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.
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.
This paper focuses on the differences and similarities of relationship status lexical realization in two social networks Facebook (Fb, American) and Vkontakte (Vk, Russian). This cross-cultural work reveals the variety of lexical forms available to tag a relationship status in four languages (American English, German, French, and Russian) conditioned by cultural and social oriented values. It also discusses translation problems and mistakes caused by different cultural realities. The analyzed translation cases are divided into literal translation, borrowing, transposition, modulation, and adaptation. The authors compare the translations in the two social networks and suggest more adequate and culturally adapted options. In general, there is prevalence of literal translation (58 % on Fb; 54% on Vk) over other techniques (42% on Fb; 46% on Vk). The results of the analysis show that Fb translations are better and culturally adapted (with only one inaccuracy) than Vk translations (with seven inaccuracies). The findings can be used as recommendations for the social network translators and further linguistic research in cross-cultural issues involving language, culture and society.
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).
Systems Thinking in Museums explores systems thinking and the practical implication of it using real-life museum examples to illuminate various entry points and stages of implementation and their challenges and opportunities. Its premise is that museums can be better off when they operate as open, dynamic, and learning systems as a whole as opposed to closed, stagnant, and status quo systems that are compartmentalized and hierarchical. This book also suggests ways to incorporate systems thinking based on reflective questions and steps with hopes to encourage museum professionals to employ systems thinking in their own museum. Few books explore theory in practice in meaningful and applicable ways; this book offers to unravel complex theories as applied in everyday practice through examples from national and international museums.