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Gorny, Eugene (2004): Russian LiveJournal: National
specifics in the development of a virtual community. Version 1.0 of
13 May 2004.
RLJ for busy people: presentation at
Internet Research 5.0 (Power Point)
Comments are welcome in the  Discussion
Forum.
Contact: gorny@list.ru
Homepage
Introduction
The community of users at LiveJournal.com (LJ) is
currently the largest virtual Russian-speaking community, uniting Russians
from all over the world. In February 2004, it reached 40,000 users [1]
and this number is rapidly growing.
In April 2004, according to the statistics of user distribution by countries
[2], the Russian Federation with its 48,000 users was
in fourth place after the United States (1,580,000 users), Canada (108,000)
and the United Kingdom (86,000) and leaving behind Australia (40,000),
Germany (11,000) and Singapore (9,700). To gain a more accurate idea
about the population of Russian-speaking users, one needs to add those
living abroad. According to “The LJist Companion: A Guide to Russian
Language LiveJournal” [3], their number can be
roughly estimated [4] at 2,000, most of them living
in Ukraine (466), United States (430), Israel (363), Estonia (141),
Germany (115), and Latvia (111).
The ratio of Russian LJ users to the total number of all Internet users
in Russia oscillates between 0.35% (to the maximum audience) and 0.85%
(to the nucleus audience) [5], which correlates with
the ratio for other countries (according to my calculation it makes
0.73% for the US, 0.49% for Canada and 0.34% for the UK) [6].
The English language does of course prevail among LJ users (more than
90%), but Russian is in second place (between 6.4 and 8.15%) while other
languages do not exceed 1%. [7]
Although the Russian LiveJournal (RLJ) community constitutes a significant
part of the LJ blogging community, it has hardly been studied and was
a blind spot in blogging research. Sometimes researchers overtly admit
that they exclude non-English blogs from their analysis [8],
and more often this omission is accepted by default. The apparent reason
of this exclusion is the language and cultural barrier. Taking advantage
of my marginal position of trickster in-between Russian-language Internet
culture and English-language Internet research, I shall try to fill
this scholarly gap.
My approach to RLJ is defined by the primary purpose of my research,
which is to study the dynamics of creative processes on the Russian
Internet. However, since the reality of the Russian Internet is almost
unknown to the Western reader, I include the issue of creativity into
a broader context.
On the descriptive level, I introduce factual material concerning the
structure and dynamics of RLJ, which can be used for further comparative
studies. On the theoretical level, I approach the complicated issue
of the correlation between the global and the local, the national and
the universal, the general and the particular in the electronically
mediated world, using the Russian blogging community as a case study.
I used a variety of research methods including the following: (1) participant
observation, a traditional method of anthropological studies from Malinowski
to Castaneda (I have been an LJ user for three years); (2) textual analysis
of primary sources (RLJ’s textual production), secondary sources
(media and research literature on blogs, LJ and RLJ) using both continuous
reading and searching by keywords, (3) analysis of statistical data;
and (4) personal interviews.
The structure of the chapter is as follows. First, I introduce LiveJournal
as a blogging service, trace its history, and outline the specifics
of its ideology and architecture as well as its position among other
blogging services. Second, I discuss deviation of RLJ from the average
norms, i.e. English-speaking LJ, and provide a hypothesis explaining
these deviations. Third, I describe some structural components of the
RLJ such as users, friends and communities. Fourth, I analyze the evolution
of RLJ over time. In conclusions, I summarize my major findings and
generalizations.
________________________
[1] <LiveJournal.com
Statistics> (15 February 2004).
[2] <LiveJournal.com
Statistics> (6 April 2004).
[3] <Sputnik
Zhzhista (The LJist Companion)> (6 April 2004).
[4] The problem is that many users either
do not give any information about themselves or indicate their location
in a oblique, deliberately false or mocking manner. The examples of
the latter are as follows: Various, Undisclosed Location, Indefinite
City, Another Globe, Neutral Zone, Fifth Dimension, Antarctica, Other
Side of the Moon, Somewhere in Space, Arizona Dream, Refrigerator, Lenin
Street, Tertia Roma, Where the hell is it?
[5] The number of Russian Internet users
was estimated from 10.2 millions (the total audience, including those
who have ever used Internet regardless of the frequency of use) to 4.2.
millions (the core audience, those using the Internet at least three
hours a week) which makes 3,9 – 9,1% of all population. These
data are for April 2003. See
this and this
for details.
[6] The
number of the Internet users in 2003 was estimated as follows: 165
millions in the United States, 26 millions in Germany, 20 millions in
the United Kingdom, 17 millions in Canada, 13 millions in France and
8 millions in Australia. (Cyber Atlas. Active Internet Users by Country,
December 2003. ).
[7] Evan
Martin (evan). preliminary language detection results (22 January
2004).
Evan Martin (evan). language identification, another
run
(9 March 2004).
[8] See,
for example, Susan C. Herring, Lois A. Scheidt, Elijah Wright and
Sabrina Bonus. Beyond the Unusual: Weblogs as Genre. Paper presented
at the Association of Internet Researchers “Broadening the Band”
Conference. Toronto, Canada, Oct. 16-19, 2003, (23 March 2004).
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