'Densely Packed Propaganda': Politically Loaded Clichés in Online Communication in and beyond Russia

• In Event: Discursive Strategies for Mediating War, Propaganda, and Rebellion during Russia's Full-Scale Invasion of Ukraine

Abstract

Modern digital technologies and online communication make it easier for people to create new imagined communities (in B. Anderson’s terms) in social networks, both local and trans-local, united by their common languages and shared discourses. News, opinions, eyewitness accounts, memes, – all kinds of information can be easily spread in social media to evoke reactions, comments, and further reposts. Naturally, propaganda uses those channels; what is more important, though, is that all elements of discourse in the process of communication, undergo material, semantic and functional transformations, and sometimes rather unpredictable, especially when they are used in a totally different context. As a result, some catch phrases, such as “Where have you been for eight years?” or “What a country it was!” turn into complex indexical signs and even systems of signs used to define not only referred objects but also speaking subjects, their audiences and discourses and sets of ideas they identify with. The paper deals with such clichés heavily loaded with political meanings and widely used in Russian speaking online communities both inside Russia and in the Baltic countries. It puts into focus interaction between global and local contexts of their use, and semantic ambiguity making possible ironic twists that turn once innocent words into double-edged weapons of political civil war.

Authors

• Kapitolina Fedorova, Tallinn U (Estonia)

• Natalia Tšuikina, Tallinn U (Estonia)