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

Abstract

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.