Sochi 2014 Online Discourse: Between National Pride and Intolerance

This paper presents the preliminary results of social network discourse analysis about Sochi 2014 Olympic Games. Main idea of the research was to try to identify core topics around Sochi Games as a socio-political event and not like a purely sportive issue. In our opinion during this event we could observe the huge contradiction between the general idea of Olympic movement (Pierre de Coubertin pacifying and unifying idea of sport) and the discourse “around” games with intolerance, glorification, corruption etc. I.e. we tried to interpret Sochi like media event within the framework of Katz and Dayan model of contests-conquests-coronations (Katz and Dayan, Media events, Harvard University press, 1994).

The methodology is based on the content-analysis of main socially shared messages mentioning the Games. The collect of data was made by Wobot tool within Vkontakte (most popular social network in Russia), Twitter and Livejournal. The final sample was about 1700 messages from 8 of January 2014 to 15 of March 2014. The structure of sample is not equal in terms of representativeness of different platforms. As we could see on picture 1, the social network Vkontakte largely dominates within all socially shared content. It means that VK has been a most powerful tool of mass diffusion of messages.

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