Application of the Theory of Self-organized Criticality to the Analysis of the Liberal Agenda in the Press of 1815-1825.

Abstract

The subject of the research in this paper is the liberal agenda in the Russian press of the pre-Decabrist period. The object of the study is the newspapers published during this period. The novelty of the work lies in the fact that the proposed study searches for pink noise in the data that were obtained from the press of the first quarter of the XIX century. The paper shows that the public consciousness of this period was in a state of self-organized criticality. Previously, the state of self-organized criticality could be found only in systems that arose at the end of the XIX century or later. The difficulty of the problem considered in this paper is that there are almost no mass sources for such an early historical period, and very few of the available ones lend themselves to formalization. The novelty of the conducted research lies in the application of the scientific tool of the theory of self-organized criticality to data having origins in the first quarter of the XIX century. The main conclusion made by the authors of the article is that the public consciousness in the pre-Decabrist period was in a state of self-organized criticality. For the analysis, statistics of publications in newspapers and magazines were collected, which served as a reflection of the liberal agenda relevant to the period of the genesis of the Decembrists. The paper shows that the sequence of publications on liberal information issues in the Russian press in the period 1815-1825 contains pink noise. Fourier analysis was used to determine it in the dynamic series.