The Space of Contemporary Public History: From Viewer’s Attention to Political Discourse

Abstract

The subject of the article is the culture of historical memory in Russian society. This is true in the context of the past, and in the light of modern formation of recent history. The specificity of Russian social structure is that cultural and historical formation aspects as well as problems of historical memory are discussed by politicians, rather than society and historians. The new millennium began with the advent of alternative communication via Internet platforms and blogs that gained popularity. The rapid dissemination and popularization of this sphere resulted in manipulations with the public opinion through messages on social networks, which became alternative to the impact of television and newspapers. The purpose of the article is to examine blogging as a phenomenon of a new interactive political culture and their role in shaping the new history of Russia. The study uses information and analytical approaches to investigate the development path of blogging platforms as a ground for public journalism. The synthesis method was used to summarize the knowledge of the matter, generalize findings, and to identify prospects for further research. Textual and visual materials were exposed to discourse and content analyses, constituting the standard methodological toolkit for working with the blogging content. The authority of academic knowledge of history decreases, assuming the gradual formation of a new style of historical thinking and new analytical approaches. This new configuration is commonly called the “social form of knowledge” about history. We are witnessing the legitimization of these sources of information that are new to historians. A special place among them belongs to materials emerging and found within the blogosphere, where opinion leaders are representatives of a particular sector of the blogosphere raising important philosophical and socio-cultural questions and forming the audience’s opinion on them.