The Image of the Mental Map in the Communication of Social Media Users From Saint Petersburg

Abstract

The study, conducted in March 2022, involved the analysis of the content in several social media chats and groups; the participants of those chats live in the same place and therefore have a common experience of the space. The study was based on the hypothesis of a direct connection between the mental map (a system of individual ideas about space), the cultural reputation of topoi, and urban trauma, embodied in the unease infrastructure. The problem of assessing the significance of a place was solved by means of folklore toponymies – the mechanism of renaming, which indicates the degree of awareness about a specific place and defines its location on the mental map as well as ascribes a certain status to it. These statuses demonstrate the degree of significance of a place for a certain subject and form a kind of hierarchy, a system of topographical preferences. Thanks to online communication, people can not only transmit information much faster than the traditional forms of folklore dissemination allow, but also broadcast personal attitudes, conveying them as a bundle of meanings (for example, while inventing new toponyms). Therefore, one of the objectives of the study was to identify established folklore toponyms in online communication: they serve as markers of attitudes, reputation, and significance; we also try to catalogue attempts to “rename” different places. Another task was to find the symptoms of such anxiety in online communication.

Keywords

• cultural reputation
• urban trauma
• the unease infrastructure