Live Journal as a New Kind of Newspaper

Abstract

Oleg Leybovich — Professor, Chair for Cultural Studies, Perm State Institute for Arts and Culture. Address: 18, Gazeta Pravda St., Perm, Russian Federation. E-mail: oleg.leibov@gmail.com

Natalia Shushkova — Associate Professor, Chair for Humanitarian Disciplines, Perm Branch of the National Research University “Higher School of Economics”. Address: 38, Studencheskaya St., Perm, 614070, Russian Federation. E-mail: NataliaShushkova@gmail.com

Authors have been faced with an important issue while researching the blogosphere’s reaction on Sayano-Shushenskaya HEP crash: what do blogs hosted on a network mean in terms of sociology? Are they personal diaries or rather a new form of electronic media? What are their social functions? How can we explain the brutal style of conversations established in them? What is the relationship between the “posts” of the 21st century and the leaflets of the French Revolution era?

The subject of study in this article is the new forms of popular journalism which have emerged in Russia in the recent decade. We also reflect on their historic analogies. In our point of view, a concept of cultural simulation could be applied for our current analysis. This concept can help investigate why bloggers try to construct their identities in an imagined, non-economic social world by adapting the historical roles of tribuni plebis —appealing to people in Marat’s and Hébert’s style.

We should mention that the current blogger’s auditorium is not a revolutionary crowd. Blog readers and commentators can be described as small, liquid, weakly tied communities of temporary confederates. These communities, by their nature, correspond to a certain condition of Russian society with its disintegrated culture, economocentrism, particularism and atomization of individuals.

Blogs could only exist on the Internet. A blogger cannot become a true tribune; it is impossible for him or her to bring people together and to inspire them by a whole speech. Each blog post is only a small piece of a mosaic that is constructed from many voices. Revolutionary journalists in the 18th century addressed their readers through newspapers since they imagined them as a potential resource of revolutionary actions. On the other hand, bloggers appeal to an expert audience by producing large volumes of text conversations with scientific terms and complicated grammatical forms. Those texts are difficult to read and understand by the people to whom reading is not a routine or professional action. Accordingly, a blog is a substitute for action; writing and reading posts has become a major form of political activity on the Internet.

The Russian blogosphere exists as a specific addendum to the traditional press, i.e. if the media disappeared, bloggers would have nothing to write about. Blog content usually corresponds to an extended marginalia of news list content; often they are comments on other comments. Only when the media delays reporting or gives biased information, can blogs become a resource of new information. Of course, this does not automatically mean that information from a blog is always unbiased, verified and trustworthy. Blogs pretend to be mass-agitators rather than present new knowledge relevant for social communication. Thus, bloggers are not really journalists of the new epoch: they play roles of home arguers who apply their exclamations to TV-sets and use blogs to reproduce the same practices.

Internet networks created by politically oriented bloggers are isomorphic to government power structures in their cultural nature. We do observe a dominance of intolerance, aggressiveness, strict division into friends and foes, and the orientation to authorities in them.