Ilya Utekhin (European University at St.Peterburg)
SOCIAL NETWORKING ON THE INTERNET: IS THE RUSSIAN WAY SPECIAL?
In July 2009, ComScore, one of the leaders of digital world measuring, claimed that «the
Russian social networking audience had the highest engagement among the 40 individual
countries reported by comScore, with an average of 6.6 hours and 1,307 pages consumed
per visitor [per month]»1. These figures are twice as much as an average for the 40
countries studied. Some years earlier, before the epidemic arrival of social networking
websites, blogging was among pronounced trend in users' internet activities; in
Livejournal.com, one of the largest platforms for blogging, Russian bloggers were the
most active. What does it mean? Is the Russian way of social networking in the internet
special?
Russia, of course, is not an exception from the general ways in which social and cultural
factors influence the adoption of new technologies. That is why along with a variety of
economic, demographic and cultural geographic factors, it would probably be useful to
look for cultural features that might contribute to shaping the uses of information
technology in this country. That is not to say that internet or smart phones can be or
actually are used in Russia in ways that sharply differ from what we find in other
countries. However, although technologies are more or less the same in the global world,
the pace of technology adoption and some ways of using technology in different societies
might turn out to be different. Correspondingly, we can speak about culturally specific
features of the use of technology. The social impact of technology might also vary crossculturally, as well as social contexts in which technology is embedded.
As it is everywhere in the world, technology is reshaping practices of everyday life in
contemporary Russia. Penetration of information technology into people's lives in
postindustrial societies leads to important changes in their life worlds. These days, a
significant part of urban population of Russia inhabits an environment that is abundant in
smart artifacts to interact with. To cope with all the challenges of this life world, one has
no alternative to actively use communication technology and a variety of virtual
Russia has World’s Most Engaged Social Networking Audience [
http://www.comscore.com/Press_Events/Press_Releases/2009/7/Russia_has_World_s_Most_Engag
ed_Social_Networking_Audience ]
1
2
interfaces. Moscow and St.Petersburg, on the one hand, and «provintsia» (periphery) and
rural areas, on the other, differ much in this respect, but, anyway, mobile phones, personal
computers at home and at work, ATMs, payment terminals etc. are now becoming
ubiquitous2. People are also getting accustomed to the use of internet, even though the
speed of internet connect in Russia is considerably lower than has become normal in
European countries. Generally, the share of time that the Russians dedicate to interaction
with smart machines and to computer-mediated communication is growing fast, though it
has not yet attained average European level.
Younger generations of urban Russians are often acquainted with information technology
from their childhood. For them, internet and many of its applications are a part of
mundane routines, almost to the point that the use of internet services does not require any
conscious effort from the users, like the use of refrigerators and TVs. Broadband internet
connection is taken for granted by many urban Russians these days, despite modest speed
of the connection. It should be noted that this leads to a new way in which internet is
used, compared to dial-up connection, potentially “dissolving the structure of everyday
life, mixing usually separate zones of study, work and recreation”3, and creating a habit of
browsing the same sites, reading email and logging on to social networking sites and
messenger regularly, several times a day.
Despite all the differences across social strata and age groups, new phenomena related to
information technology embrace the population of Russia as whole. Let us take
multitasking as an example. “Multitasking is the simultaneous conduct of two or more
activities, during a given time period”, as it is formulated by Susan Kenyon who studied
the influence of internet use on scheduling daily activities and on perception of time4.
Parallel activities are often met in everyday life outside information technology, but
Kenyon claims that internet works as ‘time enhancer’, providing opportunities for virtual
mobility and thus loosing «the traditionally close links between activity, space and
2
See some interesting observations on the use of mobile phones in Russia in: Markku Lonkila
and Boris Gladarev (2008). Social networks and cellphone use in Russia: local consequences
of global communication technology. New Media & Society, Vol 10(2): p.273–293
3
Søren Mørk Petersen (2007). Cyborg Practice: Material Aspects of Broadband Internet Use.
Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies. Vol 13(1):
p.85.
4
Susan Kenyon (2008). Internet Use and Time Use: The importance of multitasking. Time &
Society Vol. 17 No. 2/3, p. 286.
3
time»5, so that many activities can be conducted anywhere, at any time. This opens
redically new opportunities for multitasking and sharing one's attention between several
activities.
For instance, multitasking is what a person is involved in when she is using a webmessenger while working on the computer while talking to a colleague. Moreover,
constant scanning for activities and people brings about what is currently referred to as
‘continuous partial attention’: an overload with information of various kinds arriving
simultaneously through different channels and thus making impossible to get immersed
into a single project. Like anywhere in the world where information technology is
inseparable from people’s daily lives, many contemporary Russians feel themselves
constantly online, not only with their mobiles open for calls and text messages, but also
with the need they feel to check their e-mail and social network websites several times a
day.
Is this 'broadening of time' becoming commonplace practice for a significant portion of
population in Russia? How this relates to the usual chronemic patters of Russian culture?
American anthropologist Edward Hall who pioneered cross-cultural study of time use
distinguished monochronic and polychronic cultural orientations that roughly correlate to
the amount and scale of multitasking, particularly in social communication6. Russian
culture and, particularly, Russian bureaucracy is not homogenous in this respect, as it
combines spheres and contexts that display opposite chronemic orientations. In Russian
everyday culture we meet both monochronic and polychronic approaches. Take queueing,
for instance. The influence of Northern-European practices of queuing led to appearance
of numbered tickets queuing system in some banks and railway ticket booking offices in
Russia. In theory, this system is a guarantee that customers are served one a time, in a
strict sequence. However, as frequent visitors to Russia might suppose, even if ticketdispensing machines that epitomise monochronic scheduling are installed, they do not
always work or, if the line in the booking office is long enough, you will probably be
approached by someone who will offer you to buy tickets with numbers close to the end
of the line. Polychronic communication with salespersons, that is, the situation when the
salesperson takes part in a multi-party conversation with more than one customer at once
5
6
Ibid., 290.
Hall, E.T. (1977). Beyond Culture, New York: Anchor Books, p.17-24.
4
and wth fellow selespersons, is still a regular practice in markets, but is gradually
disappearing from the shops in Russia. In this cultural context, internet-related
multitasking is readily accepted within essentially polychronic cultural ways at home and
at work, but it may bring about conflicts with monochronic orientation of labour
organization in the working place7.
It is characteristic that time spent by office workers on social networking sites (SNS)
during the working days is not easy to evaluate by means of questionnaires and
interviews, because people tend to report low figures for themselves while claiming much
longer times for their colleagues’ non-work related use of SNS during the working day.
Since in big cities most offices are connected to internet, this situation started to be felt as
a problem by some employers. Generally, however, the penetration of internet in Russia,
according to data available in October 2008, is not very high (69% of adult population do
not use internet at all; compare this to 70 per cent of households having broadband
internet connection in the US8). In St.Petersburg and Moscow, penetration is much higher
and fast increasing: up to 750 000 households in St.Petersburg have broadband internet
connection in 2008 (cf. only 70000 in 2005), and unlimited internet is becoming a feature
of everyday life as usual as a telephone line. The bigger is the city, the larger is the share
of internet users: 41% (population older than 15 y.o.) for Moscow and St.Petersburg (and
even higher according to other sources9; compare to 12% for rural areas). Mobile internet
use (mostly WAP/GPRS) grew by 82 per cent in 2008 and the number of its users has
reached 32.5 million10. Young people with high level of education are more often among
internet users than other social groups. Latest data available show that daily audience of
internet in summer 2009 amounts to 22% of urban population older than 1811.
According to what people say to sociologists, most often internet is used by the Russians
It is not by chance that the second line in ComScore's list of SNS activity of internet audience is
occupied by mainly polichronic Brazil.
8
Data on the structure of internet audience in Russia from 2008 are available at:
7
http://bd.fom.ru/report/map/bntergum07/internet/internet0802/int0802 . According to this
publication, only 29 per cent of the Russian population are internet users.
9
Ruslan Tagiev (TNS). Audience of Internet in Russia. One more year. (2008). In Russian.
(http://www.slideshare.net/segal/ss-398595 )
10
Data by J`son&Partners ( http://www.rbcdaily.ru/2009/03/17/media/406295 ).
11
Data from http://www.fom.ru
5
for work and study, for email, and for reading the news; the share is growing of those
who get access to multimedia materials and communicate online. Curiously, the survey by
VTsIOM does not mention e-commerce and e-banking at all. Which is not to say that ecommerce does not exist in Russia: in 2007, the turnover of e-commerce in Russia was
USD 3.2 billion (the growth is 30% with respect to 2006), and 85% of active internet
users said they used to shop online. However, only 16% of users shopped online at least
once a month, and most of the shoppers (70%) paid for online goods in cash upon
delivery while only 12% of responders used their bank cards online. The most popular
shopping items include books (51% of responders) and computers (43%)12. According to
recent report by FOM (Public Opinion Foundation) on internet trade and payments in
Russia13, 87% of internet audience older than 18 said that they know about paid services,
but only 26% actually use them, which means that 74% of internet audience have never
paid in the internet. Among paid services, by far most popular is paid download of music
and video, and it is followed by buying software. Audiences that actively engage in
internet activities such as content creation and socializing, are predictably more active in
buying goods and services. It is interesting that one of the main reasons that people
mentioned to explain why they don’t use paid services is as follows: same things can be
found elsewhere in the internet for free. That is partly true, the more so as some SNSs, in
a legally ambiguous stance, let their subscribers access for free the multimedia content
that is claimed to belong to users’ private collections.
Data quoted above are taken from representative polls. Sociologist know, however, that
what people say about what they do differ from what they actually do, and people are
sometimes not conscious about real motives of behavior, or just unwilling to express the
motives in interviews and polls. In reality, the Russians not only work and study, email
and read news on the internet; they also, and mostly, socialize, play online games, and
access multimedia and adult content. Most eloquent, though indirect, indicator of users'
12
Quoted from Lenta.ru: The Turnover of E-trade Grown by 30 per cent in a Year (in Russian)
www.lenta.ru/news/2008/07/02/etrade/
13
Lebedev, Pavel (2009) Elektornnye den'gi i platnye uslugi v internete [e-money and paid
internet-services]. Presentation at the Conference «E-trade 2009», October 7, 2009. FOM. Available
at http://bd.fom.ru/report/map/bntergum07/intergum0703/eldengy09
6
real interests is the statistics of search queries submitted to web search engines14. The
evolution of Top10 queries in Russian internet from 2001 to 2008 is very impressive. In
2001-2, most popular searches were порно, секс, sex, mp3, porno, followed by эротика,
знакомства, реферат, гороскоп. In 2006, Top5 queries involved сонник, гороскоп,
работа, знакомства, порно. Although in 2008 sex and dating retained their high
position among the interests of the Russian internet users, the first more frequent five
queries were as follows: одноклассники (1.9% of all queries submitted), odnoklassniki.ru
(0.3%), однокласники (0.2%), odnoklassniki (0.2%), работа (0.2%). That is to say, in
2008 top four queries have to do with Odnoklassniki. 'Classmates', or
www.odnoklassniki.ru, is an analog of Classmates social networking service, one of the
two most prominent Russian social network websites. Similarly, in 2008 and in early
2009, another leading social network, vKontakte, was also among most popular searches.
From these data we can see that between 2006 and 2008 something important has
happened that reflected a significant change in patterns of behavior of Russian internet
users, as it is reflected in the statistics of their search queries.
Data on monthly reach of the most popular services complement this picture. By the
beginning of 2008 monthly reach figures were as follows: Yandex (search engine) 13.55
mln15, Mail.ru 13,50 mln, Rambler (search engine) 8.73 mln, Odnoklassniki.ru (social
network site) 9.52 mln, LiveJournal (blogging service) 5.02 mln. At least once a month,
social network sites or blogs are visited by 92.1 per cent of Russian internet users in
200816. Social networking is gaining a more and more significant share of internet traffic
in Russia, thus following the global trend. In Russia, by Fall 2007, 62 per cent of internet
users said they used at least one social network site, and a third part of responders said
they used more than one17.
14
Data quoted here are taken from various sources. These are, first, official press releases by
Yandex, and, second, statistic data from Liveinternet.ru that reflect transition to web pages from
search engine result pages for a definite query (see
http://www.liveinternet.ru/stat/ru/queries.html?period=month ).
15
Compare to 142 mln of the total population of Russia.
16
Ruslan Tagiev (TNS). Audience of Internet in Russia. One more year. (2008). In Russian (
http://www.slideshare.net/segal/ss-398595 )
17
Fedor Vyrin (Mail.ru). Users of Social Networks. Who Are They? (2008) In Russian.
(http://www.slideshare.net/segal/ss-398672 )
7
Generally, social network sites on the internet have a number of features that allow
categorize these services as a separate phenomenon. However varied thematically and
functionally are the services, their users have to build up a virtual Self as a public or semipublic profile within a system. As part of this profile, a list of connections with other
users (‘contacts’) is made available, so that contacts can be viewed within a user’s
network of contacts. The nature of the connections varies depending on the type of site.
Identity-driven categories can underlie site design, which is particularly pronounced when
service's target audience strategy is aimed at creation of a niche-community.
Users of social network sites are given opportunities to put online (a part of) their offline
extended social networks, or to create new connections with various purposes ranging
from establishing and developing professional contacts (e.g., in LinkedIn) to dating.
Networking might involve the exchange of multimedia content (e.g., Youtube) and/or
collaborative filtration as part of recommendation services (e.g., Imhonet, most prominent
recommendation service in Russian internet). Social networking usually supposes a sort
of self-presentation and self-expression, especially in services based on user generated
content. Socialization and communication is another dimension of users' activity on social
network sites.
Interestingly, long before internet in Russian schoolchildren's subculture there was an
instrument for playful networking that can distantly remind us of today's social
networking on the web. This was an inheritance of old album tradition, mainly among
girls. They used to have a copybook where to copy their favorite lyrics, quotations, and a
questionnaire that included questions about personal attitudes and tastes. This
questionnaire was first filled in by the album’s owner, but then offered to other people,
often as a way to get a closer acquaintance with the album owner’s circle of friends. This
rudimentarily combined two crucial functions of SNSs, self-presentation and
communication. Although blogging on LiveJournal platform was not a Russian invention,
Russian language is second most popular after English in LiveJournal: 29 per cent of all
the posts are in Russian, compared to 66 per cent in English18.
18
Data on the audience of Zhivoj Zhurnal are available from the corporate blog of
research department of SUP, owner company of LiveJournal (
http://livestat.livejournal.com/ ).
8
Recent social networking boom in the internet started in Russia later than in the West, and
its first manifestation was active blogging. Personal web publishing service LiveJournal
emerged since 2001 and for several years was an important place of activity for those
Russians who were active on the web. As Eugene Gorny writes in his study, «The
dialectic of private and public speech is a conspicuous feature of blogs. Since 2001, the
blogging service Livejournal.com (or, as the Russians call it, Zhivoj Zurnal or simply
ZhZh) has become the largest discussion center of the Russian Internet. […] A host of
Internet celebrities and intellectual and cultural figures also contributed to its popularity
with the masses». It is characteristic that the audience of ZhZh, as it can be seen from the
rating of its interests and its social characteristics, is more "literate" than that of other
blogging services that appeared later. For Russian culture, its orientation towards written
language and texts is so important that blogging logically became an affordable way of
virtual self-expression and socializing.
In 2007, the number of Russian language users of LiveJournal was around 800 thousand,
most of them residing in Moscow and in St.Petersburg, and a few other blogging services
were available in Russian internet19. ZhZh was and, to some extent, still is something
different from personal web-publishing service. For Russian users, it has become a means
of socializing and communication, with posting comments, communities, friends, friends’
entries updates, and some other opportunities that later were realized and gained much
success in micro-blogging and social network services like Twitter.
These days, although blogging in Russia remains an important platform for social
activism, it is overshadowed by social networking by means of services analogous to
Facebook and Classmates. Since 2007, the share of active blogs, that is, those that are
updated at least once in three months, is decreasing, as well as the absolute number of
active blogs20.
19
Most popular competitor to LiveJournal is Mail.ru blogging service that opened in 2005
and by April 2007 had 1.1 mln subscribers (http://www.adme.ru/blogi/2007/04/10/16777/
).
20
Data on Russian blogging are from Yandex on Blogosphere report
(http://www.slideshare.net/segal/yandex-on-blogosphere-spring-2008 ). Interestingly,
according to that report, female blogs outnumber blogs written by male users.
9
Blogging cannot be as attractive to broad masses of users as Facebook-type sites are,
mainly because writing and maintaining a blog presumes self-expression and requires
certain effort of creativity from the part of the blog owner, even though the content is not
original but borrowed from elsewhere and linked. Potentially semi-anonymous milieu
requires an active construction of a public face. Odnoklassniki and similar social
networking services do not require this kind of effort, and hence their appeal: selfpresentation, networking, and communication are made simple. Unlike blogs, the
popularity of social networking sites in Russia involved so wide strata of the population
that during 2008, in more than a half of Russian offices, network administrators used to
block access to social network services: similarly, earlier they used to block access to
erotic content to prevent wasting working time and internet traffic. Instant messaging is
also sometimes blocked in many cases to avoid the loss of labor time, even if it actually
could have increased the efficiency of interaction between office workers. It is worth
mentioning that in Russian secondary schools SNSs are also blocked, according to an
order by the Ministry of Education.
Launched in March 2006, Odnoklassniki.ru collected 3 mln subscribers by Summer 2007,
and in October 2007 occupied top one position among search queries in Runet. This query
has been holding first position since then with up to 2.0% of all web queries. It is worth
noting that the users who submit this query to a search engine do not usually wish to find
information about this service, but rather aim at navigating to Odnoklassniki website. The
fact that they do not use url field of their browser is indicative of their lack of knowledge
of advanced web surfing routines: it is very likely that they do not clearly distinguish
browser from search engine website interface. The level of computer and internet literacy
of a large part of the subscribers of Odnoklassniki is probably lower than that of the users
of vKontakte, and hence vKontakte, also being a popular search query, does not attain the
top position. This is understandable, if we take into account the difference between the
audiences of the both services. They are comparable in number. In August 2008,
Odnoklassniki celebrated 20 mln accounts registered, and in early 2009, the number of
accounts outgrew 30 mln21.
21
Data on the structure of audience of Odnoklassniki is available for download as a slide show of
TNS 2008 study from http://wg16.odnoklassniki.ru/cdk/st.cmd/helpAdvertise/tkn/2032 , a page
aimed to potential advertisers.
10
Another big social networking service, vKontakte, also registered 30 mln accounts on
March 18, 2009, and is still growing impressively, far from saturation phase22. vKontakte
differs from Odnoklassniki in the structure of its audience: the share of students and
younger age groups is significantly higher in vKontakte. It should be noted that the
functionality of the service is much wider, especially in what concerns storage and
sharing multimedia content. Compared to Odnoklassniki, the interface of vKontakte is
more web 2.0 like, Facebook-style, but somewhat easier and more intuitive than
Facebook.
Interestingly, TNS Gallup 2008 study quoted above shows that female share of the
audience of Odnoklassniki is higher than that of the overall Russian internet audience,
especially in age group 25-34 y.o., and higher than that of male subscribers to this service.
Compared to Odnoklassniki, the audience of vKontakte is not only younger, but the
number of male subscribers is higher in age groups under 35 y.o.; in older age groups,
females significantly outnumber male subscribers, both in vKontakte and in
Odnoklassniki.
Despite its positioning as a site for socializing, the functionality of vKontakte allows
uploading multimedia content and getting access to content uploaded by other
subscribers, hence a part of the SNS’s attractivity. As in MySpace, user’s profile is
eventually complemented with the multimedia content available from the user’s page. As
in Facebook, a growing variety of applications is offered to the users.
High popularity of SNS’s can partly be explained by the fact that average Russian internet
is not fast enough for downloading quality online multimedia content, and thus cannot be
compared in this respect to Western countries where internet users have a broader range
of efficient services. At the same time, pay services in the internet are less spread in
Russia than in Europe, and paying virtually is not the thing the Russian were accustomed
to when SNSs flourished. It should also be kept in mind that the number of active users in
SNSs is significantly lower that the number of subscribers. Interestingly, researchers who
studied the spread of internet use in China have come to the conclusion that internet
adoption and internet use are two different phenomena dependent of different variables.
22
By early November 2009, vKontakte claimed to have more than 48 mln subscribers, against 40
mln in Odnoklassniki.
11
They consider that “perceived social norms or perceived benefits may provide sufficient
incentives for an audience to make the one-time investment, but may not be enough for
the audience to sustain constant usage unless there is a felt need”23. One-time investment,
in this case, is the purchase of equipment for internet connection. This logic might also be
true for the Russian situation with wide adoption of internet technology. By the same
token, SNSs get high number of subscribers at some point, but this is not to say that all
those millions of people really use the service: to create an account and to be active user
is not the same. A significant part of Odnoklassniki’s subscribers use the SNS irregularly
– or don’t use their accounts at all.
Some facts suggest that social networking in general, but particularly the use of
Odnoklassniki might be one of the first activities on the internet in which beginner users
of the web are involved24. By the moment when public enthusiasm started in the US about
MySpace, blogging, and Facebook, the penetration of internet in the US was higher than
in Russia, even if compared to St.Petersburg and Moscow. Hence, what is special about
the Russian case is the fact that social networking boom coincided with a fast spread of
broadband connection in big cities. Correspondingly, social networking becomes a
starting point of the regular use of internet for new strata of the population. Before that,
the use of the internet correlated with the level of education and young age; with social
networks' boom, this correlation becomes much less pronounced.
Although putting online of existing social networks and enhancing communication within
them has been the declared aim of Odnoklassniki and vKontakte services, this is
obviously only one of the ways in which these services are actually employed by internet
users. The services' functionality that allows creation of interest based communities, as
well as various means for introducing oneself to strangers meet a high demand from the
23
Jonathan J. H. Zhu and Zhou He. (2002) Perceived Characteristics, Perceived Needs, and
Perceived Popularity: Adoption and Use of the Internet in China. Communication Research Vol. 29,
p.489.
24
One of the strategic initiatives of the Russian government related to the building of ’information
society’ in Russia involves organization of access points to internet in all the post offices across the
country. In December 2008, I saw in one post-office in Irkutsk an announcement placed near the
computer that was supposed to be used for connecting to internet. It listed web addresses of selected
services in the following way: For search on the internet - www.yandex.ru, www.rambler.ru ; for
socializing (Rus. dl’a obshcheniya) – www.odnoklassniki.ru, www.vkontakte.ru.
12
part of the users, up to the point that the users find their own ways of employing available
services.
Generally, advances of technology offer opportunities that the users adopt, reject, or
transform according to their demands. In this respect, it is highly informative to study
actual uses of technology that diverge from what have been planned by designers. Such
uses reveal needs and expectations of the users that had not yet been met by existing
technology. Thus, to quote an example, one of possible networking activities in
vKontakte is to mark one’s friends as represented on photographs and videos uploaded to
the site. When such marks are left as annotations of multimedia content, friends marked
on the pictures get a message from the system offering to confirm the fact that they are
present on that image. Since some images are not actually photographs of people, but
might be any sort of images, system messages are used simply to attract friends’ attention
to a recently posted picture or video. Another example is the way in which people
embellish their accounts displaying high profile friends and celebrities in their friend list;
celebrities’ pages of this kind are, of course, fake.
The both largest SNSs of the Russian internet put emphasis on opportunities to link
former class-mates and colleagues, whereas the interests and hobbies belong to secondary
features; they are available for search in vKontakte but non-existent in Odnoklassniki.
People’s social networks that are being put online by means of SNSs involve people who
belong to Russian speaking community living outside Russia, mostly in the US, Germany,
Israel, Canada and the countries of the former USSR. An important share of
Odnoklassniki’s subscribers are living abroad and use the site to communicate with their
friends and relatives, thus enhancing the idea of international Russianness not linked to
current dwelling place. Along with this global trend, there is another one, just the
opposite: the use of internet is becoming more local. People do not only communicate
over great distances because internet allows to do it easily, but also – or instead - get to
know their local setting in a new way, by means of bringing online their local networks
and thus by adding a new dimension to their sociality. This is worth of a separate study,
as it involves more subtle forms of sociality than those which are covered by the terms
‘community’ and ‘networking’25.
25
On a different material, this idea was proposed by John Postill in his case study of a
suburb in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia (Postrill J. (2008) Localizing the internet beyond
13
SNSs boom in Russia has nourished attempts to get substantial cash flow for advertising
and some kinds of services. Now subscribers are asked to pay for advanced privacy
setting (Odnoklasniki), for additional search opportunities, for additional features of
applications and games (in vKontakte). Encouraged by success of the two leaders, several
SNS projects were launched in an attempt to elicit the drives and needs that had not been
exploited as part of virtualized sociability. Some services were offered to Russian internet
users that are geographically linked to users’ locality, e.g., with emphasis on becoming
acquainted with one’s neighbours whose locations are indicated in a map (“Mir Tesen”
‘The World Is Small‘, “Vashi Sosedi” ‘Your Neighbours’, “Sosedi Online” ‘Neighbours
Online’, “Pervaja Piterskaya” ‘First Piter’s’ ). None of them has obtained a level of
popularity comparable with Odnoklassniki, but it is characteristic which direction took the
inventiveness of the projects’ authors.
Privacy concerns related to users’ personal information on SNSs have been discussed in
Russian media. Apart from hackers’ activities who use SNSs to fish personal information
and for spamming, vKontakte and Odnoklassniki is an environment that contains valuable
data for those who are wishing to control one’s relationships, starting from police and
banks up to one’s parents, partners and ex-partner. Privacy settings of vKontakte allow
shutting one’s friends list not only from non-friends, but also from friends. New media
thus allow essentially new forms of monitoring of one’s behavior, but their success would
be unthinkable without means to guarantee certain level of privacy against eventual
intrusions. Monitoring and intrusions into privacy in SNSs is a new kind of concern for
many of SNSs subscribers. Thus, in 2009, monitoring services such as bringing access to
information about the cell phone subscribers’ location even if they choose not to disclose
it, or even reading other people’s texting messages, became one of the topics actively
advertised in spam and fraudulent ads displayed on SNS and some other media. Services
of this kind are not actually supplied by mobile providers, because they are against the
law, but everyone knows that the prohibitions are often possible to outwit in Russia. The
demand from those seeking to intrude in others’ privacy is as high as to let those who stay
behind those ads to earn millions, as some publications estimate.
communities and networks. New Media & Society, Vol.10, p. 413-431).
14
This is an example of a new form of fraud that has nothing new in itself, like many other
phenomena that are enhanced and given new shape and intensity on SNSs, but do not
represent a radically new form of social life. What is actually new is the role the virtual
networking can play in everyday life, when it is coupled to exchange with multimedia
content, entertainment, and self-expression. Russian culture has readily accepted this
virtual dimension of human life. However, there is no single explanation to the fact that
the Russians are most active in the world in internet-based social networking.
To conclude, I would like to sum up some of the observations and to draw some
conclusions about the Russian way of internet-based social networking.
First, fast growing SNSs extend sociability of many Russians to internet. For them,
checking e-mail and other activities in the internet are routines performed on a daily basis,
but web-based sociability often becomes the most important motivation for the use of
internet.
Second, for a significant group of users belonging to older age cohorts SNSs have become
the starting point of their acquaintance with the internet. This is linked with the fact that
social networking boom coincided with the wide spread of broadband connection in big
cities, especially in Moscow and St.Petersburg.
Third, SNSs are transforming cultural norms of private and public, as well as stereotypes
of human relationships that now comprise communication and even friendship with
people met in the internet.
Fourth, blogging and SNSs’ interest groups are becoming an alternative platform for
expression of opinion and social activism in a country where traditional media are under
control. This is an important resource for development of civil society in Russia.