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Self-Representation in the Web World of Opera: What Do the Blogs and Social Network Accounts of Famous Russian Opera Singers Tell Us About?
- Demokratizatsiya: The Journal of Post-Soviet Democratization
- Institute for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies, The George Washington University
- Volume 25, Number 1, Winter 2017
- pp. 87-109
- Article
- Additional Information
Uppsala Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies This article examines the online self-staging strategies of famous opera singers of Russian origin in Runet (the Russian-language internet). It argues that, in the Russian media context, opera singers’ blogs create an “emotional regime” of high intensity, which helps them to destabilize political hierarchies and intimately connect the grassroots with the political sphere. The study starts from the assumption that the digital environment changes the character of relations between audiences and celebrities in several ways. The most important of these, the paper argues, is that social network communication between opera stars and their fans distorts the traditional limitations and hierarchies.