Experience industries. Socio-Cultural Research Technologies

MEDIA IN THE PALETTE OF SOCIO-CULTURAL PRACTICES: FROM CLASSICS TO TRASH, FROM MASLENITSA TO GAME UNIVERSES

Sergey Malenko — Wed, 26 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Dear readers!

The editors are pleased to present the first 2025 issue, which examines various aspects of the existence of media culture in the modern socio-cultural space. Today, media have become an integral part of the official and everyday life of people, largely determining the formal and intimate ways of their presentation and existence in culture and society.

The issue opens with an article by Olga Pavlova from Krasnodar in the "Reflections" section. The author argues that mediation is generated by the information society and its inherent mass communication. At the same time, media culture itself acts as a technology of manipulation, as well as a tool for creating and promoting screen mythologemes that are interwoven into current institutional and geopolitical contexts.

Moscow researcher Galina Varakina in the "Tradition" section proposed to analyze the use of the principle of mediality in the architecture of a historical city. The examination is carried out using the example of the historical development of Ryazan in the second half of the 19th - early 20th centuries. The author states that it is architecture that acts as a medium that has a unique sign-symbolic language that helps to express the key socio-cultural meanings of the historical period in question more deeply and vividly. Thus, an adaptive relationship is visible in stone and wooden architectural forms, allowing the creation and transmission of a single architectural ensemble of a historical city.

Ekaterina Egorova and Natalia Bedina present the results of their research of a student audience, aimed at identifying patterns of youth perception of cinema. Despite the fact that today cinema offers very different material for interpretation, the authors have established that students clearly identify stable cultural codes of the films they watch. And the themes of action and conscious choice are becoming leading ones today for the formation of readiness for active inclusion in social life in the younger generation.

The article by Moscow scientists Natalia Saenko and Sergey Grigoriev continues the analysis of cinematic texts. The material examines the social mythology of happiness based on a comparative interpretation of the original text and two domestic film adaptations of Arkady Gaidar's story "Chuk and Gek". If the 1953 Soviet film adaptation was filled with post-war existential searches for human warmth, loyalty, friendship and family, then the 2022 film is rather dedicated to nostalgia for the USSR and the contradictions that have developed between the mythologies of Soviet happiness and the mythology of eudaemonism and hedonism in modern Russia.

The topic of traditionalism is continued by Vsevolod Shipulin's article, which analyzes modern formats for designing and promoting collective identities. Strengthening collective ideas about the unity of the Russian people today requires finding effective tools (including in mass culture) that would allow strengthening and developing Russian identity. The author solves these problems by examining the traditions of celebrating the interethnic Maslenitsa, which allows effectively forming and broadcasting a multicultural and interethnic image of Russian society.

The "Horizons" section is devoted to examining media trends, and opens with an article by Georgy Polevodov and Artem Makulin, focused on analyzing contemporary Russian frontline media. The reflections are based on the inter-author project "Field Notebook of the SWO", which is aimed at creating tools capable of maintaining high morale in combat units of the Russian army. The authors come to the conclusion that contemporary examples of high spiritual and military feats are of enduring importance for the implementation of an open and productive dialogue between the military, representatives of the intelligentsia and society as a whole.

Modern media today are impossible without digital environments, within which they are actively transformed. Ufa researchers Irida Enikeeva and Lev Semushkin invite readers to familiarize themselves with the results of their socio-philosophical analysis of game universes. Such media simulacra are the result of the collective creativity of game technicians and players and record the recursion between reality and the created game universes, which seriously affects the interpretation of certain historical events, as well as the definition of a person's place in the real world.

Our author from the city of Pushkin, Vadim Lapatin, concludes the first issue with thoughts on digital media and offers the readers of our publication an article devoted to the analysis of the phenomenon of trash streaming in the Russian-language segment of the Internet. The author asks about the nature of the attractiveness of trash streams for Russian-speaking users of the World Wide Web and tries to establish the leading motives of the user audience, which is happy to immerse itself in the trash streams of the "lower Internet".

Of course, the proposed texts in no way exhaust the entire diversity of modern media culture, which purposefully creates a special emotional and impressive atmosphere for a variety of target audiences. Nevertheless, familiarization with them will allow the reader to understand the nature of media and the spectrum of its modern manifestations more deeply.

IN THE WORLD OF BLESSED LACK OF FREEDOM: MEDIATIZATION AS A BASIC CHARACTERISTIC OF MEDIA CULTURE

Olga Pavlova — Wed, 26 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The author considers mediatization generated by mass communication through the specifics of its impact on modern socio-cultural institutions, including the processes of socialization and enculturation of the individual characterizing media culture as a certain stage of cultural development corresponding to the information society. The article characterizes the specific features of modern media culture, and also outlines the characteristics of mediatization, which in modern conditions acts as a technology of manipulation of consciousness and an instrument for representing the mythologemes of screen culture, as the modern phase of cultural development is also designated. The author comes to the conclusion that mediatization, at the present stage of its development using the entire arsenal of new information and communication technologies, has a purely mythological nature and, being a product of the postmodern culture of simulacra and total play, manipulates the consciousness of individuals, asserting the values of consumer society in it and other relevant socio-cultural mythologemes conditioned by the problematic geopolitical discourse of the era.

FEATURES OF THE HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT OF RYAZAN IN THE SECOND HALF OF THE 19TH — EARLY 20TH CENTURIES: THE PROBLEM OF POLYMEDIALITY IN THE ARCHITECTURE OF THE CITY

Galina Varakina — Wed, 26 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The study is devoted to the consideration of the features of the historical development of Ryazan in the second half of the XIX – early XX centuries. When analyzing architecture, the author used comparative and intermediate methods, atypical for modern art criticism, and the urban ensemble of Ryazan itself would be understood as a polymedial space. This approach, on the one hand, is the purpose of the research, and on the other, constitutes its scientific novelty. Architecture and its specific sign-symbolic language act as a socio-cultural medium. Moreover, these mediums are multiple, which is due to the use of a set of materials in construction that differ in different construction capabilities. The latter significantly affects the design and shape, size and decor of structures. The specific interrelation of objects of the urban environment eventually forms a special polymedial space. However, the principle of intermediality is related to other processes in urban architecture and is much less common. The author examines the process of adapting the forms and techniques of stone architecture in relation to brick and wooden buildings, and also proves the existence of its reverse effect on stone architecture, which repeats adaptive forms. Thus, a reasonable conclusion is drawn about the existence of complementarity in the architectural development of the specified time range and its causes are identified.

A JOURNEY INTO THE STUDENT'S WORLDVIEW: FROM MIYAZAKI TO TARKOVSKY AND BACK

Ekaterina Egorova, Natalya Bedina — Wed, 26 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The article is devoted to understanding the results of a survey conducted by the authors during the first semester of the 2022-2023 academic year among 2nd year students of the Northern (Arctic) Federal University named after M. V. Lomonosov (Arkhangelsk). In the process of organizing communication trainings, it turned out that the form of a review of the film acts as an effective tool for the implementation of educational and educational tasks in the process of teaching the discipline "Public Speaking". By duplicating reality, cinematography presents the possibilities of creative awareness of reality, facilitates dialogue, relieves tension in the student audience, and helps overcome the fear of public speaking. Due to the need to understand the film discourse as an important component of the consciousness of modern youth, the article examines issues related to both the means of artistic communication and the cultural code of cinema as a whole. The presented attempt to interpret student feedback questionnaires actualizes the trends in the development of audience preferences and indicates that the cultural code of the interpreted films remains stable. The backgrounds, angles, techniques of its embodiment change, but the theme of a person's act, awareness of choosing a path, fears and anxieties remain unshakeable. Thus, screen culture can and should be investigated from the point of view of analyzing the way personality is formed among young people.

THREE RUSSIAN CHUCK AND HUCK HAPPINESSES: COMPARISON OF BOOK AND CINEMATIC TEXTS IN INTERIORS OF HISTORICAL ERAS

Natalya Saenko, Sergey Grigoriev — Wed, 26 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The article analyzes the social mythology of happiness in different eras based on Arkady Gaidar's short story "Chuck and Geck" (1939) and two film adaptations of the same text, dating from 1953 and 2022. The variability of the concept of happiness is shown depending on the historical context: the 1930s; the post-war decade in the USSR; modern Russia. It is stated that the analysis of the mythology of happiness is significantly complicated by the age category of the potential reader of Gaidar's works: the book belongs to children's literature. The Soviet child (both the hero of the story and the reader of the Gaidar text) perceives the moral issues of the text and assimilates its didactic aspect, perceives the same pragmatics of the text. The article illustrates the multilayered specificity of Gaidar's stories, his openness to several contextual interpretations at the same time. In this regard, the study highlights the importance of the historical and social environment that influenced the basic axiological structure of the narrative. The author turns to intermediate and comparative methods to compare the original 1939 story and the two film adaptations.

THE PHENOMENON OF INTERETHNIC MASLENITSA: INNOVATIVE PRACTICES OF PRESENTING COLLECTIVE IDENTITIES IN THE RUSSIAN MULTICULTURAL ENVIRONMENT

Vsevolod Shipulin — Wed, 26 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The article analyzes the formats and scenarios of designing and promoting collective identities in the political and cultural realities of the Russian Federation. The goal of many of them, especially those initiated at the political level, is to develop and strengthen collective ideas about the unity of the Russian people, anchored by common values of civic patriotism, but at the same time preserving national and cultural diversity. For this purpose, the tools of mass culture are actively used, including the practice of reformatting and recoding, saturating the content and semantics of cultural phenomena with multinational content, the meanings and narratives of which were previously deciphered differently in the minds of the majority of the population. Among the examples confirming the thesis is the celebration of the international Carnival. At the same time, various ways of presenting collective identity by national, ethnocultural, and religious communities, including migrant communities, are analyzed, striving to adapt to Russian conditions, while preserving their identity and avoiding acculturation. The wide representation of such communities online and offline also contributes to the formation of a multicultural and multinational image of Russian society.

FRONTLINE MEDIA OF THE 21ST CENTURY: REFLECTIONS ON THE BOOK "THE FIELD NOTEBOOK OF SMO"

George Polevodov, Artyom Makulin — Wed, 26 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The article is devoted to understanding the specifics of the formation and principles of operation of modern Russian front–line media using the example of a recently published book, the inter-author's project "The Field Notebook of the SMO". The special military operation that began on February 24, 2022 by decision of the President of the Russian Federation, Vladimir Putin, identified a number of problematic issues both in the field of worldview and an existential approach to understanding these issues, as well as in the field of purely practical, directly related to psychological assistance to our soldiers in SMO and clarifying key humanitarian issues. The book contains an original philosophical search and a real opportunity to reduce the psychological stress of Russian servicemen stationed in the area of a Special Military Operation by demonstrating vivid examples of spiritual culture in the light of a combination of scientific approach, religious motives, and relevant poetry. Using actual factual material, the author demonstrates the enduring importance of an open, honest and principled dialogue between military men, philosophers, cultural scientists, priests, poets, writers, journalists, bloggers, and all those who care about the fate of the Motherland and the world in this difficult time.

THE RECURSION OF THE "KINGDOM OF THE GAME" AND THE "KINGDOM OF REALITY", OR THE DIALECTIC OF THE SYMBOLISM OF THE "OTHER" IN GAME UNIVERSES: SOCIO-PHILOSOPHICAL ANALYSIS

Irida Enikeeva, Lev Semushkin — Wed, 26 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This article is devoted to a socio-philosophical study of the problem of the connection of game universes and possible sources of their inspiration in the surrounding social reality. Such fictional worlds, which are the result of many years of collective creativity between game technicians and gamblers, are almost never considered by experts from the philosophical scientific community. For a qualitative understanding of the essence of modern people's fascination with such a hobby, the authors conducted a comparative analysis based on: the peculiarities of understanding symbols in the spirit of Ernst Cassirer, network culture according to Manuel Castells, simulations according to Jean Baudrillard, doubles and the Other according to Jacques Lacan. As a result of the research, one of the forms of recursion between the real and game universes was revealed, which manifests itself in a specific reflection of historical events, in their reinterpretation within symbolic structures, as well as in the playful nature of a person's transition between worlds attractive to him. The authors also consider the features of such a phenomenon as online fan communities that form and promote gaming subcultures. It is determined that the objects of the game world become simulacra, losing their connection with the primary source of inspiration, becoming materialized in fan creativity and products for representatives of the gaming subculture. The responsibility of the game technician for influencing the user audience through the game in terms of changing its cultural preferences, strategies and behavior is emphasized.

HUMILIATION OR ENTERTAINMENT? TRASH STREAMS AS A SINFUL PLEASURE OF THE “BOTTOM INTERNET

Vadim Lapatin — Wed, 26 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The article concerns the phenomenon of trash streaming in the Russian-language segment of the Internet, which also has the self-name The “Bottom Internet,” and analyzes modern Russian legislative practice regarding trash streams, as well as approaches to defining the phenomenon under study in Russian scientific literature. The author focuses on the attractiveness of trash streams for Runet users. The article highlights several motives of the viewing audience. Firstly, the attractiveness of trash streams is explained by a greater effect of authenticity compared to television reality shows ‒ the viewer can watch “real life” on the air. Secondly, the audience already during the online broadcast gets the opportunity to channel the suppressed aggressive impulses accumulated in everyday experience. Thirdly, trash streams allow individuals to go beyond everyday limitations and realize fantasies that cannot be realized in ordinary life. Finally, by interacting with trash stream participants through donations and ordering challenges from them, the anonymous audience modifies and shapes content – the most important symbolic benefit of the modern digital era. In this way, trash stream viewers receive a perverse sense of themselves as creators of content that crosses the line of acceptability.