Online: Digital Icons 2. Social Networks on RuNet

The structure, taxonomy, function, and significance of social networks on the Russian Internet: that is the topic of the issue 2 of Digital Icons: Studies in Russian, Eurasian and Central European New Media. Digital Icons, previously The Russian Cyberspace Journal, recently changed its name to reflect a widened geographic scope and an increasingly complex media orientation.

Digital Icons it is, then. Titled “From Comrades to Classmates: Social Networks on the Russian Internet,” issue 2 was launched this week and is fully accessible online. A tip of the veil: the contributors consider the role of social media in contemporary Russia, with a special eye for the paradoxical stereotypes of Russian society — as collectivistic on the one hand, and amorphous and apathetic on the other. They determine, too, the role of social networks in maintaining Russia’s regional integrity by binding together the widely dispersed Russian-speaking diaspora. They do so in statistically (Alexanyan) and psychoanalytically (Mikheeva) oriented analyses of the Russian blogosphere, in articles on political and ethnographic identity-building on RuNet (MacLeod, Suleymanova, Katsbert), on online Russian libraries (Mjor), and in explorations of the specifities of Russian as opposed to global social networks (Golynko-Volfson).

Together with three reviews of recent RuNet-related publications, the articles make for a lavish discussion of Russian social media. Enjoy.

Russian humour

With our F2 conference on “Play” coming up in January a general update on Russian humour — outside of its new technology context — could be useful. Two recent books for this (and other) purpose(s): the edited volume: Olga Mesropova & Seth Graham, eds. Uncensored?: Reinventing Humor and Satire in Post-Soviet Russia, Slavica 2008 and Seth Graham’s monograph on the Russian anekdot: Resonant Dissonance: The Russian Joke in Cultural Context, (Studies in Russian Literature and Theory), NUP 2009.

The edited volume offers contributions on Russian humor and satire in post-Soviet literature, jokes, film and TV, music and stand-up comedy. With a constant view to the role of humour, satire, jokes and irony in the Soviet society, the analysis of post-Soviet humor and satire, in the words of the editors “contributes to the ongoing scholarly discussion both of how Russians have negotiated the effects of the post-Soviet transition and how today’s popular culture playfully “re-appropriates” Soviet history. (8)”

Graham’s book explores the Russian anekdot in its cultural context(s), with chapters on the genealogy of the word and the genre, its main functions, thematic clusters, the genre’s reflexivity (meta-jokes) and post-Soviet afterlife. The book makes delightful reading, not only because of all the funny examples (unfortunately, only in English translation). Happy reading!

Is linguistics harmful?

Our colleague Alexander Berdichevsky gave a very interesting interview to the Russian radio station Russkaia sluzba novostei. One of the topics raised in this interview was whether linguists can inflict harm on the development of a language. Some of you might have guessed Sasha’s answer already (the rest of you are welcome to download the interview…), but as interesting as the response itself is the reference to an ongoing public debate in Russia about the relationship between professional and lay linguistics. A key document in this debate is a paper given by professor Andrei A. Zalizniak “O professiona’noi i liubitel’skoi lingvistike”.

Interestingly, an adjacent debate has surfaced on the thread of comments to Dmitrii Medvedevs video blog. A linguist under the nick of Niva accusses the president, as well as premier minister Vladimir Putin, of giving in to the widespread notion that changes in the language are due to the meddling of linguists with the language:

Тем не менее не могу молчать, поскольку вижу в этом еще один момент непонимания между наукой и властью. Я имею в виду сказанную Вами фразу, приведшую меня и моих коллег в недоумение: «На одной из моих встреч с учителями ими было правильно замечено: “Хватит уже переставлять ударения в словах, надо заняться реальными проблемами, которых в нашей стране достаточно”». […] Сегодня кто-то в эфире задал В.В. Путину вопрос про йогурт, и очаровательная ведущая тут же припечатала это выражением «реформа языка» (кстати, неверным по своей сути). К клевете на науку мы начинаем, увы, привыкать. Дмитрий Анатольевич, лингвисты — не враги народа, а тоже граждане России и тоже имеют право на защиту чести и достоинства. Мы уже устали быть без вины виноватыми.

I believe the last word has not been said in this debate…

AAASS, Columbia Meet-and-Greet, CfP

Although the Future of Russian team had to miss some delegates at the AAASS 2009 conference, it was a more than fruitful event for the project, I would say. Next to panel sessions, the project group activities included a meet-and-greet with scholars from Columbia University’s New Modes of Communication project. They pointed our attention to their upcoming conference, which some of us – or other readers of this blog – may want to visit. The Etiology and Ecology of Post-Soviet Communication is hosted in May 2010 by Columbia’s Harriman Institute. The organizers – Eugene Gorny, Florian Toepfl, Catharine Nepomnyashchy, Alan Timberlake, and Guobin Yang – welcome panels on:

“the emergence and evolution of social networks; patterns of interlinking; the phenomenon of social contagion in online communications; political clustering in the blogosphere and beyond; public versus private identities; doublethink, cynicism, coded language; the emergence of opinion leaders in the blogosphere; freedom of the press on the internet; forms and degrees of censorship, online activism/social movements on the internet; dissenters and political activism; democracy to autocracy in the Russian internet.”

One-page abstracts can be sent to nmc.conference@gmail.com by February 1, 2010. For those who can’t make it: the conference culminates a one-year project which has its own wiki site. Worth a visit, not only for the contents proper, but also as a sample of a new type of scholarly platform — one which utilizes cutting-edge digital research tools to facilitate, among other online services, internal communication and a collective virtual biography. Next year, the site may include podcasts of the May conference presentations – or so Eugene Gorny and Florian Toepfl suggested during our meeting.

Affective Fabrics of Digital Cultures: CfP

shadow mechanism, vlad kuntsman, 2006

On June 3-4, 2010, the University of Manchester hosts the two-day conference Affective Fabrics of Digital Cultures: Feelings, Technologies, Politics.  Organized by Adi Kuntsman – the author of a recently published book on online hate speech – the event brings together contributions from an exciting blend of scholarly fields: sociology, for one, media and cultural studies, arts, politics and science, and technology studies. Submissions for papers or round-tables are welcomed before February 1, 2010. “How does affect work in on-line networks and digital assemblages?”  Is one of the questions participants could ponder. Or: “What kind of perceptions, sensations, affective movements and public feelings emerge in our highly mediated and digitalised environments? What is the cybertouch of war, violence, terror? What are the structures of feeling that operate in the digitalised everyday and computerised ordinary?”

With such keynote speakers as Patricia Clough and Athina Karatzogianni – authors of Autoaffection: Unconscious Thought in the Age of Teletechnology and The Politics of Cyberconflict, respectively - the event sounds more than promising for the scholar of new media, politics, and emotion. With Kuntsman as the initiator, it is bound to be of interest to academics who scrutinize the RuNet in particular, too.

60 Parallel’: The (Ru)Net & Society

How to study online audiences? How does online communication and writing affect views of the self and of humanity? The Russian journal 60 parallel’ touches upon these and related questions in its latest issue, devoted to Internet and society. Apart from contributions by Elena Goroshko, Anna Sysoeva, and Evgenii Dukov, the issue provides an interview with Russian Cyberspace Journal editor Vlad Strukov, on the RuNet as an object of scholarly inquiry.

Remarkable, given the thematic focus: teasers of the different articles can be read online, but for the entire issue you have to buy a print copy, which can be paid… in cash via mail transfer only. Now there is one of the paradoxes of living in a digital era which is only just beginning to outgrow its cradle.

Breakthrough for Twitter in Belarus

The web project Generation.by reports from the recent conference Delovoi Internet in Minsk, which was devoted to BY-net, the Belarusian Internet sphere. Many of the papers from the conference are available on the conference home page, and they give a good understanding of the development of Internet and social media in the country. In Generation.by’s report we learn that the prices of Internet access in Belarus are 30 times lower today than five years ago, but they are still significantly higher than in the neighbouring countries. Thus, if you want a connection equal to 1 Mb/sec in Belarus you will have to pay 100 times more than in Poland. This is interpreted as a result of the state monopoly on providing Internet services. Still, the number of Internet users increases steadily, and has reached 3 million in the 10 mill country.

The conference organisers had arranged for a live twitter update throughout the conference, through the tag #di_by, which turned out to be very popular among the participants. The same has been the case for similar conferences in the city, and Twitter seems to have gained a strong foothold in Belarus.

The language maven

A pet child has many names. Among the dearest pets of the “Landslide of the Norm” research group were the language mavens, or guardians, or purists, or high priests, etc., a group of people devoted to protecting the norms of the Russian (standard) language. This phenomenon, however, is not restricted to Russia, but is widespread in modern standard language communities.

Recently one of the most visible American language mavens, William Safire, passed away. He contributed to the trade in a highly respected manner with his column “On Language” in the New York Times. Ben Zimmer has written a highly readable obituary of Safire, which discusses the art of language mavenism.

Dotting the right i

In a recent blog post the Belarusian programmer Ihar Makhanëk explains the challenges of writing Belarusian on a Russian keyboard. As should be known the Cyrillic Belarusian alphabet is distinguished from the Russian Cyrillic one by several letters. The “Latin” “і”, the unique “ў” (u karotkae), the obligatory “ё”, as well as the absence of the Russian letters “щ” and “ъ” (Belarusian uses the diagraph “шч” and an apostrophe respectively).

The solution for many Belarusians (and, possibly Ukrainians as well) when they need to enter the Belarusian “i”, Makhanëk suggests in his highly informative post, is to switch to an English keyboard set up. The problem, however, is that the Belarusian “і” and the Latin “i” have different positions in the Unicode system. The Belarusian “і” holds the position U+0456 (lower-case) and U+0406 (upper-case), while the Latin “i” holds positions U+0069 (lower-case) and U+0049 (upper-case).

As a result of this the use of the Latin “i” as a replacement for the Belarusian creates problems when you want to search for a word, or to make alphabetical lists, since the words you want to search for have been coded incorrectly. Makhanëk’s post shows that the challenges connected with computer-mediated communication are not only related to the available technical solutions, but also to the individual choices of the users.

A law-breaking word

What does the word реже mean in this quotation?

(1)

ххх: привет Тоха, заходи реже в л2, там сейчас замес, МЯСО!
ууу: да не Тоха я – я ОТЕЦ
ххх: Да я знаю, что ты папко, хуле, с таким опытом и шмотом и я был бы папко! Заходи реже, нужно организовать пачку!!ато тут все тупят
ууу: так я не умею, даже не знаю как заходить в этот ваш л2…
ххх: бляяяя, Тоха, ты чё сёдня накуреный???
ууу: ЭТО ОТЕЦ АНТОНА, АНТОНА НЕТУ ДОМА

Not “seldomer” at all. It’s a distorted резче, which is a comparative of резко, which has a slang meaning “quickly, immediately”. Here it actually means “immediately, right now”.

Some other words might also need explanation:

л2 — Lineage 2, a popular MMORPG;

замес — bloody battle;

папка, отец (note the interlocutors fail to understand each other when using this word) — as far as I understand, an experienced high-level player, probably there is a more specific meaning;

шмот — weapon, armour, accessories;

пачка — probably a squad or something like that.

It’s quite easy to understand where do all these slang signantia and signata come from. That is not the case with реже.

UPD: I was so dumb as to forget about the cases близко-ближе, низко-ниже, узко-уже (thanks Martin!). Obviously, реже is formed by analogy to them.

However, the pragmatic problem still exists: not only this word is ambiguous, it’s meaning is almost opposite to the meaning of its homonym. One could expect that the speakers would avoid such ambiguity, but, obviously, they don’t. They don’t even care about the fact that реже-seldomer is more popular than реже-immediately and thus probably would be the default choice of a hearer facing this ambiguity. The context determines everything.

Here are some more examples (I yandexed for «давай реже»):

(2)

В очереди передо мной стоит девочка лет восьми. Очередь продвигается медленно и стоящая в метре от нее мама произносит: “Ты, коза, давай реже! Я опаздываю бля!”  Не хватало только пальцев веером и дешевой тонкой сигаретки в зубах, причем мама была не молодой.

(3)

ПродУУУУУУУУУУУУУУУУ­У!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!­!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Давай реже пишы дальше , я хочу продуууууууууууу!!!­!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!­!!!!!!!!

(4)

и де раздачя нетупи давай реже)))

(5)

Фаенька: *БЛОНДИНОЧКА*, блииин, повезло. наверна тоже свойство блонди, точняк завидую примите к себе плиииииииииииз

(…)

*БЛОНДИНОЧКА*: Фаенька, ты сильно то не завидуй, а то сглазишь

(…)

Фаенька: *БЛОНДИНОЧКА*, вот именно поэтому давай реже принимай к себе

(6)

-Сашуль,давай реже открывай, мне надо в туалет за прокладкой.

(7)

Мы все пародии на людей,так,что….
Давай реже приходи и погнали играть в футбол.

(Note that here it is really possible to understand реже as less often. But the speaker still doesn’t care)

(8)

Ну-ну,ну-ну.Давай реже так хочу пару новостей и фоток добавить.

(9)

а то контра заебала уже давай реже сервак включай!!!

(=”I am fed up with Counterstrike, switch on the Lineage 2 server faster!” http://la2-gold.at.ua/forum/2-35-2)