The Place of the Russian Orthodox Church of

The Place of the Russian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate in the System of Relations Between the Society and the State (Based on the Materials of the Social Media) Polyakov E. 443 gr.

The topicality of research. • ROC (MP) as a spiritual and cultural reliance for current political power. • Social media VS mainstream media. • Internet as a consolidating and communicative platform forces opposed to the Kremlin.

The novelty and originality. • The majority of works devoted to the study of religion focus on how religion is transformed in such a space. • Russian researches devoted to Orthodoxy in the Web describe only official sources. • The first attempt to describe such type of a community in sociopolitical discourse.

The main issue. • Social media is opposed to mainstream media, the majority of the political internet-communities are opposed to the Kremlin. • How in this case such type of a community appeared?

The object and the subject of this research. • Object – Russian Orthodox internet community. • Subject – Set of representations about ROC (MP), public policy and society.

The goal of this research. • Identify and describe this set of representations.

Methodology. • Social constructivism. (Berger. , Luckmann (1966). , Anderson (1991). , Jung (2006)). • Religion doesn`t have any essential core that determines their fundamental character. • Tradition is the same construct as religion or ethnicity. • These categories are constituted by politics, and by the particular historical processes. • The boundaries constitute the identity; the identity doesn`t constitute the boundary.

Methods. • Content analysis. (Manheim. , Rich (1997)). • Subject of analysis is a content of text (posts, messages, etc. ). • Make up a specific vocabulary of words and verbal constructions with their definitions. • Content sample (approximate number: 300500 posts). • Labeling and clustering.

Methods. • Discourse analysis. (van Dijk (1989). , Jorgensen. , Phillips (2008)). • Subject of analysis is language (definitions, interpretations, keywords etc). • Helps to identify the key authentic words and semantic-conceptual constructions of the discourse. • Under discourse we understand social language of community.

Hypotheses of the study. • Representations about political and social agenda of the Orthodox Internet community, Church and public officials are close to each other.

Hypotheses of the study. • The majority of community predisposed to nationalistic ideas.

Hypotheses of the study. • Most of the uploaded content will be devoted to religious issues.

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