Digital “habitats”: neighborhood chat as a mechanism of social status construction (the case of housing estates in Irkutsk)

Abstract

The article analyzes the role and place of neighborhood interaction in messengers in terms of social status construction. The digitalization of everyday life and the expanded construction of multi-apartment housing objects in Russian cities raise many questions for researchers about the peculiarities of social processes and the formation of social structure in these conditions. The aim of the article is to show, based on two years of observation and collected empirical material (more than 60,000 user messages), how the discourse of neighborly discussions of modern apartment complexes in Irkutsk articulates the narrative of social well-being. The main method of research is discourse analysis; the social status of residents seems to us to be an “empty sign” for the filling of which the discourse of neighborhood discussions “struggles.” MAXQDA 2020 software was used to preprocess the text array, preprocessing was done using thematic coding. A number of codes were identified that were somehow related to the problematic under study. The coded set of texts was summarized into three main tropes around which discussions of the topic of interest revolve — financial solvency of community members, material markers of wealth, and the image of residents of neighboring localities. The main theoretical resources used in the research were the ideas of P. Bourdieu and the “social construction of reality” of P. Berger and T. Luckmann. Neighborhood chat seems to us to be a mechanism that allows us to instrumentalize the attributes of social status in textual practices, thus crystallizing the community from within. The main factors determining the self-description and self-image of communities as carriers of high social status were identified as well-being and location in the urban space predetermined at the stage of realization by developers of new real estate.