere in global e-commerce. Consumers from different cultural backgrounds might not feel and behave the same in a differently coloured, online retail environment.
ABSTRACT An inseparable part of human life, emotions were neglected in the academic discourse in the West for a long time, because scholars juxtaposed them with thought and reason. Yet educational research reveals that emotions are manifestations of high order intelligence and stimulate goal achievement, memory, and motivation in knowledge acquisition. Emotions are culturally and individually shaped. While some cultures consider open demonstration of feelings inappropriate, others perceive unwillingness to reveal emotions as indicators of indifference. These differences are of major importance for understanding contemporary multilingual and multicultural societies. Differences in emotion management between majority and minority cultures may lead to intergroup conflicts. The interrelation between emotions, language and culture emerges in comparative analyses of emotion lexis in different languages. Although all languages contain words expressing positive and negative emotions, idioms, tropes and interjections used to render them vary. There is growing evidence that multilinguals often switch between languages to express their emotions more precisely, adjusting to the communicative situation. Moreover, foreign-language learners often misjudge their interlocutors' attitudes due to the insufficient knowledge of the norms of expressing emotions in the target language. They sometimes fail to predict the consequences of their own utterances, which may cause a communication break-down.
Networking within online communities is recognized as a new way of social interaction. The authors study Russian Internet communities that unite members of the same profession – professional social networks. In such communities, speech etiquette is formed under the influence of communicative values that are, in turn, formed under the influence of values that are determined by a particular profession. We search for a correlation between professional social networks’ speech etiquette features and the profession of their members, and raise the questions: What communication goals are pursued by the users of the communities studied? What communicative situations form the professional social networks’ speech etiquette? What are the communicative values of an online group for professionals? What kinds of professionals’ speech activity may influence the formation of speech etiquette in professional social networks? Speech activity of professional social networks was analysed in ‘Dentistry’, ‘Overheard in the police’, and ‘Law dot ru’.
ABSTRACT What factors influence users to believe the stories they find in social media, and what role do emotions play for users in concluding that a particular fact is ‘true’? This article examines one aspect of emotionalized communication in social networks in an information war context, namely, how social network users make decisions about the reliability of the information they receive. We employ a qualitative study of a single case – a discussion among Russian-speaking Livejournal.com and Facebook.com users of a tragic incident in Ukraine – the deadly fire that took place in the Odessa Trade Union House on 2 May, 2014. The relevancy of this case consists in how, for all its uniqueness as a tragic event, the communications by users in its immediate aftermath typify important features of social media discussions of ‘shocking events’. This article considers a general model of behavior of users who must try to comprehend the tragic news and are caught in a state of uncertainty amid acute confrontation between actors in an information conflict.
ABSTRACT Odessa as a place of contradictions, the mythological ‘cradle of Revolution’ and the capital city of humor, is an essential part of Soviet and post-Soviet culture. Recently, there seems to be an increased longing for simple values and genuine interpersonal relationships that could be found in places of communal living, such as the (in)famous Odessan courtyards. Television and film industry feed the nostalgic feelings with productions set in Odessa, and the scenes that take place in Odessan courtyards often feature reassuringly stereotypical characters. The aim of this article is to analyze how humor and nostalgia are conveyed in such content and the emotional response they obtain from the audience.
ABSTRACT After the October Revolution and the Civil War, funerals became a distinct element of daily Soviet life. As a response to the traumatic moral situations, the filming of funerals fulfilled a documentary and didactic function as it formalized changes that were occurring within society, demonstrated appropriate ways to mourn, and performed a commemorative function. This article contributes to the ongoing study of Sergei Tretiakov's oeuvre by focusing on representations of funeral rights in his Georgian screenplays and films: Eliso (1928), Slepaia (1930), Sol' Svanetii (1930), and Khabarda (1931). It argues that the cinematic representations of funerals in Tretiakov's Georgian screenplays reflect several competing paradigms at work: the funeral rebellion in Eliso, the private funeral in Slepaia, the ethnographic funeral in Sol' Svanetii, and the political funeral in Khabarda. Within each of these scenes, the viewers' emotions are being rerouted and manipulated to align with the film's ideological message. This article further casts a light on a time when manipulating viewers' emotions was at its formative stages, while the contradictions between facts and emotions were being negotiated in LEF's cine-theory and on screen.
ABSTRACT The paper introduces the Multimodal Russian Corpus (MURCO) as a part of the Russian National Corpus (RNC). MURCO provides users with a great amount of linguistic information related to Russian. Moreover, the deeply annotated part of the MURCO contains data concerning Russian gesticulation, speech act system, types of vocal gestures and interjections in Russian, and so on. It should be noted that there is no specific annotation of emotions in MURCO, because it was initially designed as a tool for the linguistic research of different types of oral discourse. However, using various types of annotation, and relying on the correlation between emotions and corresponding language features, we can find a great number of emotional contexts for further study. This article describes the main types of annotation and the structure of the MURCO interface; and demonstrates various ways to extract the necessary information for emotional studies.
ABSTRACT Art has always been connected with human emotions, and fear is one of them. What kinds of narrative patterns are used to depict emotions onscreen, for instance fear? This paper explores the emotion of fear, which predominates in a number of recent Russian TV series, by examining the language of fear onscreen in the intricate interaction of real-life schemata and fantasy, as well as the place of so-called ‘fear-narratives’ in broader contexts related to certain types of events and situations. It describes the tendency in recent Russian TV series, that can be called ‘Russian noir’, which plays with the emotion of fear, and seeks to answer the question, whether there are any differences in depicting and inducing the emotion of fear between the small screen and the big one.
