Issue 5. Transmedial Practices in Post-Communist Spaces
Michael Gorham
Michael Gorham (Ph.D., Stanford Umniversity) is an Associate Professor of Russian at the University of Florida, and Associate Editor of The Russian Review and Russian Language Journal. His book Speaking in Soviet Tongues: Language Culture and the Politics of Voice in Revolutionary Russia (Northern Illinois University Press, 2003) received Choice Magazine’s ‘Outstanding Academic Book’ award and the 2004 AATSEEL award for ‘Best Book in Literary and Cultural Studies’. His current research on language, politics and national identity from glasnost to Twitter has appeared in twelve different peer-review journals and edited volumes. Gorham is a core member of the international working group ‘The Future of Russian: Language Culture in the Era of New Technology’, sponsored by the Norwegian Research Council.
5.2 Virtual Rusophonia: Language Policy as ‘Soft Power’ in the New Media Age
Debates on Russian language policy in the internet age have typically focused either on the formal degradation of language by a variety of internal and external forces of corruption or on the functional democratization of speech afforded by the internet’s decentralized and relatively uncensored mode of operation. Yet more recent trends complicate this dichotomy and reflect official efforts to use language and the internet as tools for ‘soft power’ – educational and cultural means of promoting Russian national interests both at home and abroad. In ‘Virtual Rusophonia” I examine two specific manifestations of this effort – the ‘Russian World Foundation’ (Fond ‘Russkii Mir’) and the ‘.rf’ Cyrillic internet domain project. While both represent a state-sponsored attempt to use language and new technology as tools for creating new spaces of ‘Russianness’, they present quite different, if not mutually exclusive visions, each fraught with tensions between the de-centred nature of web-based communication and the top-down, paternalistic penchants of the Putin-era political elite.
Language of contribution: English