From the “Quasi Criticism of Authority” to the Discourse “Participation and Development”: A Public Agenda on the Runet Social Networks (Case Studies of Network Community Practices)

Abstract

The article presents the results of an empirical study of the public agenda of network communities in the Runet space. Online communities as part of the morphology of modern society become agents of social and political change, including in the process of constructing social problems and representing ways to solve them. Based on an empirical analysis of discursive practices of two online communities (“The Greenhouse of Social Technologies”, “Science | Science”), the authors determine clusters of structuring the problems of the public agenda and discursive models that reflect sustainable and contextual interest of community members in social and political problems. The results of the study showed that the studied online communities demonstrate different models of the public agenda, which represent not only the system of their value priorities in relation to the perception of social and political reality that take shape in ideological constructions, but also behavioral practices in public space. The study confirms that the public agenda is the result of collective self-determination of network communities, and not a reflection of objective social and political conditions, in which social actors put forward their own claims, claims and try to keep them in public space. Thus, the category of public agenda applicable to the empirical analysis of network communities allows you to go beyond the boundaries of understanding the process and effects of network communication in public space. The analytical tools and methods of empirical research proposed by the authors open new possibilities for studying the relationship between institutional practices and the subjective space of politics (political identity, political picture of the world, political culture, ideology).