Storytelling for the social media age : A study of mediated historicity and political narratives in “1917. Free history”

Abstract: Scholarship on politics and popular culture is constantly evolving in the field of media and communications. Analyzing diverse types of mediated texts, especially the ones that are structured as narratives, such works aim to show how the cultural evolves from the political and vice versa. While storytelling in social media has attracted many scholars, it is mostly neglected from the perspective of politics and popular culture. The probable reason for this is that social media for long time have not introduced any new types of popular culture mediated texts, which would be impossible to imagine without the opportunities of Web 2.0. Through examining “1917. Free history” – a project dedicated to the anniversary of the Russian revolution – this study aims to fill the research gap and expand the scholarship on politics and popular culture to the storytelling in social media. It examines the theoretical paradigm of mediated historicity with the help of content analysis, and the concepts of narrative, myth and ideology with the help of narrative analysis. For the former, the results show how remediation in pursuit of immediacy, expressed in implicitly hiding the initial contexts of production of the texts, constructs the mediated historicity of the project. For the latter, the results show that the political narratives of “1917” are constructed as agoras holding different competing myths which make equipollent ideologies appear natural. These practices are mutually beneficial and their interconnections are understood by applying a theory of the Russian identity which corresponds to the notion of identity as a national mythscape. This work could have a potential impact on narrative and discourse methodologies for the popular culture mediated texts in social media. It could also contribute to the theoretical debates on mediated historicity and research on national identity, cosmopolitan identity and nationalism in social media.