The Representation of the “Other” in the Turkish TV Advertisements

Turkey, which has a rich cultural mosaic, consists of the combination of many ‘Others’, including cultural, religious and ethnic the ‘Others’; the ‘Other’ as a gender role; as refugees, emigrants, etc. In such a multicultural climate, our research aim is to identify the stereotypes that represent the ‘Other’ in TV advertisements on Turkey’s mainstream channels. For this purpose, we examined 101 prime-time TV commercials that were broadcast on the five most watched mainstream TV channels between September and December 2020. Having conducted the quantitative and qualitative content analysis of TV commercials, we revealed the symbolic annihilation of the ‘Others’ in the Turkish advertising environment, which is accordance with the conservative perception of the country. In line with the international research, we came to the conclusion that the white Turkish men with medium-high socioeconomic status were heavily represented in the prime-time Turkish TV advertising. Nevertheless, it was also revealed that gendered visibility of the others as well as women portrayals were considered only as the ‘Other’ in the Turkish TV ads. Besides, our research findings overwhelmingly reflect the hegemonic culture and highly traditional views on gender roles.

Global Conflict of the Past in Contemporary Media Space: Historical Memory in a Discursive Perspective

The article is devoted to an overview of studies on the discursive embodiment of historical memory, particularly, in the media. The research is aimed at the overview and systematization of, predominantly, international and Russian concepts of historical memory in academic literature. The scientific significance of research results is determined by the possibility of clarifying the definitions of historical memory in the process of systematizing the existing overseas and domestic studies. With that, the “starting point” of historical memory in this research are global political conflicts, particularly, World War I and World War II. The focus of research interest is the memory of the world wars which is discursively expressed in modern media space with various pragmatic tasks. Analysis of media materials allows for revealing the mechanisms of using historical memory as a tool for creating assessment and images while covering World War I and World War II. The research makes it possible to obtain a general discursive picture of the mass consciousness and, what is especially, important, to get specific data on the linguistic “content” of historical memory reflected in online media. The article is addressed to researchers in various fields of the Humanities, journalists and a wide circle of readers who are interested in the problem.

The Place of Chinese Doramas in the Russian Socio-Cultural Landscape

The increasing interest of people around the world towards the popular cultures of China, Korea and Japan leads researchers to question how these countries influence the socio-cultural spaces of other countries through the export of their mass culture products. This study focuses on the analysis of Chinese doramas in the Russian sociocultural space. The increasing number of online fan communities, the activity of translators and dubbers of Chinese TV series, and the widespread use of the Internet in Russia make Chinese dramas easily accessible to a wide audience. Using quantitative methods, the author of the study came to the conclusion that people in Russia are very interested in Asian cultures, and audiences of Asian TV series are growing at a tremendous rate every year. While Korean dramas remain the most popular in Russia, Chinese serials have great competitive potential against their Korean and Japanese counterparts. This article may be useful to all researchers of mass and popular culture and television series.

Media Coverage of Injury Prevalence in Tennis: a Content Analysis of Selected Online Newspapers

The health benefits of tennis have been well-described. However, like many other sports, playing tennis places athletes at risk of injury with a lot of physical and psychological effects. Thus, research has indicated the need for systematic studies to design useful strategies for the prevention and treatment of tennis-related injuries. Therefore, via a media-based analysis, this study aims to identify the most commonly reported tennis-related injuries and determine the extent of their news coverage in selected Nigerian online newspapers. Vanguard, Punch, The Nation, The Sun, and ThisDay were selected based on their popularity and online readership. A total of 113 tennis-related news articles were gathered via an internet-based search and subjected to content analysis. The articles were collected from January 2015 until December 2020 using “tennis” and “injury” as keywords. The findings showed that tennis-related injuries occur more often in lower extremities than upper extremities. Also, knee injury, hip injury, and elbow injury were the most commonly reported tennis-related injuries in the selected newspapers. Interestingly, these findings concur with previous clinical research on tennis-related injuries. Further analysis revealed that the selected newspapers paid much attention to tennis-related injuries. However, very few news stories reported official responses to tennis injuries. It was envisaged that this study could provide valuable insights on how to discover more efficient data for tennis injury analysis.

“Start” Button Pressed. Game Studies Resumed

Book review: Vetushinkiy, A. (2021). Gamedrome: The Things You Need to Know about Videogames and Game Culture. Moscow: Eksmo. (In Russian).

Review of the Book “Historical Memory in Social Media” by Sophia Tikhonova, Denis Artamonov

The subject of review is the book “Historical Memory in Social Media” by Sofya Tikhonova and Denis Artamonov. In the book, the authors focus on the design and specification of the production of images of the past on the Internet and the gaming industry, referring to various materials, from text “fake” messages and memes to computer games. Research is not limited to the description of empirical data. The supporting structure of the research is the author's concept of digital history and digital philosophy of history. Research optics is aimed at determining the status of the digital subject of history, which seems to be an acute anthropological and socio-philosophical problem. The book discusses the issues of modification of the politics of memory, the production of “fakes”, the connotation of historical events, the trend of miniaturization of history and the crisis of great narratives. Considerable attention is paid to the everyday everyday practices of information production, woven into the context of “history making”. The review pays attention to all the main structural parts of the book and reproduces the logical sequence of the key ideas of the text. With references to the original author's text, the reviewer also gives his own interpretations of the conceptual and terminological innovations of the book, and also focuses on some controversial aspects of the research.

Personal and Correspondence Discussion of International Bakhtin Theoretical and Practical Conference “Street Theatre vs. Theatre of the Military Actions”

This work reviews the International Bakhtin Theoretical and Practical Conference “Street theatre vs. the theatre of military actions” held in Moscow in 2019. A review of the collection of articles based on the materials of this conference is given.

Looking for a Bookstore in Town: Intellectual Readers and the Death of “Gutenberg Galaxy”

The author analyses the problems of erosion of the book culture and the role of bookishness in the contemporary Western and Russian identities. While analysing the processes of disappearance and displacement of bookshops, the author presumes that culture of bookstores and communication subcultures in them cannot compete with networks and e-commerce. It is assumed that the logic of capitalism favours the progress of on-line bookstores, specialising in the serial and mass literature while independent bookstores prefer to sell intellectual, non-fiction, and academic books that are not interesting to consumer readers of mass culture. The author tries to analyse causes of private non-mass bookstores crisis. The author believes that intellectuals of 2000s were optimistic in their prognosis for the development of bookstores as spaces of cultural initiatives. By the end of 2020, due to the coronavirus pandemic, the number of independent bookstores decreased significantly when on-line bookstores occupied their place. It is assumed that the cultures of reading, book collections, personal libraries lost the positions they held in the 20th century and even in the first decade of the 21st century. The author presumes that independent bookstores became cultural ghettos and intellectual reservations, when net bookstores became successful actors of the mass culture. In general, it is predicted that heterogeneous, regionally localised minority book cultures and reading strategies of the New Medievalism may replace the “mass” book as a cultural institution of a modern political imagined communities as elements of the dying Gutenberg Galaxy with its heterogeneous national identities.

The Image of the Other in the (post-)Covid Period: Analysis of Russian-language Internet Queries

The digital age has greatly changed the way information is stored and accessed. The Internet allows us to retrieve an unlimited amount of data from anywhere, at any time of the day or night. The search for new information consistently takes place via search engines, which process and store user query statistics. The analysis of these queries allows us to trace various social trends. At the same time, the personality of the researcher does not affect the "query" of the user, who is fully "sincere and independent" in finding the information he or she needs. Our hypothesis for this study is that by analysing the queries of Internet users we can identify the attitude of the contemporary Russian society to the Other and determine the criteria by which the image of the Other is formed. Considering the nature of the COVID-19 pandemic, the researchers assumed that periods of lockdown may have had a particular effect, increasing interest in certain markers of otherness and decreasing interest in other markers. As a result, we identified 10 models of otherness during the (post)lockdown period, in which food and sexual marker groups are the dominant ones. In particular, the Other-Chinese model, as in previous years, remains worrying. The focus has shifted from the appearance to the sexual and food aspects. The COVID-19 pandemic has played a part in this. The Other-Japanese/Korean model also remains ambiguous, but there is a downward trend in alertness. As for the other models, for the most part they are allert-neutral.

Fabula Nova Obscura Est: Possible Worlds in “Final Fantasy XIII-2”

Modern narratological researches are quite well developed and has long gone beyond the purely philological field. One of the applications of narratology is the study of computer games, the most relevant new medium. This paper is devoted to the issue of unusual narrative strategies used in games on the example of Final Fantasy XIII-2. The analysis is conducted via the possible-worlds method, which is currently in demand in modern humanities, but it is less known in Russia. The aim of the research is to determine the function of possible worlds existing in Final Fantasy XIII-2 for a better understanding of the game design. In the course of the work, the author examines the internal structure of the game world with the help of the theory of possible worlds, analyzes the narrative strategy, and makes a game scheme of possible worlds with accessibility links which let to see the deep internal structure of the narrative game world. In conclusion, it is clear that Final Fantasy XIII-2 contains a non-trivial narrative structure with multiple branches that is smoothed out by the gameplay and cinematic experience of the player, although such a composition of possible worlds represents a complex scheme of the game's macrocosm which demands a close attention to the narrative. The article is intended for various humanitarian specialists interested in the study of computer games.