Auto-Stereotype about Russia in the Media for Foreign Audiences (Based on the Material of the Telegram Channel “Gateway to Russia”

Abstract

Autostereotyping belongs to the category of fundamental scientific problems considered by scholars within the framework of various social sciences and humanities. The aim of the study was to identify the specific features of the content of the auto-stereotype about Russia in the space of Telegram media, the target audience of which is foreigners interested in the Russian language and Russian culture as a way of understanding the new reality. Using TGstat, a service for analyzing Telegram channels and chats, the highest-rated cluster of channels covering this topic was identified. For a deeper understanding of the essence of the auto-stereotype formed in the media aimed at a foreign reader/viewer, a case study was used, which involved a detailed study of a specific information resource, namely the Telegram channel “Gateway to Russia”, aimed at covering the culture and history of Russia for a foreign audience and vividly capturing the country's auto-stereotype at the end of the first quarter of the 21st century. Based on the fact that a Telegram post is a combination of verbal and visual information, different methods of analysis were used. Based on the results of the semantic analysis of the texts of 6,360 posts conducted on the open platform Seogift.ru, the dominance of the auto-stereotype about Russia was revealed through semantic positions with the meaning of a qualitative feature and through evaluative characteristics, such as “Russian, great, big, the most, first, new, old, red, famous”, with the actualization of the meanings of the lexemes “year, church, city, person, army, war, century, child, museum, ballerina, painting, artist, USSR”. The analysis of the visual content of the Telegram channel allowed us to conclude that it constructs an auto-stereotype about Russia as a country of unlimited possibilities, beautiful landscapes, climatic cataclysms, natural wonders, bright and original personalities, and peoples.