Dynamics of Russian digital political discourse
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.31558/2617-0248.2020.5.3Keywords:
political discourse; authoritative regime; Russia; political emotions; negativity; intertextualityAbstract
In the digital world, political actors have been getting plenty of possibilities for a direct communication with society, without mass media participation. In democratic countries formats and structures of official discourses has been transforming in order to use the possibility. However, changes in authoritarian discourses are not studied properly. In the paper Russian political discourse transformation is considered (four indicators are taken into account). The interrelations of official (president’s site) and non-official (internet-site «Lenta.ru») is observed between 2005-2019. The analysis is conducted with computer programs, written in Python. The calculation of the indicators (emotionality, negativism, intertextuality (direct and indirect) shows, that the discourse has low activity. There is no rapprochement between the official and non-official components. Thus, the reorientation of the official discourse towards direct communication and the discourse usage for the political struggle is indistinctive. Low level of political interrelations, which may be explained with some peculiarities of Russian political regime, leads to low indicators of emotionality and negativity for the official (0,03; 0,03) and non-official (0,2; 0,19) discourses. Additionally the direct intertextuality isn’t typical for Russian official discourse – it’s true for the whole period of observation (0,003), direct intertextuality has been less salient since 2010 (0,9). The indicators for the non-official discourse are larger (0,04 – indirect; 0,15 – direct), although, in comparison with other democratic states, these number are enough for reach forums of ideas functioning in the political sphere. Thus, as a rule, Russian political actors don’t create messages, attractive for audiences, in order to disseminate the texts in both official and non-official discourses. To sum up, texts’ formats and structure transformation is indistinctive for Russian political discourse, and in the digital reality this makes the direct interrelations between political actors (officials) and society a problematic one.
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