Abstract
The study reveals the multifunctionality which is typical of German and Russian political blogs. Regardless of the language of the blogs, information and evaluation, political and convening, consolidating, agitation and propaganda, presentation and propaganda, and directive functions are among the dominant functions. The paper briefly describes the linguistic means which represent these functions. It shows the discursive hybridity of political blogs which is manifested in combining the features of Internet discourse with elements of political, news, journalistic, and social values discourses (in German political blogs) and political, business, legal, conversational, and artistic discourses (in Russian political blogs). The authors establish the relevant communicative strategies of the addresser (the strategy to justify a “problem”, the strategy to support / not support demonstrated evaluation) and the tactics that implement them. The authors also define the topics for discussion which initiate the addressee’s protest reaction – these are social issues, international and regional developments, environment and migration crisis in German political blogs and finance and taxes, constitution and government, elections, corruption and officials in Russian political blogs. The paper describes the ways of forming and maintaining convening technologies in the protest practice considered. It considers the features of mediatization of politics and personality in the content analyzed, which are manifested in guiding the political agenda to the needs of the addressee. It also establishes that German and Russian political blogs as a protest practice are characterized by a set of common system and communicative characteristics, a similar strategy and tactic organization, and a different set of problem areas marked with the “threat” index. The results obtained contribute to further development of the provisions of the communicative theory of protest, facilitate the understanding of modern protest forms and attempt to explain how technology, politics and the media sphere are interlinked.
Highlights
The mediatization of modern society manifesed in the integration of digital media into all social processes including political ones [1, 5,6,7] creates conditions for the transformation of protest practices which contribute to the implementation of "controlled chaos" technologies
The combination of protest practices with the processes of mediatization in the modern society encourages researchers to study of the latest formats and mechanisms for organizing collective interactions, consider the processes of changing communication, the emergence of a different communicative experience of subjects, and the formation of a new attitude towards the value and reliability of information [3, 9, 15]
The study methodology is based on a combination of system and communicative and integrative approaches; on scientific theses on the system and communicative autonomy of protest; on interrelations between the technological and sociocultural, political and media spheres; on the discursive construction of reality and subjects of communication as well as how the phenomenon of mediatization is reflected in modern Internet practices and how it changes thinking and psychology of the subjects of communication [4, 16]; on the interpretation of protest as a communicative practice of conflict resolution [11, 14]
Summary
The mediatization of modern society manifesed in the integration of digital media into all social processes including political ones [1, 5,6,7] creates conditions for the transformation of protest practices which contribute to the implementation of "controlled chaos" technologies. The combination of protest practices with the processes of mediatization in the modern society encourages researchers to study of the latest formats and mechanisms for organizing collective interactions, consider the processes of changing communication, the emergence of a different communicative experience of subjects, and the formation of a new attitude towards the value and reliability of information [3, 9, 15]. These aspects of research are designed to assess the factors which influence the transformation of protest practices and help further develop algorithms for regulating protest behavior and managing conflict societies. The final sample size was about 1,000 German and 1,000 Russian posts for the period from 2018 to 2020
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