Olena Goroshko is Professor of Linguistics and Head of the Department of Modern Languages and Cross-Cultural Communication of the National Technical University, "Kharkiv Polytechnic Institute" (Ukraine). Goroshko's research interests include psycho-sociolinguistics, gender and Internet studies, forensics and e-learning. In 2004 Goroshko was a visiting fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute University of Oxford. She has authored a number of publications including Linguistic Consciousness: Gender Paradigm (2003). At present she is involved in the UNESCO sponsored project Gender Equality and Women's Empowerment. Her new monograph Gendering Net is due for publication at Kharkiv University Press (2009).
Elena Zhigalina is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Modern Languages and Cross-Cultural Communication of the National Technical University, "Kharkiv Polytechnic Institute" (Ukraine). She is working on her PhD thesis entitled Lingual Design of English-Speaking Corporate Blogs. Her research interests include linguistics analysis of communication on the Internet, corporate communication and e-learning.
The emergence and application of new informational technologies have essentially changed the way individuals and political institutions interact. While linguistics aims to analyse political discourse from a general angle, this article specifically discusses the impact of the Internet on political communication. The contribution argues that the broadband access to the Internet has reshaped the communicative space of the web (for example, blogs have emerged). As the analysis of 16 political blogs moderated by leading Russian politicians has demonstrated, in the era of network societies, gaining social and communicative capital is one of the major goals for the agents of political discourse.
Language of contribution: Russian
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