Thursday, March 28Институт «Высшая школа журналистики и массовых коммуникаций» СПбГУ
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2019. Volume 6, No. 3

2019
№ 3
(Vol. 6)

The article deals with the forming and modernizing the journalism theory terminological apparatus in the changing socio-cultural environment and technical and technological support of its functioning. Some scholars insist on the need for a radical revision of the theoretical concepts in journalism, which would greatly affect the lexical representation of scientific knowledge. The author considers the experience of compiling terminological dictionaries of journalism in Russia and abroad and notes the high activity in this area, mainly at the applied level. However, the task to publish the fundamental encyclopedic dictionary is still to be completed. It will only be possible if there is an adequate theoretical concept of modern journalism to rely on. The study analyzes recent publications, which assess the impact on the journalism theory and its terminology of two main factors, namely the trends in world science and the digital explosion in the media industry. Supporters of radical changes insist that due to these factors the theory of journalism should give way to the theory of media. Accordingly, the media would become an essential element in the terminology system. At the same time, authoritative foreign scientists write that the imaginary crisis of journalism is typical of some Western countries and that the idea to revise the theory is promoted by representatives of the Anglo-American school of communication studies. In other regions of the world, on the one hand, journalism is successfully developing, although changing in forms of functioning, on the other hand, the lexical diversity brought by different national cultures, enriches science more than terminological unification. The author also sees no reason to kill journalism theory with its stable terminology, which reflects the existing institutional and professional reality.

2019
№ 3
(Vol. 6)

The article discusses the identification of the urban community in the so-called urban-oriented media (V. V. Abashev, I. M. Pechischev). The relevance of the study is justified by active urbanization processes indirectly influenced by the situation of late Russian urbanization (V. L. Glazychev) and the formation of “hipster urbanism” (V. S. Vakhshtain). As a representative method of forming a new urban identity, self-narratives which are typical of this kind of media and which have replaced the traditional interview are analysed. Based on the notion of speech being intentional (L. R. Duskayeva) and the concept of narrative as a basic metaphor (T. R. Sarbin), the stable types of self-narratives that have developed in the three main subject-thematic groups of autobiographical narrations (life story, specific experience, attitude to the place) are studied in the article. The metaphors of a startup, a response to a challenge and design are considered as the basic metaphors that demonstrate the values of the new urban identity, namely creativity, self-sufficiency, individuality, including the assertion of the right of being unusual, as well as the comfort of the urban environment and socio-psychological comfort based on conscious tolerance. At the same time, being a means to understanding particular life experiences, biographical narratives do not only introduce possible scenarios of life in a megalopolis, but also create an environment for joint identification communicative situation. By giving the vote to ordinary citizens, urban-oriented media achieve solidarity with their readers, which is very important for social identification processes.

2019
№ 3
(Vol. 6)

In this article the author explores the language of online media. The stylistic characteristics of colloquial words and expressions, their word-formation patterns and etymology are studied through the case of headlines of the leading Russian online publications. The choice is justified by the high communicative status of online publications, which facilitates the main functions of news texts, i.e. to inform and to influence the reader. The study clarifies the term “substandard” in connection with its modern interpretation. The concept of urban substandard speech and its varieties are defined. By way of stylistic, contextual and quantitative analysis, the author attempts to determine the varieties and functional features of substandard vocabulary in Internet publications. The study also describes the word-formation models and etymological characteristics of the selected items, which helps to determine their position in the system of the modern Russian language. Varieties of substandard speech are revealed: from colloquial expressive items to slang. The path of substandard vocabulary to the codified standard language is traced. The article also shows the relationship between jargon, slang, and urban substandard speech. The research focuses on the substandard vocabulary in the Internet media, which have a significant impact on Modern Standard Russian. The interest in substandard elements in the media is due to the fact that it is through the public discourse that these elements penetrate the standard variety of the language. Internet media, being the leader in the media sphere, play a significant role in this process. This article will be of interest for philologists and journalists, as well as the broad public.

2019
№ 3
(Vol. 6)

The paper deals with the categories of hypertext as compared to the traditionally acknowledged categories of text. It treats both the technologically independent and technology-based properties of digital texts. Although the technological shift from the affective to the digital presentation leads to a significant growth of the role and impact of the addressee on the content of communication, nevertheless, the conceptual basis of hypertext is shown to be prevailing over its digital code-based properties. The essential distinction of hypertext from the paper-based text lies in the significant modification of the iconic principles and the predominance of the hypotext structure over the paragraph division. The author presents the systemic, formal, functional, and pragmatic categories as applied to the production and the reception hypertext representation models.

2019
№ 3
(Vol. 6)

The article discusses the current situation in which the roles of participants of mass and information discourse are changing because of modern Internet technologies. Instant messengers these days not only serve as a platform of interpersonal communication but are also used to ensure contact with the audience and creation of stable traffic on the websites of information Internet resources. In the status oriented discourse of Viber communities, speech techniques of a person-focused discourse are used: the etiquette formulas characteristic of interpersonal communication, small talk as a kind of phatic idle-speech genre, the topics related to private life of administrators of community and its participants are discussed. In the analyzed community vertical communications in the “editors — audience” binomial tend to evolve horizontally, while phatic communication becomes an attribute of mass communication. Through the case of a Viber community of an information resource the author studies the genres of phatic speech communication in the messenger: etiquette (formulas of greeting, farewell, advice), entertaining (stickers, polls, jokes), metatextual (introductory heading — “triggers”). Two key tonalities of texts are distinguished: the tonality of intimization, characteristic of the etiquette and entertaining genres, and the tonality of the outrageous, typical of introductory heading — “triggers”. Introductory headings in publications of the community are formed according to the laws of “the selling texts” in marketing communications and carry out the role of psychological hooks that “hitch up” the participants’ attention: threat to personal security, details of private life, exclusiveness of an event, desperate acts, financial benefits, etc. Thus a Viber community of an information resource becomes the kind of space where one can see an overlap of various types of discourse, namely, mass and information, colloquial, and marketing.

2019
№ 3
(Vol. 6)

The paper presents the structural and semantic analysis of clickbait headlines in internet media services, which play a key role in attracting the attention of the recipient to specially prepared content. A modern media user consumes content that is interesting to him or her through headlines-hyperlinks. In an oversaturated information environment, the headline is an important supporting, attractively “packaged” element, which determines further actions of the internet-user. The data (headlines, announcements — leads — full texts) of such media resources as Национальная служба новостей https://nsn.fm/, Яндекс.Новости https://news.yandex.ru/, Рамблер.Новости https://news.rambler.ru/, EurAsiaDaily https://eadaily.com/ru/news/, MsnНовости https://www.msn.com/ru-ru/news for 2016–2019 were used to form the body of the empirical material. Based on the analysis of the studied texts, the article substantiates the idea that clickbaiting aims at searching for non-trivial forms of linking information, which is revealed step by step as a result of clicking on the provided links. The author considers the lexico-stylistic, syntactic and structural organization of clickbait headers, as well as describes the popular mechanisms used in creating “clickable” content, such as character substitution and false death, semantic provocation techniques, heuristic techniques, citation, context modification, presenting the possible as real. The study showed that the linguistic architecture of clickbait headlines allows one to update false events and design falsified information, thereby developing fake media resources and viral advertising disguised as a news item.

2019
№ 3
(Vol. 6)

The relevance of the social media study nowadays is connected with the fact that, having transformed into the media scene, the social media appeared to be aimed at the establishment and transmission of modern cultural values and the promotion of prestigious behavioral patterns. This article focuses on the analysis of the Instagram discourse as one of the most popular and fast developing social media. The paper is aimed at revealing the true intentions of Instabloggers. Taking the creolized nature of the media text into account the author of the article appeals to the method of linguostylistic analysis with linguosemiotic elements, which enables to examine the posts in terms of the semiotic languages used there. The messages studied were ones by users who have no connection with the media industry and do not place posts that serve commercial purposes. The conducted research has brought to light a close link between advertising, PR, and Instagram-communication. It shows that as media texts the posts carry the intention of promotion, the purpose of encouraging the audience to take certain action being their implicit yet dominant aim. Due to Instaposts having creolized nature, the aim is achieved with the help of visual components. This effect appears to be stipulated by Instagram being social media: photos perceived as trustworthy, the blogs become a kind of documentary chronicles, which make it possible both to promulgate a type of lifestyle and to attract new subscribers, the supporters of the lifestyle. Communicative tasks, which the authors of the blogs perform, demonstrate that their focus is on creating a self-image and on self-promotion. This allows to consider Instagram-communication as image communication and to classify it as the promoting communication.

2019
№ 3
(Vol. 6)

The article is devoted to the functioning of the radio discourse in the information and communication conditions of the 21st century, and to its key component — radio text. The approach proposed in the article is based on a broad interpretation of hypertextuality and becomes the basis for considering radio text as a single whole, which includes not only audio recordings, but also video broadcasts of radio programmes and printed text the station’s website. The concept of hyper radio text is introduced, and radio programme announcements, Internet comments on radio programmes, journalists’ blogs and comments on them, as well as the website of the radio station are analyzed as components (modules) of the hyper radio text. The website of the radio station is considered as a key unit that combines radio text into a single communicative space of the radio discourse. The main metatext units organizing intertext links are revealed. The relationship between radio text and social media is investigated, in which the latter serve a communicative platform to provide feedback and prove that modern radio discourse is a communicative space in which the mass addressee is no longer a subject of information perception but an active participant in communication. Not only the radio listener, but also the Internet user becomes the addressee in this case. The problem of radio text authorship is also discussed. Through analyzing a number of Russian and foreign studies and examining empirical material, it is shown that opportunities for co-authorship in the new radio discourse are expanding. Interactivity, multimedia, hypertextuality, nonlinearity, modularity, intertextuality, multiple codes, collective authorship are noted as the main features of radio text.

2019
№ 3
(Vol. 6)

The article deals with lexical units that nominate communicative statuses and communicative roles of the Internet forum participants, as well as speech statements containing specified lexemes with metacommunicative function. The research is a case study of three popular Belarusian Internet forums. Poll results of 18 active members of one of the online forums (the experience of communication on the site is 5–12 years) were madditionally used. The analysis of the status-role nominations used by the Internet forum participants in order to regulate communicative relationships allowed to reveal the main features of forum community members communicative consciousness. The status-role ratio of the online forum participants is determined by the character of the forum. To maintain the online forum community its members have to perform certain communication roles connected with generating, distributing, and consuming content, as well as regulating the users’ interaction in relation to this content. There are four main factors at play in terms of participants hierarchy and opportunities for leadership: communicative power possession (administrators, global moderators, moderators), communicative activity level (“topikstartery”, inspirers, users, “yuzery”), cognitive qualities and demonstrated level of user competence (gurus, experts, “aksakaly”, connoisseur, “chayniki”, “lamery”), commitment to specific, evaluative-marked speech behaviour types (violators, critics, “fludery”, “fleymery”, “neadekvaty”, graphomaniacs, “povtorshchiki”). The status-role names are used by forum users to label meaningful status-role positions and to determine the participants’ roles in communication.

2019
№ 3
(Vol. 6)

The article examines the possibilities of using mass media materials from the Russian National Corpus for educational purposes. It is emphasized that of special interest are the properties specific for certain types of text as they best demonstrate particular linguistic phenomena. The features of mass media that prioritize choosing them as speech material are 1) the mobility of vocabulary, 2) the importance of stylistic functions over stylistic means (the out of ordinary use of means of other styles), 3) atypical syntagmatics. Particularly effective for the formulation of research tasks in the educational sphere will be the tasks 1) of demonstrating language phenomena in diachrony (for example, the formation of a portable value, the formation of idioms), 2) of observing the ratio of direct and portable meaning in texts of different styles in synchrony, 3) of analyzing the lexical collocations and compatibility. The didactic potential of the materials in the Russian National Corpus is demonstrated through the analysis of phenomena of various nature. The proposed search strategy, in particular, makes it possible to compare the methods of syntactic presentation of a significant element of the textual structure, i.e. the title. By modeling teaching and research situations it is also shown how work with the journalese and the collocations common in mass media can be arranged. To illustrate the dependence of language use on the sphere of use, a comparative analysis of search results in the Newspaper and Main Corpus is proved to be productive. Viewing media texts through the lens of computer technologies leaves no questions as to their potential in teaching. This refers to a wide range of subjects within the humanities.