Mediatized by policy and demediatized in practice: Representation of Russian youth policy in the social media accounts of the authorities

Abstract

This paper examines how well the government agencies responsible for the implementation of specific areas of national youth policy in Russia manage to cover this topic on their social media resources, and identifies relevant trends for the space where the state and youth communicate. The results of our qualitative and quantitative content analysis of posts showed that the topic of youth policy does not receive proper coverage on the agencies’ own social media accounts. Most often, youth policy is discussed in the context of covering events for young Russians. In addition, much attention is paid to documenting meetings of government officials to discuss issues within their areas of competence. At the same time, reports on specific government measures to support young people, current initiatives, and success stories of young Russians who take an active part in the development and implementation of the country’s youth policy rarely get published on the agencies’ accounts. The potential of the format for discussing youth policy in an open dialog on equal terms with the audience has yet to be tapped into. We believe it is possible to view the identified features of the communication strategies of the agencies as manifested demediatization of interaction between the state and youth.

Keywords

• mediatization
• demediatization
• state
• youth
• youth policy
• social media