TaRC and Russian Media Lab Network‘s (University of Helsinki) collaborative initiative Online Talks on Russian Media continues on April 12 with another presentation focusing on the consequences of the Russian war in Ukraine.
Olga Logunova and Pavel Lebedev will present their research project “Digital celebrities and platform curation in the current Russian context”. Recently, Russian celebrities have lost access to popular global social media platforms. Additionally, some platforms have switched off all monetisation instruments for Russian content-makers.
The result of this transformation is still in the dark, as it is not finished yet. However, the authors will discuss how these changes have affected celebrities and opinion leaders so far. The presentation is based on the idea of platform affordances and their influence on celebrities’ self-presentation and engagement patterns.
The analysis covers more than 22,000 publicly available posts and comments from 15 Russian-speaking celebrities on three platforms: Instagram, TikTok, and VK (45 accounts totally). A quantitative analysis revealed two main ways of digital celebrities’ changing practices: 1) platform switching, and 2) new communication patterns on social media.
The study provides conceptual and empirical grounds for studying engagement practice as one of the affordances in celebrities’ communication and outlines further directions for exploring these connections.
Read more information about the speakers in the RMLN blog.
This Online Talk will be held on Zoom on Tuesday 12 April, 12:00 to 13:30 Helsinki time (GMT+3). It will be moderated by Dr Olga Dovbysh (University of Helsinki).
If you have registered for Online Talks or the RMLN mailing list before, you have received the Zoom link to your email. If you still want to participate, please send an email to Dr Katja Lehtisaari (katja.lehtisaari@tuni.fi).