Scholarly record

TWITTER AS PHENOMENON OF MASS CULTURE: COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS BETWEEN RUSSIA AND GREAT BRITAIN

I. Sergeeva

Abstract

The appearance of the social media has led the mankind to a new era of social development and social relations, when the exchange and the production of information has become the major human activity. The present article studies the development of Twitter as a cultural phenomenon in Russia and in Great Britain, thus showing that the digital age of social media has enabled cross-cultural communication to become mass scale, supranational and global. Social networks as well as blogging systems involve a person not only as a recipient of information but also as an active content generator. Moreover, the essence of the cross-cultural communication has been reshaped as well: it is now not dependent on a concrete geographical location of participants of the communication process, and the number of participants of any act of communication has become unlimited. Therefore, we hold it for possible to speak of the inextricable connection between such concepts as “cross-cultural communication”, “mass communication” and “mass culture”. The term “consumer generated media”, also referred to as “content created by Internet users”, describes a very important part of revolutionary changes within the media sphere. Texts written not by professional journalists but by users who are not directly involved in the production of a mass media product have become the integral part of the information global landscape. A wide range of scientific issued is subjected to thorough analysis, such as development of contemporary communication models; cultural aspects of the evolution of the “mass communication” concept; application of various communication models to Twitter; Twitter's sociocultural functions in Russia and in Great Britain as a new instrument of global cross-cultural communication.

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