The Ordinary Social Media User as a Historian: Ways to Create a Historical Narrative on YouTube
The article discusses the features of the participation of ordinary users of the YouTube platform in the creation of digital products that look like “folk” stories about Russian history of the twentieth century. Such stories are created by ordinary users within the framework of standard digital algorithms and technologies for their production. This gives rise to the effect of invariance of storytelling and makes it possible to identify repeating structural and substantial elements in them. The aim of the study is to study the specifics of technologies for creating digital stories and identifying narrative structures in them that are correlated with the components of a mediatized cultural memory. The focus of the research is video stories created by ordinary users and the semantic extension of video stories in user comment threads. The article suggests typologization of video stories by formats and production methods, as well as by their content and rhetoric. The following describes the principles of constructing stories about the past in the comments. This allows us to identify the different roles that users choose when creating macro- and microhistories. Video stories and comments on them should be considered as integral works, the interactive digital content of which is formed and transformed in the process of socio-cultural network communications.