Article
Features of internet consumption in Russian rural settlements
Russian media infrastructure is known to be more developed in big cities compared with smaller settlements. Thus, the rural audience is not a popular object of research. It is believed that the development of new media, including the internet, occurs with a certain delay there, and also the commercial potential of these types of customers is quite low.
Authors of the proposed article are aiming to answer the question: What are the features of internet development and consumption in rural Russia? The research is based on the results of several quantitative surveys, covering all the Russian population including rural residents, as well as two ethnographic research expeditions to the Kostroma and Rostov regions.
By analyzing the logs of corporate e-mail networks we found a number of patterns, showing how the size of ego-networks of individual employees changes on a day by day basis. We proposed a simple model that adequately describes the observed time dependence of an employee's "social circle". Comparison of experimental data with the theoretical model showed that employees are divided into two groups - with fast and slow changes in their social circles, respectively. We believe that the presence of these groups reflects both project-type and process-type of employees' activities. Comparison of data obtained before and during the global economic crisis has shown that the crisis led to an actual reduction in project-type activities.
This book provides a comprehensive analysis of the ways in which new media technologies have shaped language and communication in contemporary Russia. It traces the development of the Russian-language internet (Runet) from late-Soviet cybernetics to the advent of Twitter and explores the evolution of web-based communication practices, showing how they have both shaped and been shaped by social, political, linguistic and literary realities. Throughout the volume, leading Runet scholars draw attention to features and trends that are characteristic of global new media, as well as those that are more specific to Russian media culture.
Legal pluralism and the experience of the state in the Caucasus are at the centre of this edited volume. This is a region affected by a multitude of legal orders and the book describes social action and governance in the light of this, and considers how conceptions of order are enforced, used, followed and staged in social networks and legal practice. Principally, how is the state perceived and how does it perform in both the North and South Caucasus? From elections in Dagestan and Armenia to uses of traditional law in Ingushetia and Georgia, from repression of journalism in Azerbaijan to the narrations of anti-corruption campaigns in Georgia - the text reflects the multifarious uses and performances of law and order. The collection includes approaches from different scholarly traditions and their respective theoretical background and therefore forms a unique product of multinational encounters.
This book presents a course of English for Specific Purposes devoted specifically to the widely-discussed topic Web 2.0. It covers several aspects of online communication ranging from online friendship to business interacions. The activities presented in the coursebook are aimed at developing students’ communicative competence in both written and oral discourse. Web 2.0 includes a variety of authentic articles that arouse interest and provoke discussions. It also presents listening texts based on professional podcasts. Most grammar and vocabulary activities are developed from authentic texts as well.
Web 2.0 can be used at the B2-C1 levels of Common European Famework. The coursebook will help learn and practice the target vocabulary. It will be relevant to those interested in the development of Information and Communication Technologies in general and the Internet in particular.
The article discusses the phenomenon of interconnected glocal hospitality communities which have recently spread over the world in the context of the internet development and cultural globalization processes. It focuses on a typical community of users of CouchSurfi ng.org, a major social hospitality network in St. Petersburg. The author argues that, in the framework of this web service, there occurs a transformation of virtual groups of users localized in various spots of the globe into actual interconnected glocal communities which shape shared identities, norms, values, and practices among its members.
The following article is devoted to analysis of civil identity's social foundations through the actor-network theory framework. Three aspects are considered: the specific character of civic identity as a subject-object interaction between the actor and the state, the network interactions in the «real» and «virtual» spaces, social memory, social and cultural experience, socially-relevant knowledge as a basis for forming a shared social context of civic identity.
There have been implemented engineering and development of multi-agent recommender system «EZSurf» that performs analysis of interests and provides recommendations for the social network «VKontakte» users based on the data from profile of particular user. During the work process different methods and technological solutions have been analyzed with examination of their advantages and disadvantages. Besides of that the comparative analysis of analogous products has been held where the most similar is Russian start-up service - Surfingbird. Based on this analysis the decision of recommender system implementation and integration has been accepted. The feature of this system is that it uses social network “VKontakte” profile for user’s data collection and API of third-party services (LastFM, TheMovieDB) for an extraction of information about similar objects. Such an approach contributes into optimization of recommender system, because it does not require creation of its own object classification system and objects database. The functionality of multi-agent system was separated between three agents. First agent (Collector) collects user data from “VKontakte” profile using VK API. Second agent (Analyzer) collects similar objects from databases of thitd-party services (LastFM, TheMovieDB) that will be the criteria for further search of recommendatory content. For search and selection of information an agent (Recommender) that works as web-crawler has been implemented. System «EZSurf» can be exploited by the users of social network “VKontakte” in everyday life for time economy on web-surfing process. At the same time they will get recommendations on content that are filtered depending on preferences of every particular user.
The results of cross-cultural research of implicit theories of innovativeness among students and teachers, representatives of three ethnocultural groups: Russians, the people of the North Caucasus (Chechens and Ingushs) and Tuvinians (N=804) are presented. Intergroup differences in implicit theories of innovativeness are revealed: the ‘individual’ theories of innovativeness prevail among Russians and among the students, the ‘social’ theories of innovativeness are more expressed among respondents from the North Caucasus, Tuva and among the teachers. Using the structural equations modeling the universal model of values impact on implicit theories of innovativeness and attitudes towards innovations is constructed. Values of the Openness to changes and individual theories of innovativeness promote the positive relation to innovations. Results of research have shown that implicit theories of innovativeness differ in different cultures, and values make different impact on the attitudes towards innovations and innovative experience in different cultures.