Digital Russia: The Language, Culture and Politics of New Media Communication (Routledge Contemporary Russia and Eastern Europe Series)

Digital Russia provides a comprehensive analysis of the ways in which new media technologies have shaped language and communication in contemporary Russia. It traces the development of the Russian-language internet, explores the evolution of web-based communication practices, showing how they have both shaped and been shaped by social, political, linguistic and literary realities, and examines online features and trends that are characteristic of, and in some cases specific to, the Russian-language internet. Cover 1 Half Title 2 Title Page 8 Copyright Page 9 Dedication 10 Table of Contents 12 List of illustrations 15 Notes on contributors 16 Acknowledgments 18 A note on transliteration and translation 20 Introduction 22 Part I Contexts 30 1 The (im)personal connection: computational systems and (post-)Soviet cultural history 32 2 From the utopia of autonomy to a political battlefield: towards a history of the “Russian internet” 55 Part II New media spaces 76 3 Divided by a common web: some characteristics of the Russian blogosphere 78 4 Social network sites on the Runet: exploring social communication 93 5 Testing and contesting Russian Twitter 109 Part III Language and diversity 126 6 The written turn: how CMC actuates linguistic change in Russian 128 7 Slangs go online, or the rise and fall of the Olbanian language 144 8 Language on display: on the performative character of computer-mediated metalanguage 162 9 Translit: computer-mediated digraphia on the Runet 177 Part IV Literature and new technology 196 10 Russian literature on the internet: from hypertext to fairy tale 198 11 Occasional political poetry and the culture of the Russian internet 215 12 Digitizing everything? Online libraries on the Runet 236 Part V The political realm 252 13 Politicians online: prospects and perils of “direct internet democracy” 254 14 Languages of memory 272 15 Is there a Russian cyber empire? 287 Index 306 "This book provides a comprehensive analysis of the ways in which new media technologies have shaped language and communication in contemporary Russia. It traces the development of the Russian language internet, explores the evolution of web-based communication practices showing how they have shaped and reshaped social, political, linguistic and literary reality, and examines online features and trends which are characteristic of, and in some cases specific to, the Russian language internet"-- Provided by publisher