Conflict Mobilization in Russian Social Media Communities As an Actual Practice of Protest Communication: Collective and Personal Dimension

From the standpoint of communicative approach conflict mobilization is considered in the article as an actual practice of protest communication in modern Russia. The parameters of the collective-personal dimension of conflict mobilization in the most popular social networks among Russian users: VKontakte, Odnoklassniki, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook are presented. Major forms of social group members online participation in protest actions, interaction means of conflict mobilization communities and the formation of Internet solidarity have been characterized with such criteria as publication volume and frequency. Selective factual and emotional-psychological argumentation with elements of defamation of opponents is concluded to prevail in the communicative behavior of the addresser. Frequent implementation of phatic strategy through consolidating appeals to community members with elements of idealization and glorification of protest actors is revealed. The addresser's self-presentation strategy is noted to be applied rather rarely; it is actualized mainly through their identification with the collective position of the group and the mass addressee. It has been established that the addressee is characterized by active self-presentation through the presentation of a subjective position opposed to a mutual opponent, is distinguished by an appeal to ethical and emotional argumentation, a variety of phatic tactics. The article reveals the relevant language means of implementing the identified strategies, shows the features of the text structure of mobilization posts.

Immobilization of Jagged1 Enhances Vascular Smooth Muscle Cells Maturation by Activating the Notch Pathway

In Notch signaling, the Jagged1-Notch3 ligand-receptor pairing is implicated for regulating the phenotype maturity of vascular smooth muscle cells. However, less is known about the role of Jagged1 presentation strategy in this regulation. In this study, we used bead-immobilized Jagged1 to direct phenotype control of primary human coronary artery smooth muscle cells (HCASMC), and to differentiate embryonic multipotent mesenchymal progenitor (10T1/2) cell towards a vascular lineage. This Jagged1 presentation strategy was sufficient to activate the Notch transcription factor HES1 and induce early-stage contractile markers, including smooth muscle α-actin and calponin in HCASMCs. Bead-bound Jagged1 was unable to regulate the late-stage markers myosin heavy chain and smoothelin; however, serum starvation and TGFβ1 were used to achieve a fully contractile smooth muscle cell. When progenitor 10T1/2 cells were used for Notch3 signaling, pre-differentiation with TGFβ1 was required for a robust Jagged1 specific response, suggesting a SMC lineage commitment was necessary to direct SMC differentiation and maturity. The presence of a magnetic tension force to the ligand-receptor complex was evaluated for signaling efficacy. Magnetic pulling forces downregulated HES1 and smooth muscle α-actin in both HCASMCs and progenitor 10T1/2 cells. Taken together, this study demonstrated that (i) bead-bound Jagged1 was sufficient to activate Notch3 and promote SMC differentiation/maturation and (ii) magnetic pulling forces did not activate Notch3, suggesting the bead alone was able to provide necessary clustering or traction forces for Notch activation. Notch is highly context-dependent; therefore, these findings provide insights to improve biomaterial-driven Jagged1 control of SMC behavior.

THE STRATEGY OF SELF-PRESENTATION WITHIN THE SUBGENRE OF THE ENGLISH-LANGUAGE OLYMPIC DISCOURSE “PORTRAIT INTERVIEW-SKETCH”

The article is devoted to the study of the subgenre "portrait interview-sketch", which has not been studied within the English-language Olympic discourse. The analyzed materi- als were published on the official website of the US Olympic team during the 2018 Winter Olympics. The means of implementing a self-presentation strategy designed to create a positive image of athletes-members of the Olympic team, which can be used as the basis for representing the image of the country as a whole, are identified and illustrated at the lexical, phraseological, morphological and semantic levels. The current research has demonstrated the disengagement of this genre from politics.

The Personality of N.S. Gumilev as a Standard of the Main Character’s Behavior in V.V. Nabokov’s Novel The Eye

The article considers the intertextual level of V.V. Nabokov’s novel The Eye. Particular attention is paid to the analysis of reminiscences and citations from N.S. Gumilev’s literary works, which were known and appreciated by V.V. Nabokov. It is proved that the mythologized image of the poet and warrior, as well as Gumilev’s characters, are the basis of the self-presentation strategy of Smurov, the central character of the novel. Being a creative person, he invents a fictional biography for himself in order to impress the society of Russian emigrants, especially the girl Vanya, with whom he is in love. However, numerous reminiscences to the Acmeist poet’s texts demonstrate an increasing discrepancy between the courageous and selfless characters of Gumilev and Smurov, who wants to look like a hero to the others, and not to be one in reality. The irony of Nabokov is that the real Smurov turns out to be a double of the comic character of A.P. Chekhov’s story Romance with Double Bass, also mentioned in the story, which is decrypted due to reminiscences on Chekhov’s works.

The Personality of N.S. Gumilev as a Standard of the Main Character’s Behavior in V.V. Nabokov’s Novel The Eye

The article considers the intertextual level of V.V. Nabokov’s novel The Eye. Particular attention is paid to the analysis of reminiscences and citations from N.S. Gumilev’s literary works, which were known and appreciated by V.V. Nabokov. It is proved that the mythologized image of the poet and warrior, as well as Gumilev’s characters, are the basis of the self-presentation strategy of Smurov, the central character of the novel. Being a creative person, he invents a fictional biography for himself in order to impress the society of Russian emigrants, especially the girl Vanya, with whom he is in love. However, numerous reminiscences to the Acmeist poet’s texts demonstrate an increasing discrepancy between the courageous and selfless characters of Gumilev and Smurov, who wants to look like a hero to the others, and not to be one in reality. The irony of Nabokov is that the real Smurov turns out to be a double of the comic character of A.P. Chekhov’s story Romance with Double Bass, also mentioned in the story, which is decrypted due to reminiscences on Chekhov’s works.

EXPLORING SUCCESSFUL CAMPAIGN PROFILES ON CROWDFUNDING-BASED PROJECT FINANCING: A TREE-BASED COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS

Crowdfunding platforms have become a popular alternative for financing projects. However, campaigners in the platform witness several challenges that affect their success. This study aims to: (a) generate and explore profiles among the non-successful, successful, and very successful campaigns; (b) to interpret investment behaviour of the backers from the profiles. We employed a fresh approach of tree-based comparative analysis (TBCA) as an exploratory tool that augments qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) with data mining evaluation. Campaign profiles were drawn from four groups of 17 predictors, namely: “campaign strategy,” “presentation strategy,” “campaigners” track records, and “temporal data.” We analyzed 647 campaigns in Kickstarter and the analysis was divided into two timelines: before and on the first day of campaigns. The emerging profiles offer practical insights for campaigners to develop a coherent set of campaign decisions and to anticipate the possible outcome. The profiles also indicate that prior to the campaign, investment behaviour is mainly explained by “signal theory.” Interestingly, for the first day of a campaign, the funding ratio performance has the most significant impact on very successful projects — that is, consistent with ”herding behaviour.”