Article
Political Storytelling in Digital Culture: a Tool for Post-Truth Politics?
The following article presents the results of an individual academic research, dedicated to the analysis of structure, functions and effects of political storytelling in terms of so-called “era of post-truth politics”.
The author would like to introduce some concepts and approaches to storytelling from the points of view of Russian literary studies and comparative literary criticism, which includes ideas and insights of major literary historians of Russian Empire and Soviet Union. The author claims these ideas important, adaptable and relevant for the key ideas about storytelling that were drawn by Western social studies, as literature has a unique position and approach in Soviet Unioin, being regarded as “ideological add-on of society”.
The following analysis leads to schemas of deconstruction of the acts of political communication worldwide through the lens of so called “shared narratives” (in Western tradition) and “wandering (migrating) plots” (in tradition of Russian Empire and Soviet Union literary studies` tradition).
The last part of the article presents narrative analysis of three cases of modern political communication in Europe, Russia and U.S.A. The intention of the author was to show three of so called “wandering plots” elements in political communications of international leaders. Case of Europe covers political communication of Iens Stoltenberg, Prime Minister of Norway, during the election rally in 2013. Case of Russia covers political communication of current president Vladimir Putin during the reconstruction of his biography in 2015. Case of U.S.A. covers political communication of Donald Trump, the elected president of U.S.A., during the election rally in 2016.
The paper considers linguistic and cross-cultural features of speech strategy and tactics in political texts.
For the first time since World War II, the U.S. seem to lose leadership at the multilateral trade talks shifting accents to bilateral and regional trade cooperation. The main reason for the shift is a deadlock at the WTO Doha-round negotiations where the U.S. face opposition of the steadily growing economies of India, China and Brazil.
Торговые переговоры, ГАТТ, ВТО, США, многосторонняя торговая система, ЕС, Япония, ИНДИЯ, КИТАЙ, Бразилия, Дж. Буш-мл., Б. Обама, М. Баррозу, Р. Зеллик, П. Лами, Р. Кирк, Л. да Силва, Карел де Гюхт, АТЭС, НАФТА, АСЕАН, трансатлантическое партнерство, "двадцатка", trade talks, GATT, WTO, U.S., Multilateral Trading System, Eu, Japan, India, China, Brazil, G.-W. Bush, B. Obama, M. Barrozo, R. Zoellick, P. Lamy, R. Kirk, L. da Silva, Karel de Gucht, APEC, NAFTA, ASEAN, Transatlantic Partnership, G 20
The article examines special politically-legal and social status of Muslim community in the USA. Not only positive experience of ethnopolitical integration is described, but also a number of problems connected to this situation.
The author teaches to awaken creativity in oneself, using emotions as a factor of motivation, explains the concept of critical thinking, gives the reader tools to add / edit publications to increase the clarity and rationality of their own judgments, and also shows where a particular theory is applicable
The visual art of the last decades privileges, explicitly or implicitly, social rather than art historical or aesthetic issues. In sites ranging from university classrooms and journals to museums and biennials, the emphasis is usually put on how effectively art handles the social issues of the day while questions of aesthetic value are often treated as suspicious and ideological. Given this anti-art character in these contexts of mediation, the insistence to perceive the objects as artistic objects constitutes a paradox that has been rarely discussed in sociological terms. This article draws on ethnographic research in order to explore “biennial art” that is to say the art that displayed in contemporary art and international platforms of showcasing. These platforms struggle to maintain a concept of art as social practice while at the same time nurture an exclusive and highbrow environment in which “artfulness” is key. I call this quality artfulness so as to both underline its artificiality as well as the inventiveness and skills required for its production. Artfulness in these sites is enabled through various formal or informal rituals of valorization, including guided tours, curatorial statements, media promoting activities and artist talks. These rituals, positioning certain objects within the sphere of art and producing them as objects meriting aesthetic interpretation, resemble the politics of publicity found in aesthetic capitalism at large.
December 19, 2016, witnessed three tragedies that could not go unnoticed by the Russian media: dozens of people died as a result of a surrogate alcohol poisoning in Irkutsk, a Russian ambassador was killed in Turkey, and a terrorist attack took place at the Christmas market in Berlin. In this article, we use the network agenda-setting theory to analyze how these tragedies were covered by different types of mass media. We show that ties between the tragedy and a network of other acute issues are more important than objective circumstances, such as the number of victims or the geography of the event. The context in which the events were examined led to greater attention to the killing of the ambassador and less attention to the surrogate alcohol poisoning. We believe that the state can exercise indirect control over the agenda by creating a network of events that will correctly guide discussions about tragedies.
The political Internet meme is one of the little-studied phenomena of modern digital culture. Understood as a unit of transmission of cultural information in the network, such a meme can be viewed, on the one hand, as a spontaneous product of the creative work of many people, a mechanism of political participation and, on the other, as a tool of political PR technologies, a way to “overstate” or “understate” the image of a political leader. The novelty of the proposed article, which is devoted to the results of the study of the memes posted on Russian social media in 2017–2019, is in the fact that it describes the first attempt to trace the formation of the images of Russian power and opposition embodied in memetic constructions. Using the methods of communication research (primarily those of semantic, semiotic and comparative analysis), as well as relying on expert interview data, the author of the article solves the main task of identifying the leading varieties of Runet’s political memes as well as the semantic characteristics of the memes that form the image of Russian politicians. One of the most important conclusions could be the observation that from the point of view of the potential of their viral spread and the possibility of being noticed by the Runet audience the most effective Internet memes are “negative”, aggressive political ones (the memes that work to “understate” the image of a political persona /or idea /or event).