Popular Blog Research Articles

ЭВОЛЮЦИЯ ЮРИЯ ДУДЯ: ОТ ПОПУЛЯРНОГО ВИДЕОБЛОГЕРА ДО ОБЩЕСТВЕННОГО ДЕЯТЕЛЯ

This article continues the research, which started in 2018, and examines the evolution of Yury Dud, one of the most popular bloggers and journalists in modern Russia, over the past two years. In 2018–2020, he released several educational documentaries (about the Stalinist repressions and Kolyma, the Beslan tragedy of 2004, the HIV epidemic in Russia, Silicon Valley startups, the disabled and the homeless, etc.). The documentaries drew a huge response, turning Yury into a public figure with significant political potential. According to sociological surveys conducted in the spring of 2020, Dud was named one of the living figures who inspire Russians the most (the audience most interested in him is young people between 18 and 24 years old). The text demonstrates the tremendous influence of the blogger’s talk show on the moods and actions of his viewers, and the way it changes their lives. As of December 2020, Yury Dud has almost 15 million subscribers on his social media accounts and more than 1.2 billion views on his YouTube channel alone. His success is based on the competent use of new media tools for promotion of a personal brand and his virtuoso ability to reach out to a variety of audiences (differing in age, education, income level, locations, interests, etc.), which normally do not overlap. Thus, his enlightenment works in several directions: not only he introduces the mass audience to new information in a fascinating way, but also helps different circles to better understand each other.

ИДЕАЛИЗАЦИИ РОЛЕВОГО ПОВЕДЕНИЯ В ПРОСТРАНСТВЕ СОЦИАЛЬНЫХ СЕТЕЙ (НА ПРИМЕРЕ АНАЛИЗА ОБРАЗА ИДЕАЛЬНОЙ МАТЕРИ)

It is noted that social networks embody the idea of simulacra, described in the works of Zh. Baudrillard. The problem of forming the image of the "ideal mother" using a social platform such as Instagram is analyzed. The content analysis method identifies and describes various aspects of the representation of motherhood by popular bloggers and analyzes the possible risks of consuming this content by users.

Непредсказанный посткапитализм: отчуждение и конкурентная борьба в сфере «производства личности»

The article develops the idea of forming postcapitalist social relations as a social revolution of an individual, which consists in the fact that popularity becomes a key advantage, the “possession” of which is a desired goal and a significant resource of political influence. At the same time, it is shown that this process leads to forming a new dominant stratum — personalities (“people with personality”): celebrities, popular bloggers, social media influencers, micro- and nanosignature. It is substantiated that the personaliat domination is a consequence of contradictory social relations between the new aristocracy represented by the representatives of the personaliat and many people who do not “possess” a popular personality - the impersonaliat (“extra people”, “lower” precariat, those who turn out to be outsiders in the world of social platforms). This contradiction is associated with the rooting of a celebrity’s culture, which encourages a lot of people to fight for popularity and focus on finding advantageous differences from others in the process of self-realization. However, this struggle in the end for the overwhelming majority turns into an increase in creative competition and subtraction. Various new forms of subtraction that appear in situations of widespread self-realization are revealed. Accordingly, arguments are given in favor of the fact that in the context of the “personality revolution”, the truly left will be rather an alternative that will call into question the ways of solving social problems formulated by popular personalities. In other words, it will be possible to oppose the total pursuit of popularity with the projects of society, in which the person is relied not as someone who rises above the others, but as an involved person who values life in harmony with others higher than his own “I”.

РЕПРЕЗЕНТАЦИЯ ДОМАШНЕГО НАСИЛИЯ В МЕДИЙНОЙ СРЕДЕ: ГЕНДЕРНЫЙ АСПЕКТ

The paper focuses on the discourse surrounding a resonate media event connected with the discussion of contested statements concerning domestic violence made by a popular Russian TV-host and blogger. We use feminist critical discourse analysis and analysis of the sociocultural context of discourse to explore the strategies employed to resolve the conflict and highlight the ways global discourses on gender and violence are localized. We show how linguistic representations promote abuse-sustaining discourses or question the gendered ideologies of male violence against women and challenge the social system that condones gender-based violence. The study revealed heterogeneity of gender attitudes, varying (gender-based) degrees of tolerance to statements about domestic violence, the ineffectiveness of the appeal to Anglophone discourses on gender and the effectiveness of a strategy based on the knowledge and experience of “one’s own” social culture. The persistence of patriarchal values in the discourse on domestic violence is supported by widely used strategies of degendering the violence and gendering the blame.

Animal Minds in the Media: Learning Outcomes for a Critical-Analysis Assignment for Students of Comparative Cognition

Students of comparative cognition must learn to read and evaluate scholarly writings such as journal articles and textbooks, and to think critically about information they hear from talks and lectures from experts in the field. They also must develop a healthy skepticism for popular-media portrayals of the mental and behavioral competencies of animals, whether those appear in serious formats such as documentaries and non-refereed popular science magazines or blogs, or even in media portrayals of animals that are intended purely for entertainment. Across a ten-year period, students in either a senior psychology course or a freshman honors seminar completed multiple assignments each semester called “Animal Minds in the Media” requiring identification and evaluation of popular media portrayals of the cognitive capabilities of animals, viewed through the lens of the comparative-psychology literature. The assignment was designed to motivate students to cultivate scientific skepticism and develop a “comparative psychologist’s way of seeing the world” by identifying implications or assumptions of popular-media treatment of animals and by bringing scientific literature to bear on the question of whether animals can actually think in the way implied by the commercial, comic, film, meme, or other media example.

LINGUOPOLITOLOGICAL DESCRIPTION OF SPECIFICITY OF LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT CHARACTERISTICS DUE TO AGe

The article deals with the peculiar features of age-related sociolects and their influence upon political communication in linguopolitical perspective. In contrast to political linguistics, linguopolitology is interpreted as a sphere of linguistic research used in political analysis, political counseling and other fields of political technologies. The author notes that people of different ages do not only possess a specific worldview but also come across different agents that influence its formation (newspapers and television for the elder generation, Internet sites of news agencies and Internet blogs for the younger people). The study reveals the main linguistic and discursive characteristics referring a message to the language of a certain generation (which may be related both to the age of the author and value-based characteristics of the target audience). These characteristic features are associated with the temporal characteristics of vocabulary, its connotations, normative features, and precedent texts. Special attention in the article is paid to the specificity of axiological characteristics in the language of different generations. The study provides data about the language of the youth in connection with their political preferences in 1999-2019 and outlines the tendencies typical of the attitude of the young people to socio-political lexicon of 2012-2017 (surge of sympathy for the word “revolution”, low evaluation of the word “soviet” and a positive attitude to the word “patriot”). The emergence of popular bloggers among “the masterminds” is reflected in the fact that obscene (profane) words are no longer considered a taboo, or an instance of showing off, and thus lose their expressiveness. The article suggests further investigation of language differences within the frames of age-related linguistics.

Reframing healthy food choices: a content analysis of Australian healthy eating blogs

BackgroundBlogs are widely being used by health professionals and consumers to communicate and access nutrition information. There are numerous benefits for dietitians to establish and contribute to healthy eating blogs. In particular, to disseminate evidence-based nutrition information to promote healthier dietary practices. The aim of this study was to explore characteristics of popular healthy eating blogs and inform the provision of healthy eating information in the Australian context.MethodsA content analysis approach was used to identify characteristics of popular Australian healthy eating blogs. A purposive and snowball sampling approach was used to identify healthy eating blogs from search engines including Google, Bing and Yahoo. Blogs were deemed eligible if: (1) the author self-identified as a health professional; (2) the blog was written by a single author; (3) the blog was written by an Australian author; (4) the blog had a minimum of one post per month, and (5) the blog focused on communicating healthy eating information to the general adult population.ResultsFive popular blogs were followed over a three-month period (December 2017–March 2018), with 76 blog posts included for analysis. Characteristics of these popular blogs were examined and four main features were identified: (i) clearly conveying the purpose of each post; (ii) developing a strong understanding of the reader base and their preferences; (iii) employing a consistent writing style; use of vocabulary and layout; and (iv) communicating healthy eating information in a practical manner. These findings reveal important insight into the features that promote effective nutrition communication within this context.ConclusionFindings from this study highlight common characteristics of popular healthy eating blogs. Future research into the development of blog guidelines which incorporate the characteristics identified in this study can support dietitians in establishing or contributing to the successful provision of evidence-based nutritional information through blogs.

A novel time-shifting method to find popular blog post topics

Blog search engines and general search engines automatically crawl Web pages from the Internet and generate search results to users. One difference between the two is that blog search engines focus on blog posts and filter general pages. This difference allows bloggers to focus only on page results for posts rather than other types of page results. Another difference is that posts involve more time-related issues than general pages. For general pages, the general search engine can only show the last update time for the page. However, for posts, the blog search engine can show all possible time clues for the post. For some frequently updated posts, time clues help bloggers find information more efficiently. In this paper, we first use some well-known semantic analysis models to analyze the performance of Google Blog Search. Next, we apply a hybrid strategy that considers the document link and time clue relationships between posts to further improve its retrieval performance. Finally, we present several experiments to simulate various possible scenarios to confirm the effectiveness of our strategy.

Doing Illness

Through three case studies, the article explores how digital media have been used in recent years to depict and comprehend experiences of cancer. It first investigates the illness blog, specifically Swedish journalist and musician Kristian Gidlund’s immensely popular blog In My Body, in which he, from 2011 to 2013, shared the narrative of his struggle with an aggressive, incurable, and ultimately deadly stomach cancer. It continues by discussing Italian engineer, artist, and hacker Salvatore Iaconesi’s digital open-source project La Cura – The Cure (2012), which has great relevance from both the digital and the medical humanities perspectives in the way Iaconesi uses his personal narrative of brain cancer to encourage people to join his struggle to find a cure. Finally, it analyzes the American couple Ryan and Amy Green’s videogame That Dragon, Cancer (2016). A game differing significantly from video and computer games in general and from other games taking cancer as their subject by letting the player enter the role of caregiver to a small child dying of cancer. Expanding on Lisa Diedrich’s theoretical concept of “doing illness”, the article emphasizes the performative dimension of narrating illness in digital media, considering how these authors and creators negotiate with narrative, cultural, and medial scripts when portraying their cancer experiences. It highlights the interactive and participatory dimension of doing illness in digital media, by exploring how the blog, open-source project, and videogame both invite and limit the audience’s opportunities to interact and participate with the illness narrative conveyed.

Wandering with Wi-Fi: The wandering trend in women’s travel blogs

Despite the continued popularity of travel blogs, there is a lack of contemporary criticism concerning the literal and figurative meanings of ‘wandering’ in the genre of online travel writing. One only has to trawl through the blogosphere to notice the number of female travellers who refer to themselves as ‘wandering’ women. However, female wandering has received little to no study in travel writing scholarship. In other words, what a ‘wandering woman’ is exactly – for example, why she wanders and how, as well as what constitutes an act of wandering – is yet to be widely theorised. Furthermore, the subversive tendency of female wandering to disrupt not only circular journeys but also stable conceptualisations of home has not been deeply explored. This paper argues that female wandering is a complex mode of travel that is characterised by the coupling of literal and figurative movement, and therefore it cannot be conceptualised through canonical understandings of departure and return. In the travel blogs presented for analysis, the authors construct non-linear narratives that are marked by boundlessness, continuity, and self-reflexivity. In this way, the blogs themselves are ‘wandering’ texts that marry the physical wandering of the body with the abstract wondering of the mind. As a result, wandering is not only the content of the blog but the defining characteristic of the text itself. When female bloggers cast themselves as wandering women, they resist the Romantic equation of wandering with suffering, and instead construct wandering as a shared reprieve rather than an individual burden. This representation of female wandering as a positive and productive endeavour is interesting given literary representations of male wandering as a curse or punishment.

E-representation: the case of blogging people’s Congress deputies in China

In this exploratory study I join the ongoing research on digitalization of political representation. In the literature on the use of the new information and communication technologies (ICTs) by the parliamentary and congress members in the Western countries, it is often argued that online engagement has the potential to improve the quality of political representation by means of more direct and individualized communication between representatives and represented. Following the scholarly research on digitalization of political representation in the Western countries, I ask how people’s congress deputies in China appropriate social media for representative communication. I first define political representation in terms of interest expression. I then apply Michael Saward’s representative claim-making perspective and analyse the content of interactions between people’s congress deputies and netizens in the Weibo microblogging sphere in the period between 2013 and 2018. To identify, analyse and categorize online claims, I propose the concept of e-representation, operationalized in terms of individualization, everydayness, interactivity and connectivity. The analysis of online blogging is further complemented by semi-structured interviews with acting and former PC deputies of national and provincial congresses, popular Weibo bloggers (so-called Big V) and academic experts conducted in China throughout 2018–2019. The presented analysis provides empirical evidence from China that also has several theoretical implications. First, it tests Saward’s model by revealing the predominance of incomplete claims. Second, it also shows that claims on representation and misrepresentation are in abundance compared to claims of representation, which are rare. The Chinese case may thus contribute to a more refined typology of representative claims.

How religion and morality correlate in age of society 5.0: Statistical analysis of emotional and moral associations with Buddhist religious terms appearing on Japanese blogs

In this paper we analyzed how much religious vocabulary, in particular Buddhist vocabulary taken from the largest online dictionary of Buddhist terms, is present in everyday social space of Japanese people, particularly, in Japanese blog entries appearing on a popular blog service (Ameba blogs). We interpreted the level of everyday usage of Buddhist terms as appearance of such terms in the consciousness of people. We further analyzed what emotional and moral associations such contents generate. In particular, we analyzed whether expressions containing Buddhist vocabulary are considered appropriate or not from a moral point of view, as well as the emotional response of Internet users to Buddhist terminology. As a result of analyzing the data, we found out that Buddhist terms were in fact not absent as a theme from Japanese blogs and generated a strong emotional response. However, while the general reaction to several expressions using Buddhist terms was as expected, there were sometimes surprising twists in terms of social consequences, major discrepancies between what is perceived as ethically correct behavior between the Buddhist doctrine and the reasoning of the general population, as well as a considerate number of terms which have lost their original meaning and instead became slang expressions.

Bad is the new good: negotiating bad motherhood in Finnish mommy blogs

ABSTRACT In recent years, there has been a growing number of mommy blogs and other social media sites where mothers air their negative feelings about motherhood. Analysing four posts of two Finnish mommy blogs and their comments, the article explores the affective power of a “bad mom” figure in relation to the contemporary experience of parenting in Finnish settings; settings which have become increasingly child-centred. The article investigates how these popular blogs mobilise their readers through self-reflective yet ambivalent confessions and ironic criticisms of normative motherhood. The article argues that while the emotional work of the bloggers might not be able to dismantle the myth of the perfect mother, the figure of a bad mom can be seen as an attempt to make sense of the frictions and contradictions triggered by the exhausting nature of the gendered, intensive parenting culture. It further argues that in this process the figure of the bad mom transforms into a new “normal” while the notion of motherhood remains both affective and polarised.

Multimedia blog volume prediction using adaptive neuro fuzzy inference system and evolutionary algorithms

Due to wide streaming multimedia blogs over the social networks, volume prediction has become indispensable for the analysis of blog popularity. As a rule base driven method, Adaptive Neuro Fuzzy Inference System has gained popularity in various prediction tasks for its efficiency and ease of implementation. In this paper, two modified Adaptive Neuro Fuzzy Inference System models have been proposed by tuning its premise and consequent parameters using (a) Particle swarm optimization and (b) Genetic algorithms, to improve its predictive performance. Particle Swarm Optimization helps in reducing the training and cross validation error of the predictive model whereas Genetic Algorithms optimize minimum clustering radius which aids in the formation of rule base. Comparative analysis of proposed method has been performed against Neural Networks, Support Vector Machines and basic Adaptive Neuro-Fuzzy Inference System. Both of the proposed variants have outperformed state-of-art techniques using Genetic algorithms and Particle swarm optimization when tested on UCI public dataset and real dataset of Twitter, making it well suitable for multimedia blog volume forecasting.

MEDICAL BLOG IN GENRISTIC DIMENTION

Nowadays there is growing popularity of medical blogs as new communicative environment and one of the promising areas of linguistic knowledge. However, in Ukrainian linguistic studies, there are few works devoted to exploring their genre characteristics that predetermines the relevance of this research. The purpose of the work is to analyze the medical blog as a genre of Internet communication. To achieve this aim, we designed and fulfilled the following objectives: to clarify the criteria for identifying a medical blog as an independent genre and to describe its genre characteristics. The methodology of this research included general scientific and linguistic methods and techniques: a descriptive method, observation techniques, comparisons and generalizations, discourse analysis, conversational analysis. The genre characteristics of medical blogs have been analyzed based on T.V. Shmeleva’s genre model. The communicative purpose, the author’s role and representation as a test addressor and the characteristics of potential addressee, the image of the past, the image of the future, and the type of dictum context and the linguistic tools for their implementation into the texts. The communicative goal of a medical blog is to convey the professional opinion of a specialist to readers, highlight issues that most often arise in medical practice, and disseminate medical and scientific knowledge among Internet users that is typical of information genres. Medical blogs also promote a healthy lifestyle and illustrate the nuances of medical procedures to help readers choose the right strategy for keeping fit and healthy. This type of communicative behaviour implements the informative and imperative goals of blogging. The author is presented from the standpoint of education, professionalism, responsibility, unselfishness and morality. Another distinctive feature is no phenomena of author’s anonymity, “virtual” and speech masks inherent in the diary blogs. The medical blog provides an unlimited number of recipients: fellow doctors and patients. This is an initial genre, providing for the extension of the communication of the addressor-addressee in the future. Dictum context of a medical blog is focused on reality, with a clear scientific position and rationality. The authors mainly use standard speech patterns within this type of genre.

Periodic Graphics: Sunscreen and coral reef damage

Chemical educator and Compound Interest blogger Andy Brunning reveals how sunscreens damage coral reefs To download a pdf of this article, visit http://cenm.ag/coralreefs References used to create this graphic: Impacts of sunscreens on coral reefs Review of environmental effects of oxybenzone and other sunscreen active ingredientsSunscreen bans – coral reefs and skin cancer A collaboration between C&EN and Andy Brunning, author of the popular graphics blog Compound Interest To see more of Brunning’s work, go to compoundchem.com. To see all of C&EN’s Periodic Graphics, visit http://cenm.ag/periodicgraphics.

Зачем молодежь создает контент о здоровом образе жизни: факторный анализ тематических блогов

В статье предпринимается попытка рассмотреть, как отражается в контенте блогов, связанных с тематикой здорового образа жизни, мотивация молодежи к их созданию и ведению, а также зависимость популярности блога от типа контента.
 Опираясь на выявленные с помощью неформализованного интервью мотивы (принести общественную пользу, показать свой опыт и личностный рост, коммуникация с друзьями, возможность заработать), авторы выдвинули гипотезу, что та или иная мотивация влияет на контент, который создает блогер, а следовательно, она может быть выявлена через соответствующую символическую репрезентацию. Для проверки этой гипотезы был использован факторный анализ (метод главных компонент).
 Результаты исследования показывают, что популяризация здорового образа жизни может осуществляться как за счет повышения социальной ответственности молодых блогеров, стремления обсуждать и предлагать аудитории социально одобряемые паттерны поведения, так и через коммерциализацию блогов, которая возможна на росте популярности данной темы и внимания к ней со стороны подписчиков. Наибольшими возможностями по монетизации контента обладают блогеры, ориентированные прежде всего на коммуникацию с аудиторией (при второстепенности остальных мотивов): у них больше всего подписчиков, активно реагирующих на контент.
 Благодарность. Исследование проведено при финансовой поддержке Российского фонда фундаментальных исследований (проект № 19-010-00850 «Институциональное моделирование экономики интернет-пространства России»).

Periodic Graphics: The Origins of the Elements

Chemical educator and Compound Interest blogger Andy Brunning shines a light on how the big bang and reactions in stars forged the elements To download a pdf of this article, visit cenm.ag/chemorigins. References used to create this graphic: Stardust and the secrets of heavy-element production Synthesis of elements A crash of stars reveals the origins of heavy elements The main nucleosynthetic origins of the dominant isotopes Origin of the elements in the Solar System A collaboration between C&EN and Andy Brunning, author of the popular graphics blog Compound Interest To see more of Brunning’s work, go to compoundchem.com. To see all of C&EN’s Periodic Graphics, visit cenm.ag/periodicgraphics.

Half-Hearted Inception, Miserable Existence, and the Untimely Death of the Bloggers' Register in Russia

The Russian Federation joins a list of countries where violence and terrorism often have a religious and an ethnic basis, and where the authorities seek ways to deal with the issue of online hate speech. In this context, in May 2014 the Russian Parliament enacted Federal Law No 97-FZ (the Bloggers’ Law). This legislation required the compulsory registration of all popular bloggers with the country's internet regulatory agency, Roskomnadzor, thereby forcing the disclosure of their real identities. The Bloggers’ Law has been widely criticised, however, and although the internet community is still engaged in a heated discussion over whether there exists a legal right to online anonymity, the law made anonymous blogging in Russia a daunting undertaking. The Bloggers’ Law was repealed in the second half of 2017, and updating of the ‘Bloggers’ Register’ ceased. This article attempts to (i) analyse the context and the reasoning behind the introduction of the Bloggers’ Register; (ii) disentangle the relevant legal provisions; and (iii) assess its effectiveness, drawing conclusions based on events in the Russian blogosphere during the period 2014–17.

African Countries in the Epoch of Information Globalization: New Challenges in the New Age

The article is devoted to the problem of ensuring security of North and Central African countries in the age of informational globalization. Today there is a new up-and-coming social and economic order based on telecommunications. The central place in this new system of public relations belongs to information and communication technologies. One can observe the situation when the creation of the knowledge-based economy is turning into the main strategic priority of the policy of every country, which considers ICT as an effective tool, which can ensure a sustainable social and economic growth. But at the same time, it is necessary to keep in mind that information technologies, when used effectively, are able to destroy existing orders, to overthrow political regimes that used to be rather stable and influential. Based on case studies of North African countries, authors show key instruments that have been used in those countries in order to manage public opinion. Among those instruments authors highlight: 1) aiming for bad expectations which entails the notion of an impending disaster and mass depression; 2) substitution of definitions which supposes that in order to create positive images of the opposition that resist the governmental forces, Western mass media calls militants and terrorists “rebels”; 3) implementation of mass dissatisfaction which means the situation when popular bloggers or representatives of opposition movements begin to promote the dissatisfaction of legal power; 4) use of biased materials. In this way, authors conclude that the effective resistance in the information warfare strictly depends on the presence of a national idea on the one hand and on the level of the informational culture of the society on the other. The last point seems to be the key element that can guarantee the survival of the State, especially if it pretends to pursue self-reliant political line based on its national interests and cultural values.