This book serves as a reader exploring the scholarly inquiry, professional education, and practice of Russian public relations and advertising in multiple contexts. It examines significant parts of what can be encompassed under the umbrella of strategic communications, including public relations and advertising, rather than investigating all areas of communication in Russia. Within the context of Russia's history, culture, and ideology, the book begins by tracing the development of communication as a field, as a discipline, and as a social institution in Russia. It then samples current studies in Russian strategic communications, examining this professional specialization's current state and likely future directions. The book's authors are mostly Russians who are experts in their specializations. Chapters are predicated upon the premise that this is an exciting time of great opportunity for Russian strategic communications. However, in Russia, exploiting such opportunities for strategic communications scholarship, education, and professional practice presents challenges within the context of that nation's cultural, historical, and ideological heritage that presently may be unique. The book concludes with a prognosis of the future of Russian strategic communications. The book is recommended reading for a worldwide audience of strategic communications scholars, educators, students, and practitioners. Such readers will find the book of interest and of unique value as the book will help them to better understand, appreciate, and respect Russian strategic communications, its genesis, and present state. © 2021 selection and editorial matter, Katerina Tsetsura and Dean Kruckeberg. All rights reserved.

Science, technology and innovation (STI) studies are interrelated, as are STI policies and policy studies. This series of books aims to contribute to improved understanding of these interrelations. Their importance has become more widely recognized, as the role of innovation in driving economic development and fostering societal welfare has become almost conventional wisdom. Interdisciplinary in coverage, the series focuses on the links between STI, business, and the broader economy and society. The series includes conceptual and empirical contributions, which aim to extend our theoretical grasp while offering practical relevance. Relevant topics include the economic and social impacts of STI, STI policy design and implementation, technology and innovation management, entrepreneurship (and related policies), foresight studies, and analysis of emerging technologies. The series is addressed to professionals in research and teaching, consultancies and industry, government and international organizations.

Museum Diplomacy in the Digital Age explores online museums as sites of contemporary cultural diplomacy.

Building on scholarship that highlights how museums can constitute and regulate citizens, construct national communities, and project messages across borders, the book explores the political powers of museums in their online spaces. Demonstrating that digital media allow museums to reach far beyond their physical locations, Grincheva investigates whether online audiences are given the tools to co-curate museums and their collections to establish new pathways for international cultural relations, exchange and, potentially, diplomacy. Evaluating the online capacities of museums to exert cultural impacts, the book illuminates how online museum narratives shape audience perceptions and redefine their cultural attitudes and identities.

Museum Diplomacy in the Digital Age will be of interest to academics and students teaching or taking courses on museums and heritage, communication and media, cultural studies, cultural diplomacy, international relations and digital humanities. It will also be useful to practitioners around the world who want to learn more about the effect digital museum experiences have on international audiences.

SUMMARY

 

Our culture represents the whole of the integrity of the 40-thousands-years-old human semiosis. Generally speaking, the human world is meaningful by definition. Mass culture is a form of cultural development appearing together especially with industrial society. Despite it having appeared more than a century ago, it maintains its relevance nowadays and becomes a basis for new dimensions of culture (digital, transmedial, consumer culture). Within the framework of general emancipatory philosophical-anthropological perspective, mass culture appears as a semiotic space and meaningful environment. It is constituted by diversity of commodities, services and facilities of their production, as well as daily and regular social practices, which become possible in relation to them, and consequently create a certain way of life of a modern human being. The heuristic idea of J.Lotman to consider culture as a semiosphere provides an important perspective to understand mass culture as a subsystem of the entire semiosphere. From this perspective, mass culture may be seen as a semiosphere with a peculiar inner organization.

The present dissertation provides an account to consider mass culture mythology as an inner secondary-modelling system, a mechanism of organization of mass culture texts into a consistent system. Due to the mythological mechanism, the mosaic discrete environment becomes a meaningful continual world similar to ancient mythological system full of existential values, which are comprehensible to everyone.

The Firs Chapter dwells upon the ontology of mass culture mythology in detail. Myth is regarded as universal of culture preserving own nature along the whole history of mankind. Myth universally reflects ways of experiencing world and individual’s presence. Universal of myth is a result of mythological mind which is a peculiar human cognitive aptitude situated on a verge between intuition and rational awareness of the world and leading to continual type of reality perception. It helps human being to overcome existential discrepancies of the opposition individual vs. nature and facilitates choices in overwhelming environment of competing meanings where discrete/discontinuous perception is impeded. The main function of myth is to decrease entropy by reconciling individual with reality and to preserve a comprehensible model of universe for human being. As a cultural form, myth is represented by mythological texts such as narratives, images, and symbols. Mass cultural mythology is a specific research object in marketing semiotics industry. Thus, the ontology of mass culture mythology, deriving from treatment of myth as cultural universal, can be deduced as a principle of organization and structuring of mass culture in integral semiosphere. Those principles reveal themselves in the four main ontological aspects of mass culture mythology: peculiar reason-consequential linkage, anthropocentricity, specific mythological chronotope and “naming” as habitualization).

The Second Chapter is dedicated to epistemology of mass culture mythology. It is discussed that myth can be grasped through consistent mechanism of structural units which are mythemes and mythologemes. Those smallest units of myth derived from ancient texts and acquire certain contemporary forms within mass culture narrative preserving their consistency. I proceed from the findings of Levi-Strauss, Jung and Kerenyi, concerning the smallest structural units of myth, which are mythemes and mythologemes, to trace their manifestations within linguistics, ethnography, literature, political and culture studies, and develop their application to mass culture narratives expressing mythological mind. All mythologemes and mythemes cannot be entirely grasped as discrete elements. Rather, they are quasi-discrete units revealing themselves from syntagmatic relations, whereas they depend on context and their discreteness is occuring at the paradigmatic level of texts. Mythologeme and mytheme appear as emic and hybrid structural units respectively, though, mytheme can also be regarded as an invariant structure. To consider mythemes as invariants I used a complementary method of Weltanschauung Categories of Ultimate Bases.

I define mythologemes as universal invariants-kernels of mythological narrative expressing the universal ideas of a human being presence in the world, which help people to fill the gap between empirical reality and inexplicable phenomena.  They can appear as actants within narrative. Mythemes, in my point of view, are invariant structural units deployed in mythological narrative resembling recurring motifemes that articulate their own entity in dynamics and development. In other words, mythologemes are paradigmatic invariants and mythemes are syntagmatic invariants. In ancient times their function was organizing beliefs about environment, their preservation and transmition in integral comprehensible form. Unlike ancient times when smallest units of myth were gathered within strong mythological systems of different local cultures, now they are splitted across different genres of global cultural texts and different fields: popular science, arts, advertising etc. To all appearances, in acquiring peculiar modes, mythologemes and mythemes preserve sustainability within mass culture discourse, they refer to universal human senses, and could be seen as semiotic markers of myth in daily narratives.

The presence of smallest mythological units in culture enables mechanism of translation of cultural texts synchronically and diachronically. As cultural universals, mythological elements “gravitate” towards the centre (bottom) of entire semiosphere, where they are concentrated in the most ancient, the most famous texts throughout entire history. At the same time, due to their simple form, they permeate all culture and help to contemporary texts of culture to acquire similarity to the most famous and commonly known and thus to move from the periphery to the center of semiosphere. In this way smallest mythological units trace the dialectics of semiosis in culture as permanent rotation of cultural forms. From another side, mythologemes and mythemes can be used in purpose in mass culture texts as they easily trigger mythological mind of the audience. They might become usually anchors of existential-mythological valorization during the process of choice between competing narratives. This reveals in marketing perspective during the process of decommoditization, which is a symbolic aspect of appropriation process of mass cultural goods.

Mythologemes and mythemes are dissipated and noticed by consumers during the process of decommoditization, which is a symbolic aspect of appropriation process of mass cultural goods. The decommoditization phenomenon means that goods and events transform their familiar meaning and utilitarian value to a unique subjective meaning and existential value for every single consumer depending on his or her anticipation. From a philosophical-anthropological point of view, this shift often means activation of the mythological mind of the consumers; in this case, structural units of mass culture mythology attract attention of consumers to those narratives. Very often it is the most significant possibility to become meaningful in diverse environment of different cultural texts due to existential-mythological valorization. I follow Lotman’s insight that myth becomes actual as autocommunication, so it says about listeners and organizes their world. It reveals as an aspiration of valorization that is possible to describe by Greimasian actantial model. The latter becomes a heuristic algorithm of mythologemes determination within mass culture narrative. Additionally I apply the Weltanschauung Categories of Ultimate Bases for structural analysis of mytheme.

In research I discussed upon several instances of the structural units of myth which are commonly present in mass cultural texts.  I regarded mythologemes of Fate, Course, Universe, Catastrophe, Golden Age, and Mother Nature. Also I considered two universal ontological mythemes of Transformation and Backtracking.

I ascertained that mythologemes can either play a specific actantial role within a narrative (the Fate, the Course, and the Mother Nature) or describe mythological chronotope (the Universe, the Catastrophe, and the Golden Age). In their turn, mythemes reveal an inner strategy of unrolling mythological narrative frontwards or backwards. Deriving from texts of culture mythologemes and mythemes become a bridge between empirical reality and coherent world picture. They help to decrease existential anxiety of human being on the world  finding tangible form to explain fear, justice/injustice, birth and death, time, transformation etc.

The mythologemes of Fate and Course fully reflect upon one of the main functions of myth, which is to grasp life as an integral whole. They emerge from the justice/injustice opposition, which is one of the most important semes penetrating mass culture discourse and one that hides behind the existential valorization and hence its mythological aspect. Justice or injustice often acquire a strong meaning of an independent, integral actant, which is capable of influencing the Subject within a narrative and, what is even more,  to exist beyond the artistic text in real life, which is a strong marker of mythological mind. Those two mythologemes can be associated with an anthropogonic genre of myth so far as they explain personal life within autocommunication process. Mythologeme of Fate can be and Adjutant or Adversary within mythological narrative, mythologeme of Course appears as an Adjutant or an Object. They always relate to the search of Subject for a purpose of life and own existential way.

The mythologemes of Universe, Catastrophe and Golden Age express an archaic desire to grasp the world in its complexity and to find out its origin in categories of mythological mind. They represent the time-space of mass culture mythological narrative. Thus, the mythologeme of Universe has an existential meaning of integration of mass culture heterotopic picture of the world in present implying intercommunication with past and future and appears as an Object within narrative. Similarly to the archaic world picture in which the Universe loci used to intercommunicate via World Tree, the uniting mythological principal in the contemporary mass culture is a symbol of a window connecting, time and spaces, cultures, extraterrestrial worlds, and different types of everyday reality, i.e. physical and cyber reality, empirical and spiritual reality.

The mythologeme of Catastrophe unlike its archaic counterpart - the mythologeme of Flood - relates to future and does not describe past events. It works as a transformation point from existential fear of unpredictable future into calm and reassurance. It relates to the cosmogonic topic as well as it plays for preservation of the universe model embodied in the image of community (whole of the mankind). It plays role of an Adversary within narrative. It is also tightly intertwined with Christian discourse and more precise with eschatological ontology. In mass culture the role of an Antichrist (as an evident marker of the End of the World narrative) is ascribed to leaders of society or to societies themselves, which are the most odious.

The mythologeme of Golden Age alludes to the universal idea of Eutopia (Dreamland) situated in a forever bygone era (always in the past) that in mass culture is associated with the subject of childhood. It can appear as an Object or an Adversary within narrative. Thus, three of those mythologemes constitute an integral triad of time and space of the world (past-present-future) and reflect upon human existential quest for integral explanation of the world, nostalgy for the past and fears towards the future.

The mythologeme of Mother Nature relates to the existential search for inner authenticity and identity. Despite the feminist turn in contemporary mass culture discourse, this mythologeme unveils itself through the key opposition between culture (technology)/nature. It can take a form of an implicit idea represented by local traditional symbols, images, characters within general mass culture discourse, or this mythologeme can also take shape of an actant (Adjutant or Adversary) within narrative.

Meanwhile Greimasian actantial model shows relations between actants within either fictional/reflected narrative or factual reality, it is remarkable that mythological mind makes those realities to merge. In some cases (when Subject is a real person) it might appear that a real person acts together (being helped or opposed) with mythologeme as an Adjutant (Fate or Mother Nature mythologeme, for example).

The mytheme of Transformation, or Miracle, and the mytheme of Backtracking, are universal ontological mythemes exhibiting ideas about natural phenomena in culture and revealing them in mass culture texts. It is possible to examine them via the Weltanschauung Categories of Ultimate Bases, which demonstrates an inner process of negotiation and overcoming of life-death existential bases as discrete constituents of the mythemes. The mytheme of Transformation lays itself bare as an inner schema of mythological narrative about miracle, the mytheme of Backtracking reveals itself as a schema of “unwrapping the bygone past” and returning to mastered time and space and thereby constituting the center of semiosphere for a subject.

The smallest units of myth can be classified by different criteria. I classified them by their structural principle: the emic units (mythologemes) and the ones possessing hybrid structure (mythemes). It is also possible to classify the emic units by their subjects by way of analogy with ancient myths: cosmogonic, anthropogonic, and structuring social semiosphere. Cosmogonic mythologemes appear in the narratives about Universe and models of time and space and their origin. Those are the mythologeme of Universe, the mythologeme of Catastrophe and the mythologeme of Golden Age. Anthropogonic mythologemes are related to individuals’ life and its structure: the mythologeme of Fate and the mythologeme of Course. The mythologemes structuring social semiosphere through the quest of identity appear within mass culture narratives about collective memory (the Mother Nature mythologeme).

The Third Chapter exemplifies the process of finding more minimal units of myth in cultural texts of different genres. The first case was dedicated to close analysis of the television communication of the Ukrainian politician Darth Vader. I analyzed how communication of the politician involved important transmitters of mythological images for Ukrainian culture. I found out that his narrative was full of combinations of polar meanings discovering mythological dimension of the message. Two main protagonists of the communication were agents of two separate mythological generations: archaic mythology (Mother Nature) and contemporary mass culture mythology (Darth Vader). Among other structural units there were the Eutopia/Garden, the Trickster, and the Death. What is more some of those archaic mythologemes acquired new form within the text, in this way trickster appeared in image of Darth Vader and Eutopia in an image of the Internet Party. By combination of archaic meanings and contemporary forms the narrative became semiotically saturated and producing new powerful connotations. This case showed how a significant trickster’s image of mass culture became a bridge between mythological mind, mass culture, and political discourse.

As well, I demonstrated an applied case from my practice where I used the Mother Nature mythologeme as a branding tool. Semiotic analysis helped me to trace a problem of an artistic image disintegration and to find out a gap between forms of expression and values of the artist’s brand. Mapping the territories of the singer images, I discovered that her personal values and her authentic vocal persona clearly tend to the female image represented in culture by Mother Nature mythologeme most clearly. Demonstration of different cultural forms of the mythologeme helped to start building a coherent narrative around an artist’s brand and to select precise image corresponding to her inner identity (tone of voice of the brands, costumes and visual media representations etc.). In this case the mythologeme helped to articulate inner brand identity with appropriate forms of expression relevant to wide mass culture context and, thus, comprehensible to mass audience.

The Conclusions Section points out a potential of the further exploration of the mythologemes and mythemes in mass cultural texts for understanding human mind and culture better and for applied marketing purposes. The extension of the structural units of myth collection can provide with increase of tools for building coherent marketing messages.

Transmediation—the telling of a single story across multiple media—is a relatively new phenomenon. While there have been adaptations (books to films, for example) for more than a century, modern technology and media consumption have expanded the scope of trans-mediating practices. Nowhere are these more evident than within the Harry Potter universe, where a coherent world and narrative are iterated across books, films, video games, fan fiction, art, music and more. Curated by a leading Harry Potter scholar, this collection of new essays explores the range of Potter texts across a variety of media.

Global Trends in Museum Diplomacy traces the transformation of museums from publicly or privately funded heritage institutions into active players in the economic sector of culture. Exploring how this transformation reconfigured cultural diplomacy, the book argues that museums have become autonomous diplomatic players on the world stage. The book offers a comparative analysis across a range of case studies in order to demonstrate that museums have gone global in the era of neoliberal globalisation. Grincheva focuses first on the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, which is well known for its bold revolutionising strategies of global expansion: museum franchising and global corporatisation. The book then goes on to explore how these strategies were adopted across museums around the world and analyses two cases of post-Guggenheim developments in China and Russia: the K11 Art Mall in Hong Kong and the International Network of Foundations of the State Hermitage Museum in Russia. These cases from more authoritarian political regimes evidence the emergence of alternative avenues of museum diplomacy that no longer depend on government commissions to serve immediate geo-political interests. Global Trends in Museum Diplomacy will be a valuable resource for students, scholars and practitioners of contemporary museology and cultural diplomacy. Documenting new developments in museum diplomacy, the book will be particularly interesting to museum and heritage practitioners and policymakers involved in international exchanges or official programs of cultural diplomacy.

Miscommunicating Social Change analyzes the discourses of three social movements and the alternative media associated with them, revealing that the Enlightenment narrative, though widely critiqued in academia, remains the dominant way of conceptualizing social change in the name of democratization in the post-Soviet terrain. The main argument of this book is that the “progressive” imaginary, which envisages progress in the unidirectional terms of catching up with the “more advanced” Western condition, is inherently anti-democratic and deeply antagonistic. Instead of fostering an inclusive democratic process in which all strata of populations holding different views are involved, it draws solid dividing frontiers between “progressive” and “retrograde” forces, deepening existing antagonisms and provoking new ones; it also naturalizes the hierarchies of the global neocolonial/neoliberal power of the West. Using case studies of the “White Ribbons” social movement for fair elections in Russia (2012), the Ukrainian Euromaidan (2013–2014), and anti-corruption protests in Russia organized by Alexei Navalny (2017) and drawing on the theories of Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe, and Nico Carpetntier, this book shows how “progressive” articulations by the social movements under consideration ended up undermining the basis of the democratic public sphere through the closure of democratic space.

Political Internet memes are an underresearched phenomenon situated at the intersection of digital and political communication. Regarded as a unit of cultural information transmitted online, such a meme can be considered as both a manifestation of anonymous networked creativity and a mechanism of political participation. The article presents the results of an investigation into Internet memes generated by protest discourses on Runet (Russian Internet). The examination of Internet content allows us to draw conclusions as to the thematic emphases of protest actions represented in Runet’s memosphere and the specifics of the image of Russian protest as reflected in memes.

The purpose of this study was to examine communication clarity in calls for papers issued by peer reviewed journals for special issues. I wanted to explore what could hinder and help guest editors to communicate their intent to potential contributors. I searched peer reviewed journals in the field of human resource management published by five leading publishers, including Emerald, Sage, Wiley, Taylor & Francis, and Elsevier. Forty-seven journals were identified, and the sample included 33 calls for papers that I examined using content analysis. The results showed that many guest editors include a problem statement; purpose statement including explicative statements and specifications; and research questions, topics, or themes. Based on this result, I created a composite profile that describes how guest editors typically craft their calls, including the average number of sources, topics, and paragraphs. I also identified eight additional tools guest editors use to increase clarity of their calls. Additionally, my analysis indicated that guest editors vary greatly in their approaches to crafting calls for papers. I identified a number of inconsistencies, inaccuracies, omissions, and redundancies that could confuse or discourage potential contributors. Journal editors could use the results of this study to examine their editorial strategies and practices and revise and improve their guidelines and templates related to special issues and their calls. Special issue guest editors might use the study results to increase the chances of receiving quality submissions.

In the mid-2010s, rap suddenly (for many external observers) became one of the most important genres in Russian pop culture. Recordings of rap battles and videos of new rap songs receive millions of views on YouTube within a month or two. At the same time, Russian rap became more and more saturated with images of violence and rhetorics of success and personal domination; nevertheless, countercurrents such as, primarily, female rap and political satire rap, can also easily be discovered. This paper presents a social-theoretical interpretation of these transformations. The main argument is as follows: Russian society in the 2010s entered a state of covert anomie. The combination of increasing social stagnation and persistent openness to Western pop culture produced an unpredictable effect: the emergence of a “hybrid” subaltern in Russian society – a “mask” of a subaltern, involved in perseverating the reproduction of performances expressing revolt. However, this revolt is mocking and self-ironical and not intended to bring about any social change. This scenario of a “mock fight” charged with images of compensatory violence is the most popular type of narration in Russian rap, but it is not the only type: it is increasingly being “ousted” by politically charged rap, which presents the state as a main actor of violence and psychological pressure.

Internet studies seem to be an essential part of the current research agenda in social studies. The specific nature of Internet components (online-media, online-communities, etc.) are studied unceasingly and closely. This book focuses precisely on the national Internet segment of Russia (Runet) as a separate phenomenon and, hence, as an integral research object. Such a complex study has not been presented before in academic literature.

This article is devoted to the phenomenon of fan fiction in its interaction with Russian classical literature. Traditionally, fan fiction is associated with products of mass culture – fantasy novels, TV-series, anime or comic books. The transformation of canonical literary texts by their creative fans is hardly a widespread practice. In Russia and the Russian-speaking world, where “great Russian literature” has sacred status and the classics are obligatory reading at secondary school, fan fiction based on classical texts is an especially exotic and shocking phenomenon. In this work I list the key characteristics of Russian-classics fan fiction, outline fan fiction writers’ most popular Russian classical texts – Eugene Onegin, War and Peace, Crime and Punishment, and Woe from Wit – and describe recurring narratives of fanfics: “crossovers”, “slash” stories, and alternative endings. I also reveal a unique subgenre of fan fiction specific to Russian classical literature, which puts the original work’s author and his characters together into the same literary space. Further, I problematize the reverence given to literary classics in the Russian-speaking world, the secondary school experience, and their influence on the creative processes of fan fiction. From a series of in-depth interviews with fan fiction writers, I identify the emotional modes of “guilt”, “responsibility” and “challenge” that are typical of the Russian-classics fan fiction experience.

In recent years scholars have called for more attention to local net histories, work that demonstrates how networked computing developed in specific geographical, material, and social contexts. Research carried out in this spirit stands in contrast to a canonical and popular history of the (singular) “Internet,” and thus sets up an opposition or dyadК between “local” net histories and the “global” or mainstream history of ARPAnet, the Internet Protocol, and the World Wide Web. This article takes up the call for local net histories by focusing on Tonet, a local network that was developed in the Siberian city of Tomsk and which peaked in usage in the early 2000s. However, rather than assuming an opposition between local and global Internet history, this article interrogates how the local net and global Internet were articulated by Tonet’s computer scientists and regional journalists at the time. The article thus enquires into symbolic connections between a local net and the global Internet, unsettling this opposition while also drawing attention to the specific legacies that shaped these concepts in the case of Tonet.

This article looks at the so called curatorial statements in global art biennials, that is to say the discourses that independent curators put together so as to interpret, justify, and explain what their exhibitions are about to art professionals, experts and the public. It asks, through which value systems curatorial branding hails and crafts middle-class, educated and self-reflective lifestyles and publics with high cultural and often symbolic capital? I will be arguing that these statements constitute a form of writing genre that follows recurring linguistic patterns, involving strategic gestures of negating dominant culture, refusing idiosyncratic straw-man narratives and blending expert with populist vocabularies. While seemingly written by socially engaged and critical ‘auteurs', these gestures of curatorial self-presentation can be read as tools for producing surplus value in line with creative economy's celebration of uniqueness, difference and unconventionality. I analyze several statements from recent large scale biennials in terms of the binary oppositions they fabricate, the both mass and specialized audiences they address and the confessional, self-reflective politics they employ. The writing and reading of these statements correspond to forms of acquired cultural capital, for instance through education or through the experience of belonging in art milieus. Contemporary biennials thus remediate the arena of cultural distinction as the ‘cultivated’ in these settings are not expected to be out-and-above-of-society experts similarly to the modern art of the past but amateur polymaths and cultural omnivores who are able to discover uniqueness and unconventionality within the total realm of cultural production.

Background Although early warning has been studied on Twitter, research focused on Canada is rare. British Columbia, Canada, is vulnerable to tsunamis, and warning systems are not ubiquitous. Establishing pre-event networks can contribute to understanding early warning dissemination potential in the province.

Analysis This study locates a 1,932 follower network for @NWS_NTWC, a Twitter handle for the U.S. National Tsunami Warning Center, and the province’s primary tsunami warning notification account. A profile content analysis identifies stakeholders and maps locations, and a network analysis describes interconnections by role, country, and community type (rural or urban).

Conclusion and implications The results describe how networks can optimize warnings via Twitter. Key outcomes include a longitudinal baseline, network-driven decision-making techniques, strategies for alerting at-risk areas, and a method for detecting influential users.

The article analyzes how Russian students interpret and practice digital technologies of self-tracking (fitness trackers, apps and wearables), that allow to collect biometric and activity data. It is based on the results of reflective thematic analysis of students’ essays on this topic. How do students describe their experience in using self-tracking technologies? What discourses of self-tracking are represented in their essays? How do they imagine the digital future and further development of the systems of self-surveillance? The research demonstrated that many students have certain experience with quantified self-tracking, whereas some tend to limit it or refused from it for some reasons. Based on the students’ stories (former and active users), the author offers to distinguish three styles of self-tracking: ‘gamer’, ‘manager’ and ‘transformer’. A ‘gamer’ is looking for the feelings of thrill, pleasure and novelty; a ‘manager’ aims at putting one’s head and life in order; a ‘transformer’ wants to change one’s life and mind radically. In reality any self-tracker combines all three roles, though one of them might dominate. According to the students, the existing technologies of self-measuring cannot give strong enough motivation for self-optimization, but in the future their effectiveness may increase. This study also resulted in defining four types of discourse on self-tracking: ‘progressivist’, ‘pragmatic’, ‘critical’ and ‘anti-utopian’. They represent the differences in conceptualization of self-tracking as a cultural phenomenon. Some students are prone to optimistic or balanced evaluation of the potential of self-tracking technologies; others focus on risks and hazards of ‘datafication’ of people and social life. The outcomes of the study develop the previous research on styles of quantified self-tracking, providing additional analysis of the reflections of (non-)users, concerning self-tracking as a cultural phenomenon.

Political Internet meme is an underresearched contemporary phenomenon situated at the interface of digital media and political communication. Regarded as a unit of online transmission of cultural information, such a meme can be considered, on the on hand, as a manifestation of post-folklore, and on the other hand, as a mechanism of political participation and construction of social media users’ collective identity. The article presents the results of investigation into Internet memes generated by protest discourse in Runet (Russian Internet). Examination of a vast amount of Internet content allows drawing conclusions as to the thematic emphases of protest actions represented in Runet’s memosphere and to the specifics of the image of Russian protest as reflected in memes.

The article analyses representation of LGBT-movement activity, namely Saint Petersburg LGBT prides, in Russia. Framing theory, which views the media as an arena in which groups of interest promote their frames, or interpretations of the discussed issue, is used. Frames juxtapose elements of the text in such a way as to provide the audience with a scheme to perceive the message. Social movements are viewed as a group of interest that introduces new frames in the public deliberation. Two types of frames can be distinguished, namely collective action frames and status quo frames. In this study, usage of two collective action frames were examined (equality frame and victim frame), and two status quo frames (morality frame and propaganda of homosexuality). Additionally, the sources of quotes used in news stories were analyzed. The study focuses on articles dedicated to Saint Petersburg LGBT prides in years 2010-2017 in the most popular local Internet websites. The analysis shows that the coverage of LGBT prides can be divided into two distinct periods: 2010–2013 and 2014–2017. In the first period, LGBT activists dominated the coverage, quoted about twice more actively than government officials. Equality and victim frames were prevalent. In the second period, activists were cited significantly less often, with the propaganda of homosexuality frame dominating in the discourse. However, contrary to findings of previous studies on social movement representation, across the whole period under consideration LGBT activists were quoted more actively than government representatives. This finding calls for further exploration of the conditions which allowed for such coverage in the context of political heterosexism and homophobia.

The study analyzes the construction of the network links of Vladimir Putin and Alexei Navalny with various issues of Russian public discussion in the national print media. The theoretical framework is issue ownership theory, according to which political actors have a range of issues that are most strongly associated with them. Ownership by the politician of topics that are perceived as important in the society determines his popularity among the population. In this study, we use the Integrum database, which contains extensive print media archives of approximately 500 Russian magazines and more than 250 national newspapers. We analyze the period from 12.12.2016 to 12.12.2017, i.е., one year after Alexey Navalny's announcement of his intention to participate in the presidential election in 2018. The analysis shows that Putin has more opportunities to form an agenda, as he attracts much more attention from national media than Navalny does. Putin is often mentioned in connection with economic issues and international relations, which attract the attention of the population and are perceived as important, while his activity in these spheres is perceived as successful. Navalny is associated with the issues of corruption, NGOs and civic activism. Corruption is an important topic for Russians, but the low attention of the media to Navalny does not allow him to gain the maximum benefit from owning this story.

There is an extensive body of research devoted to how political satire affects political knowledge and political behavior. Extant studies are focused on political satire in democratic countries and do not pay enough attention to authoritarian regimes. This study extends this research to non- democratic regimes, while also adding to it by exploring the extent to which the use of political satire encourages exposure to political information. We conduct an online experiment on the sample of Russian students. We borrow satirical pictures from Lentach – popular Russian socialmedia public page, whose motto is “a propaganda of common sense” as opposed to biasedpolitical messages proliferated by government-controlled media outlets. Using both frequentist and Bayesian approaches, we found that access to political information containing satirical illustrating content increases attention to the information, relative to political news reports accompanied by standard news illustrations. The findings contribute to the literature on the political entertainment and exposure to political information, as well as to research on media under authoritarianism.

The study analyzes the construction of the network links of Vladimir Putin and Alexei Navalny with various issues of Russian public discussion in the national print media. The theoretical framework is issue ownership theory, according to which political actors have a range of issues that are most strongly associated with them. Ownership by the politician of topics that are perceived as important in the society determines his popularity among the population. In this study, we use the Integrum database, which contains extensive print media archives of approximately 500 Russian magazines and more than 250 national newspapers. We analyze the period from 12.12.2016 to 12.12.2017, i.е., one year after Alexey Navalny's announcement of his intention to participate in the presidential election in 2018. The analysis shows that Putin has more opportunities to form an agenda, as he attracts much more attention from national media than Navalny does. Putin is often mentioned in connection with economic issues and international relations, which attract the attention of the population and are perceived as important, while his activity in these spheres is perceived as successful. Navalny is associated with the issues of corruption, NGOs and civic activism. Corruption is an important topic for Russians, but the low attention of the media to Navalny does not allow him to gain the maximum benefit from owning this story.

At this time, developers of research information systems are experimenting with new tools for research outputs usage that can expand the open access to research. These tools allow researchers to record research as annotations, nanopublications or other micro research outputs and link them by scientific relationships. If these micro outputs and relationships are shared by their creators publicly, these actions can initiate direct scholarly communication between the creators and the authors of the used research outputs. Such direct communication takes place while researchers are manipulating and organising their research results, e.g. as manuscripts. Thus, researchers come to communication before the manuscripts become traditional publications. In this paper, we discuss how this pre-publication communication can affect existing research practice. It can have important consequences for the research community like the end of publication as a communication instrument, the higher level of transparency in research, changes for the Open Access movement, academic publishers, peer-reviewing and research assessment systems. We analyse a background that exists in the economics discipline for experiments with the pre-publication communication. We propose a set of experiments with already existed and new tools, which can help with exploring the end of publication possible impacts on the research community.