The Сrisis of Сonsciousness in the Russian Internet: The Experience of Discourse Analysis

Abstract

The crisis poses a specific practice of representation of consciousness. The current situation in the Russian media is characterized by a lack of freedom of speech where the traditional media is controlled by the state. It has made the Internet the only platform where there is a possibility to implement the various forms of expression of the crisis of consciousness. Russian authorities use the crisis in order to demonstrate the correctness of their strategy of social and economic policies. This appears to be a very specific way of constructing social and cultural reality being developed. The Russian Internet provides space for the regularly produced animated film Mr. Freeman, which is focused on Russian crisis of consciousness. The video shorts were analyzed as “description of discursive events”(Foucault). Discourse analysis provides an opportunity to highlight the discursive elements of two types; these are the symbolic and the semantic, which form the two levels of the crisis consciousness.The symbolic level the series includes images of Napoleon, the Little Prince, a meat grinder, the thinker, Caesar, and finally, a spider. On the semantic level this includes a free man, multiple fluid identities, the negation of cultural stereotypes typical of popular culture, the denial of the basic principles of the consumer society, anarchism as a reaction to the totalitarian state penetration into all spheres of social life and anti-hierarchy. The predominance of these images shows the current crisis of consciousness of Russian Internet users, which is expressed and oriented towards symbolic forms of protest. The crisis generates the specific practices of representation of the consciousness (it can be characterised as crisis consciousness), on the one hand, which are hardly revealed by the classic methods of sociology, and, on the other hand, are expressed in particular ways through the unconventional media and the forms of arts. DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2013.v4n11p186