Genesis of Journalism in Russia: Problems of Identifying the Initial Coordinates

Section: History of Journalism

The paper presents an approach to the study of the genesis of journalism in Russia. This approach allows to overcome the difficulties of conceptualization of journalism history as a scientific and academic discipline. The author considers as a fundamental difficulty the general agreement among researchers about the obviousness of the initial coordinates of the genesis of journalism in Russia. Hence, the problems associated with identifying these coordinates turn out to be unnoticed. In the study based on the qualitative analysis of textbooks, historical and cultural analysis, and the maieutic method, three main problems are examined. The first one is epistemological: researchers reconstruct not the genesis of journalism as the techno-cultural practice, but the genesis of means of mass communication as its technologies and platforms, and institutions that actualize journalism. The second and the third problems are historical and cultural: most researchers trace this genesis right from the turn of the 17th and 18th centuries when the Russian government began to use the achievements of written and printed culture. Moreover, historians consider the press as a “canonical form” of journalism, and the head of the state as its “official inventor”. The author articulates the 10th and the 11th centuries as the initial coordinates of the genesis of journalism in Russia and differentiates two pre-institutional periods within it. The first one is the becoming of the para-journalistic practice (until the mid-16th century), and the second one is the becoming of the journalistic practice proper (until the beginning of the 18th century). The conclusion of the paper is: any journalism history is based on mnemohistorical reflection, but the latter must be taken under control in order to solve the problems mentioned above.

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