About a week ago, the Russian Politics section of the
Economist covered an incident that was fervently discussed among the Russian
bloggers: a pseudo-documentary aired on the NTV channel “shedding light to” the
Anatomy of Protest, insinuating that the main reason the people took part in
the protests in March and February was the promise for pechenki (biscuits in Russian). This incident triggered an online outcry, which was “flavored” with a heavy dose of humor –pictures of a young
woman holding a sign with the following message “SO NTV, where are my biscuits?” and the public “ceremony” of the
NTV’s funeral- but also served as a study case for the blogging dynamics of
this post. Following a qualitative path –due to a low number of blog entries as
well as a limited online context- I decided to re-visit the argument of Eugene Gorny purporting that the Russian blogosphere is a substitute for the public
sphere, as it reproduces social atomization, negative attitude towards official
institutions, informality, symbolic action and most importantly, laughter.[1]
Qualitative mini-take on the “Anatomy”
The
concomitant consequences of the NTV’s documentary exhibit all the above
mentioned characteristics of the Russian blogosphere noted by Gorny, albeit accompanied
by an enormous BUT…Undoubtedly, the negative attitude towards official institutions
is prevalent in Russian politics (and not only in Russia!), and attempts to channel such frustration
through creativity and humor are also present BUT the incident demonstrated
something greater than mere reproduction of Soviet byt (in a very rough translation byt refers to “the way of life”). Furthermore, the question whether the Russian blogosphere constitutes a public sphere- or its substitute for that
matter- is necessarily sterile in intellectual interest (my apologies to the
Habermasian fans…). The most interesting/puzzling aspect of this incident is
the emerging language-practice, which aspires to establish/strengthen/reinforce
the identity of the“Russian bloggers.”
A
prominent example is the repetition of the phrase “the bloggers are discussing
(insert any topic that is relevant, for example the hunger strike in Astrakhan!),” which fosters the “sense” of bloggers’ group-identity. Furthermore, the
incorporation of pictures and videos establishes a stronger link between the
content generator and the observer as it taps the aspect of validity and truth.
Consequently, there are two dimensions of identity creation at place:
endogenous and exogenous. Here, the former captures the dynamics of the bloggers’
group “feel”, since they engage in common action (discussion) publicly; while the
latter refers to the outsiders' validation of reality, or in other words any observer -and even bloggers themselves- can affect the bloggers' identity by just "viewing" their posts, since pageviews carry special significance for the blogging community.
The
struggle of establishing oneself as a blogger is utterly understandable given
that journalists proper have been extremely good in adapting to the new medium, but this
is not the end of the story. The striving desire to become recognized is imbricated
with political significance, which leads inevitably to a process of
rediscovering the political. Therefore, in order to take
the Russian blogosphere seriously we need to see beyond the Habermasian
conception of communicative rationality in the public sphere, but instead go
back to the processes which transform the
political, in this case blogging itself. In order to achieve such
understanding, I believe that the work of Hannah Arendt and Chantal Mouffe
would be extremely helpful, BUT the women will “speak” in the next post.
PS
There has been a promising qualitative study on the Russian Blogosphere conducted by the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, which surprisingly utilizes the format of a BLOG itself! The results look like this:
There has been a promising qualitative study on the Russian Blogosphere conducted by the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, which surprisingly utilizes the format of a BLOG itself! The results look like this:
[1] Eugene Gorny, “Understanding the Real
Impact of Russian Blogs” in Russian
Analytical Digest, Vol. 69 2009, 8.
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