REGIONAL POLITICAL DISCOURSE: THEORETICAL MODEL, METHODOLOGY OF RESEARCH AND PRACTICE OF MANAGING POLITICAL CONTENT IN THE ONLINE SPACE OF THE RUSSIAN FEDERATION SUBJECTS
An asynchronous multimodal discursive field formed by political content is a reflection of the activities of a network community from a small community of residents of any locality to network communities operating within the subjects of the Russian Federation and in the whole country. Political content is able to transform socio-political reality by producing events - a message or a series of messages that can change the balance of power or interests in society. Regional political discourse, political content and the asynchronous multimodal discursive fields produced by it accumulate the potential of social action in the online space which can lead to both constructive and destructive actions in the offline space. To analyze the regional political discourse, a political content management model was applied and a research methodology was tested. The community “Typical” on the VKontakte social network, formed on the basis of the administrative centers of 22 subjects of the Russian Federation (Abakan, Anadyr, Barnaul, Blagoveshchensk, Vladivostok, Vladimir, Voronezh, Ivanovo, Kemerovo, Krasnogorsk, Krasnoyarsk, Magadan, Moscow, Nizhny Novgorod, Novosibirsk, Omsk, Orel, Pskov, Samara, Tyumen, Khabarovsk, Yakutsk) became the empirical base of the study. To analyze empirical data, a hybrid operational toolkit (comprising mathematical analysis of social networks and communities, folksonomic analysis, linguodiscursive analysis, and relational sociology) was developed and tested. It was used for political content analysis and analysis of asynchronous multimodal discursive fields formed in these communities in the online space. A Data Set was generated for each of the 22 “Typical” communities from the messages published by participants from January 1, 2018 to June 1, 2019 (the total number of messages with audio, video and textual content was about 160,000). As a result of the study, it became possible to identify the characteristics of regional political discourses in the context of the elections of the heads of the subjects of the Russian Federation in 2018 and to reveal the trends in the formation and development of asynchronous multimodal discursive fields in the online space of the Russian regions.