Hype is afloat

The source of any meme on the Internet is always difficult, if possible, to find. The rally on March 26 became a meme, not yet begun, and finding the only responsible for this is no longer possible. Nevertheless, the fact remains: already in the morning of Sunday, March 26, dozens of the largest non -political publics on the VKontakte network began to lay out calls to go outside and jokes about Dmitry Medvedev. This was not a planned action, as the guardians will definitely try to explain to us. This was what is best described by a capacious and unprocessed term “hype”. Huge media with an audience of millions of people who exist out of sight of the conventional media, news aggregators, television and media analysts suddenly picked up the theme of the rally one after another.

Plings call for a rally

The audience of publics, which usually lay out jokes, quotes of heroes of pop culture or musical collections, unexpectedly discovered the world of riot police, autosaks and ships. To understand the scale of the incident, it is enough to say that all day the posts about the rally were placed by MDK and Borsch, the total number of subscribers of which exceeds 13 million people.

Would the rally “Crusading of the Children” become? Of course, there were more adolescents than in 2011-2012. This is probably partly due to the history of the Bryansk schoolchildren who published a video of the educational conversation conducted by the school principal after one of them signed up in the community discussing Navalny’s action, for which he was taken to the police directly from the lesson. On this entry, the director explains to the boys that Putin is a “leader with a high rating due to foreign policy”, although his domestic policy is “weak”, because there is no money. The record attracted such attention that this alone was enough for hundreds of students to join the protesters. It is important to understand that “schoolchildren have reached a rally” is a journalistic stamp, which is possibly explained by the fact that for both pro -government and opposition journalists, everyone who looks younger than 25 seems to schoolchildren.

More than half of the Borschy subscribers are young people 17-18 years old. The core of the audience of the public “How I met a tetanus” with 1.2 million subscribers, which also actively covered rallies - 18–21. In other words, it is more about junior students.

YouTube in a sharp rejuvenation of protest played a role almost more important than VKontakte. The broadcast from the rally in Moscow, which was conducted by the Corruption Foundation, stably occupied the first place in the trends - the section where the video falls, the faster of all gaining views. Getting there for YouTube channel is how to win in a casino: no matter what you show, the giant audience is provided. As a result, the broadcast gained incredible 4.5 million views. It is not surprising that it was interrupted by the appearance of the police in the office of the FBC: to allow so many people live to see how young people reached promotions throughout the country and how risepen detained them harshly, the authorities could not.

Hype did not end with the end of the rally. Several popular video bloggers promptly recorded videos on Sunday, and March 28 Nikolai Sobolev, whose channel is one of the fastest growing of the Russian-speaking ones, recorded the stand-up about a rally. Two hours after the release of this video, there were already about 500 thousand views. At the time of delivery of the number - 2 million for comparison, the daily audience of Channel One is about 10 million.

When it turned out that the authorities did not intend to give answers to the questions asked to her, this turned out to be a personal insult for people who were not yet accustomed to great -power rudeness due to age

It seems that Sobolev formulated the reasons that prompted his audience to reach the rally and not forget about him the next day: “I am not a political blogger, I am not competent in many issues of politics. I am very skeptical about the most Navalny. But one thing I know for sure: the information provided by the FBK looked convincing enough for people to get an answer to their main question: where is the money, Lebovsky (the allusion to the film of the Coen brothers “Big Lebovski”. - NT). If this is not true - so easy to tell the people about it, explain how it happened. While we have not heard any answers, I’m not going to be silent personally. ” The main thesis of Danila of the transverse, another popular Vinebloher, whose video about the rally, collected 1 million views: “He (Medvedev. - NT) does not consider it necessary to explain to us - people from whom he took money.”

Politics goes on social networks

For NT readers, these claims may look somewhat naive: the silence or insulting excuses for the authorities in response to the next investigation of Navalny - the same familiar part of the landscape as fabricated criminal cases against opposition activists. However, for subscribers of Sobolev and Transverse, this was the main discovery of this spring. What is important, both of the other, like dozens of bloggers who recorded the videos about the rally and Medvedev, were rarely spoke on political topics.

For the vast majority of those who first went to the rally on Sunday, Navalny is not an unconditional leader - just as the regime is not an unconditional evil. But when it turned out that the authorities not only do not intend to give answers to the questions asked to her, but would also do everything so that the questions no longer ask, this turned out to be a personal insult for people who are not yet used to great -power rudeness due to age.

The scale of the detentions and the complete silence of the topic of rallies in the loyalist media - the usual methods of combating the opposition - in the eyes of this audience also play against the authorities: they just want to hear answers to their questions, this is not a figure of speech; But instead of answers, autosaks and silence on the air are obtained.

“Young people are not watching TV,” a common journalistic stamp. This is not so, teenagers watch TV a lot and willingly, but in another sense of the word. They watch many series and entertainment shows (often not on the air, but on YouTube), but never turn on the TV to just watch live broadcast in the evening. One way or another, the silence of the topic of rallies on federal channels did not pass by them. Moreover, they have something to compare: as we see, YouTube reacted instantly.

“The huge YouTube segment, engaged in entertainment videos for schoolchildren and students, always seemed completely free from politics,” says Igor Antonovsky, the creator of the popular public “VKontakte” and the scriptwriter of several shows on YouTube. - Here, even Russians with Ukrainians were in fairly tolerant relations. But now politics burst here. ”

The success of the Navalny team

Navalny had long began to pay attention to YouTube. This spring, an interview with him was published on Kamikadze_d, the most popular of the Russian political channels on YouTube. Although the video collected more than 1 million views, the interview remained absolutely unnoticed by journalists. What is characteristic, even the creator of the Kamikadze_d channel, exclusively a political and sharply opposition channel, in correspondence with NT claims that "he went to the rally not because of Navalny, but because of the investigation."

The FBK film about Medvedev scored 15.5 million views on YouTube (of which 4 million are a week after the rally). “Shortly before the film about Medvedev,” says Antonovsky, “YouTube changed the recommendation algorithm. The algorithm is such a magical word for everyone who is engaged in social networks, it is he who determines what kind of content people see and which ones are not. YouTube began to display a video gaining popularity. And if earlier he did not show the schoolchildren on the main page of political content, because he analyzed what they were watching, and thought that he was not interesting to them, now a popular political video may appear on the main page. Therefore, the film “He is not Dimon” came to a very successful moment. Plus there is an interesting beginning about sneakers. ”

Vasily Sonkin, General Producer of Stratosphere, who is engaged in the production of video, is held by the same opinion: “YouTube takes the videos not for the number of views, but for the number of minutes viewed. The fifty -minute video that thousands of people watch quickly rises in the ranking. YouTube, reacting to this, considers such a content promising, shows it to more and more people. When the video becomes popular, all video bloggers pick up the topic to collect more views. Once - and the topic completely captures the tape. ”

However, it is too early to celebrate the victory. Medvedev sneakers became a meme - this is a fact. But memes live and die very quickly. “Video bloggers are quite cynical people, just like television managers. What content works, they will saw this, ”says Antonovsky. “They made Vidos about the rally, another hype will go further, and there will be vidos about it.”

In search of a new language

On the other hand, a large policy burst into the media space of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, young people who before that did not know the name Navalny or the word “Auto-Zak”, but rather considered these things to be something boring and not related to them. Now any wrong step of power (and the authorities will commit them, because even less than the opposition can speak the language of this audience) can become an meme even more powerful than "he is not a dimon." And at some point, a meme from a reason for jokes can become an occasion for action.

“Paphos falsity does not work, and therefore, television propaganda has no chance. In general, there is no methodological way to cope with these problems in power.

In addition, to discredit power, the educational system makes more than any opposition politician. Recently, the Internet has literally daily records of meaningless “educational conversations”, “patriotic lectures” and other grassroots initiatives working to destroy the remains of trust and respect for schoolchildren and students for pro -government narrative. “You are traitors, traitors and liberal-fascists,” the teacher of the Tomsk gymnasium reports to schoolchildren who entered the rally on March 26.

“The Internet has been on the Internet for several years of the era of new sincerity,” says Sonkin. - Paphos falsity does not work, and therefore, television propaganda has no chance. In general, there is no methodological way to cope with these problems in power. Unless irreversibly change itself. ” Each new attempt to talk with a young audience with the usual official language or, even worse, put pressure on it will lead to the exact opposite result.

Of course, the same challenge is faced with the opposition in the person of Navalny (an important feature of this rally: for a young audience from opposition politicians, only Navalny exists as a non -income figure). He will need to find some adequate to this audience and a very sincere language. “If Navalny suddenly, God forbid, decides to use, say, Zhduna (a popular meme of last winter. - NT), then he will immediately lose thousands of these schoolchildren, because Zhdun is Mamkin’s meme,” says Antonovsky. - Holding hype is very difficult. "

Photo: Social Networks, Sobolev channel on YouTube.com