What do VKontakte users say and learn about cyberpunk?
Cyberpunk is one of the widely discussed trends in gaming and film culture in 2017. Everything that has been released or announced under the cyberpunk sign this year is films (“Ghost in Armor”, “Blade Runner 2049”), games (news about Cyberpunk 2077, Red Strings Club, The Observer), etc., - has generated a great response and a clear increase in interest in cyberpunk not only among the “oldfags” (connoisseurs and amateurs, who had long since formed their interest in the cyberpunk), but also among those who have heard little or nothing about it before.
The study of this reaction and is devoted to my publication. It says nothing about cyberpunk itself. Its object is a “ popular cyberpunk”, and the task is to determine what it is, how it is perceived, what “cyberpunk” is associated with for Internet users in Russia.
Obviously, this is a very difficult task, requiring large resources. However, we can get closer to its solution by turning to one of the most indicative sources - social networks . Social networks are a mirror and at the same time a tool for shaping popular views.
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For those who are reluctant to delve into the details, I can immediately tell about the results.
Further - just the details of how I came to these conclusions.
Study timeline
I limited myself to a period of two weeks - from October 19 to November 1, 2017. Why is that? It's not so much the difficulty of obtaining data of greater depth. As it turned out, this two-week period can be considered as one large synchronous cut, with minimal dynamics. In fact, with my work, I answer the question “What was cyberpunk in October 2017” . A longer period would lead me to the topic “how the ideas about cyberpunk changed”, and this is, albeit a very interesting one, but a completely different story, for which other resources are required.
During this period, over 1,250 records have been published in “VK”, in which cyberpunk is mentioned. Total coverage - 2 133 000 + views.
On the day from 62 to 107 posts were published. At the same time, a rather large number of entries, an average of 35%, are “personal” publications that are published by users on personal pages. Accordingly, the share of the public is 65%.
Find a trend to increase / decrease the number of publications per day, I could not. The only thing that seemed curious (but partly logical due to the weakening of the campaign “Running Blade”) - a gradual decrease in the number of “personal” publications from 43% at the beginning of the period to 31% at the end.
Also on this material I could not find the dependence of the number and type of publications on the age of publishers.
Interiorization is a process when a cultural phenomenon, a concept that is often quite complex and diverse, becomes for a particular person personally experienced, intuitive and recognizable in the outside world. The internalization of a cyberpunk comes at a time when a person begins to call a window view, a picture, news from the media, a musical composition, etc. as “cyberpunk”. And the user is in a hurry to share the news on the social network: “I opened a cyberpunk in the environment!”.
In our case, cyberpunk received a relatively high internalization. It is noticeable, for example, in how often the word “cyberpunk” is used in user reactions : a publisher places certain content (news, picture, etc.) and comments on it as an example, a symptom of cyberpunk. At the same time, no cyberpunk is mentioned in the original news (it may even be from another opera), but the publisher recognizes it in the news and puts a “cyberpunk diagnosis” on to the events.
Reactions make up a significant part of the total sample (more than 10%) , but since most of these are personal records, their coverage is small. What are the users “discovering” cyberpunk?
The main source of “recognizable cyberpunk” (more than 49 reactions from 140+) is news . The strongest, in terms of the number of reactions, news is connected with events and achievements in the field of robotics ( Robot Sophia , Robot in the Government of Leningrad Region ) and artificial intelligence ( example ). The main reaction to them is phrases from the series “cyberpunk, which we deserve”, “cyberpunk is already near”, etc.
Separately, you can note the " contrasting news ." As a rule, these are messages about the manifestation of technologies in unusual areas or about their unexpected, ridiculous application. Publishers see this as a striking symptom of the onset of cyberpunk or cyberpunk “in Russian”. Examples are news about the Tetris game embedded in the onboard computer “Gazelle”, the task about spinners in the computer science competition, the desire of the representatives of the Russian Orthodox Church to monitor virtual life , the criminals who robbed the victim through online banking , etc.
Similar to the previous reaction to memes (more later) or images with funny signatures. The themes are different: IT-humor ( example ), impression of a movie, just “hilarious” pictures ( example ), etc.
The immediate environment is also a generator of cyberpunk reactions, and, apparently, the most personal, demonstrating the active inclusion of elements of cyberpunk in the picture of the world. VKontakte users discover what seems to be a cyberpunk, in their own daily life - in architecture and interior ( example ), clothes, shoes, accessories ( example ), etc.
Separately, I note the impressions of travel: getting to Beijing, Seoul, etc., publishers feel in the cyberpunk citadel
Thus, cyberpunk , with all the “curvature” of representations (that is, their inconsistency with the reference concept), becomes familiar, close and understandable to the user.
This is confirmed by the analysis of personal self-characteristics of users in the social network. They use “cyberpunk”, declaring themselves, their preferences, i.e. conducting “self-presentation” in different situations:
in posts on your own pages, addressed to friends and guests of the profile;
as well as in posts addressed to a wide audience of “like-minded people”, in particular in the public dating and search for partners in role-playing games. During the period, a total of about 30 such “self-presentations” were published, with a declaration of interest / love for cyberpunk.
Another sign of interiorization is the work of various levels, from handicrafts to fully finished works. First of all, these are two types of products:
the first is visual products: art, images, illustrations, handicrafts that the users place on their pages;
the second is texts: poems, fan fiction, various kinds of “LitRPGs”, and so on.
In total, during the study period, at least 50 such publications were published. Some publications combine creative work with monetization and a call to buy art, a book, etc.
Lists are one of the most volatile, easily distributed types of content on a social network. Most of the lists do not have an author, they interfere with a lot of different sorts of phenomena, but they have the effect of encyclopedic, charts. All this, on the one hand, gives them the ability to easily migrate from public to public, collecting a huge number of views and reposts, on the other - predetermines their low involving ability. The lists, en masse, “are hung on the wall so as not to forget” and immediately forgotten.
Naturally, this also applies to those lists that mention cyberpunk.
In total, these are more than 15 different lists that were published over 130 times over these two weeks and received a total coverage of 417,000+ . This is the largest coverage of all other content types.
What side was cyberpunk in the “lists”? Who or what became his “ambassador” in the most popular type of content?
Top positions in coverage are 3 lists related to literature:
a list of “27 books that need to be read up to 27 years old” (there are several variants of the name). The ambassador from cyberpunk in this list is W. Gibson's “ Neuromant ”. (example). Thanks to 66 publications of this list, the audience in 218000+ learned about “Neuromante” as a key work of cyberpunk;
lists of “10 books from the (autumn) depression” (19 publications) and “10 books breaking consciousness” (11 publications) collected a total coverage of 135,000+. Both lists offer audiences as a sample of the cyberpunk book Mitchell's Cloud Atlas .
Interestingly, the Cloud Atlas, thanks to these two and less common lists, has earned the reputation of a “typical” cyberpunk, without being a clear example of cyberpunk for experts.
Without departing from the box office, one can also say, in general, about the context of “cyberpunk in books”. Moreover, it is by no means a top one - ~ 100 entries have a small total coverage of 81000+. Among the books and authors that have become for users of “VK” a manifestation of cyberpunk are the same “Cloud Atlas” and the expected Philip Dick, Sterling, Gibson, Neil Stevenson, and also Victor Pelevin (due to the release of his new novel on artificial intelligence) . The most popular entries are posts linking to the article “Cyberpunk-books: 10 main novels” , which became the main source of ideas about cyberpunk-books in this period.
Memes in VKontakte are probably the most popular content. Obviously, memes are an extremely effective way of popularizing, creating a noticeably simplified or curved representation of the phenomenon and at the same time transmitting it to a massive and not at all sophisticated audience. At the same time, unlike lists, due to humor, memes have a noticeably greater audience involvement, get more response.
This is confirmed by the example of cyberpunk. Built on the mention of cyberpunk meme content (i.e. pictures with signatures that create a humorous effect) received the largest coverage of all types of content (after “lists”) —– over 325,000. Movies, games, and music give way to memes. What is interesting, almost completely, this coverage created a single meme. The photo with the image of the tea packaging called “Cybertea” and the signature “Cyberpunk that we brewed” was published in 20+ public pages. We can say that this meme is the main thing that VKontakte users learned about cyberpunk during this period.
The total coverage of publications about games in which cyberpunk is somehow mentioned is relatively large: 271000+. This is more than movies or music. But this leadership is peculiar: about half of the total coverage is created by one “strong” publication in public, which, in general, is quite far from the topic of games, but, apparently, captures and uses “actual trends” quite well. This post covering 103000+ was made by the BadComedian community and is dedicated to The Red Strings Club.
The remaining 107 publications have much lower coverage. In addition to the publication of the World of Fiction website, which gathered 20000+ audiences, about games in the cyberpunk style, among the largest topics are the games Cyberpunk 2077 (13000+), Deus Ex (11400+), Strain Tactics (14000+), and Ruiner, The Last Night, Observer. And in all cases, this coverage is not formed by single “strong”, but by several publications.
The more resonance and interiorization the theme has, the more often, at least in VKontakte, it is associated with audio content. Strictly speaking, cyberpunk is not represented in public music. However, publishers actively tie various performers to the cyberpunk “wave”: the cumulative coverage of such posts amounted to more than 235 thousand views, this is the second place after the games. What has become for the users of the social network the musical embodiment of cyberpunk?
From the observations I note the following:
Not surprisingly, in two weeks of October, Blade Runner 2049 collected the largest number of posts talking about cyberpunk in the context of cinema. The overwhelming majority of them are reviews and reviews , in which publishers share their impressions of the film viewing of the new “Bladerunner”. In total, in “VK” for the studied period I found 95 published reviews. 25 - in public, the rest - on personal pages. As a result, their coverage reached 57,000+, which, I must admit, is very serious for this type of content.
Since I started talking about reviews, it is worthwhile to briefly talk about how exactly the users describe the movie in the reviews, a kind of “average perception”. It should be borne in mind that the published review is not a direct viewer reaction to the film, but rather the text that the user publishes in order to publicly demonstrate their tastes and preferences, their affiliation to a certain “reference group”. This determines the language and tone of the text.
In general, the distribution of reviews by key resembles the rating of reviews on “Kinopoisk”. A few neutral, 11 negative, the rest (ie, about 80 reviews) - words of recognition, admiration and delight.
Those who did not like the film say, first of all, about deceived expectations, the absence of declared actions, history, unjustified timekeeping and boredom, etc., that the film is a pure marketing product, and its “advantages ” , .
Those whom the film impressed , first of all, speak of it as a film that created a unique “atmosphere”, as “deep”, “intelligent”, “meditative”, “philosophical” cinema, filled with “symbols” and “references ”, As a“ visual and sound masterpiece ”. At the same time, reviewers often oppose it to “the rest of the movie-trash,” “Hollywood cud,” and call it “cinema is not for everyone,” “cinema for connoisseurs.”
And, of course, interiorization is noticeable: reviewers are projecting the film on themselves, their surroundings, for example: “I came out of the hall last, and, as a crush, looked out of the taxi window, not seeing the difference between night Surgut and night California.
Of the other contexts connecting cyberpunk and cinema (movies, etc.), you can call the “Matrix”(and more broadly - the work of Wachowski) with coverage of 15000+, the films “Johnny Mnemonic”, “Kamikaze 1989”, “Revival”, “Gene Generation”. It is noteworthy that very few people remember the “Ghost in the Shell” of 2017. But the largest coverage (45000+) received the context of the anime , at the expense of not only fan communities, but also “neutral” publishers. Among the popular “cyberpunk” anime are GitS, PsychoPassport, Experiment Lane, Cyber-City Oedo.
Finally, good coverage in the 150000+ received posts containing various kinds of art - illustrations, concepts, etc. Publishers actively post (and readers actively respond to) art resembling a cyberpunk setting, characters, etc.
Cyberpunk, due to the growing popularity of the topic, as well as the “proximity” for users of the social network, of course, attracted the attention of commercial publishers. Among them are two groups.
The first is event organizers. Clubs, quest rooms, anti-cafe began to actively use the theme of cyberpunk to activate (examples). True, the most famous event in terms of coverage (30,000+) was the Man in the Middle festival in the Nekrasovsky library, with free admission.
The second - manufacturers and sellers of clothing, goods and accessories, tattoo workshops , etc .:
Instead of conclusions (especially since they were already at the very beginning of the article), I will apologize to the readers - in particular, to those whom the article seemed useless or incomplete. In general, this is just the first approach to the topic of “popular cyberpunk”, and I did not want to delay the results until they “turned sour.” Hence the possible disadvantages.
But I think that the topic of mass, popular views is interesting not for me alone. Therefore, I expect to soon present a more voluminous and more complete picture. Thank you for your time!
The study of this reaction and is devoted to my publication. It says nothing about cyberpunk itself. Its object is a “ popular cyberpunk”, and the task is to determine what it is, how it is perceived, what “cyberpunk” is associated with for Internet users in Russia.
Obviously, this is a very difficult task, requiring large resources. However, we can get closer to its solution by turning to one of the most indicative sources - social networks . Social networks are a mirror and at the same time a tool for shaping popular views.
')
For those who are reluctant to delve into the details, I can immediately tell about the results.
- “Cyberpunk” has become a really popular phenomenon for users of social networks. On average, in “VKontakte” in a relatively “non-hot” period, which I took for analysis, ~ 100 records were published per day.
- Cyberpunk has been internalized - it has become a marker and a way of self-determination of users who mention “cyberpunk” when they talk about themselves, their preferences, their reactions to the news, about their environment, etc. In addition, for many, cyberpunk has become the basis of creative activity. Another manifestation is the growth of commercial activity around cyberpunk.
- The most popular common contexts in which “cyberpunk” was mentioned are lists (recommendation lists for reading or viewing), humor (memes), games, art, music, films. In some contexts, the most common associations are significantly different from the cyberpunk reference concepts.
Further - just the details of how I came to these conclusions.
What you can skip: research methodology.
I used the same methodology as in my other works on the study of mass representations. I consider social networks as a tool, a channel of formation, suggestions and at the same time a “mirror” of mass representations, often very heterogeneous, non-monolithic.
Each “ broadcaster ” (publisher), in the role of which can be a person or a community, publishes content in a social network, acts as a translator of certain ideas, associations, etc. - own or "reflected", strangers. Accordingly, the addressee of the submissions is the audience of the “broadcaster”, which, in addition to passive learning (taking note), can also show an “echo” activity: reposts, likes and comments on the publisher's recording allow the submissions to achieve the greatest coverage and influence.
On the other hand, social networks are a space that exceptionally well represents those popular, widespread ideas that circulate in modern culture. Definitely, from all public sources of this kind of data, the social network is one of the most “live” and immediate. By publications in social networks, we can trace both the popularity of certain themes and events, and the contexts in which they are mentioned. In other words, thanks to social networks, we not only see the level and dynamics of the popularity of the phenomenon, but also its associative connections: in connection with which they talk about it, in what way, what is emphasized, etc.
Of all the social networks widely used in Russia and the CIS, VKontakte represents the greatest value for such research. Only this social network allows us to define an audience ( coverage ) of posts now and can provide a full-fledged, “continuous” section of publications. Therefore, all the conclusions we will do only on the basis of the materials of this social network.
At the same time, “VKontakte” imposes restrictions . Firstly, these are restrictions on the audience. Naturally, the “VK” audience cannot be equated to the Russian audience in general, although it is more “democratic” compared to “Facebook”. And the average publisher in “VK” differs significantly from the similar in “Odnoklassniki” and “Facebook”, mainly due to the difference in age and the purpose of presence (positioning). Without going into analytics, I will say very generally that the “VKontakte” audience is younger, more relaxed and behaves least formally compared to “OK” and “FB”.
Secondly, there are limitations on the depth of analytics . As an ordinary user, I have access to a depth of 1000 entries per request. And if in some cases this is more than enough, then with “high-loaded” topics, as in the case of cyberpunk, this depth is enough for several days. Therefore, we had to create a script that conducts regular parsing of records by the keyword and preserving the links to them separately.
Thus, methodologically the work is quite simple:
The result should be the answers to the questions: who, what and in connection with what says about cyberpunk in “VK”.
The main difficulty in this work is the interpretation. There is a danger of replacing the result with your own ideas, and I tried very hard to minimize this moment.
It is also very important not to give estimates to the identified ideas. What professionals know about cyberpunk (in the field of literature, culture, games, etc.), including fundamental references, standards, differs markedly from what cyberpunk looks like in the eyes of non-professional groups. For example, a secondary (from the point of view of experts) product with elements of cyberpunk can become a reference reference for other groups, as happened with Taylor Swift clips.
Each “ broadcaster ” (publisher), in the role of which can be a person or a community, publishes content in a social network, acts as a translator of certain ideas, associations, etc. - own or "reflected", strangers. Accordingly, the addressee of the submissions is the audience of the “broadcaster”, which, in addition to passive learning (taking note), can also show an “echo” activity: reposts, likes and comments on the publisher's recording allow the submissions to achieve the greatest coverage and influence.
On the other hand, social networks are a space that exceptionally well represents those popular, widespread ideas that circulate in modern culture. Definitely, from all public sources of this kind of data, the social network is one of the most “live” and immediate. By publications in social networks, we can trace both the popularity of certain themes and events, and the contexts in which they are mentioned. In other words, thanks to social networks, we not only see the level and dynamics of the popularity of the phenomenon, but also its associative connections: in connection with which they talk about it, in what way, what is emphasized, etc.
Of all the social networks widely used in Russia and the CIS, VKontakte represents the greatest value for such research. Only this social network allows us to define an audience ( coverage ) of posts now and can provide a full-fledged, “continuous” section of publications. Therefore, all the conclusions we will do only on the basis of the materials of this social network.
At the same time, “VKontakte” imposes restrictions . Firstly, these are restrictions on the audience. Naturally, the “VK” audience cannot be equated to the Russian audience in general, although it is more “democratic” compared to “Facebook”. And the average publisher in “VK” differs significantly from the similar in “Odnoklassniki” and “Facebook”, mainly due to the difference in age and the purpose of presence (positioning). Without going into analytics, I will say very generally that the “VKontakte” audience is younger, more relaxed and behaves least formally compared to “OK” and “FB”.
Secondly, there are limitations on the depth of analytics . As an ordinary user, I have access to a depth of 1000 entries per request. And if in some cases this is more than enough, then with “high-loaded” topics, as in the case of cyberpunk, this depth is enough for several days. Therefore, we had to create a script that conducts regular parsing of records by the keyword and preserving the links to them separately.
Thus, methodologically the work is quite simple:
- collection of all open records from “VKontakte”, in which the word “cyberpunk” was mentioned in one way or another, for the period from 10/19/17 to 11/01/17. I specifically emphasize that the records that indirectly related to manifestations of cyberpunk, but did not mention the word , were not included in the sample;
- analysis of records by format, type, topic, scope, context;
- generalization and interpretation of results.
The result should be the answers to the questions: who, what and in connection with what says about cyberpunk in “VK”.
The main difficulty in this work is the interpretation. There is a danger of replacing the result with your own ideas, and I tried very hard to minimize this moment.
It is also very important not to give estimates to the identified ideas. What professionals know about cyberpunk (in the field of literature, culture, games, etc.), including fundamental references, standards, differs markedly from what cyberpunk looks like in the eyes of non-professional groups. For example, a secondary (from the point of view of experts) product with elements of cyberpunk can become a reference reference for other groups, as happened with Taylor Swift clips.
Study timeline
I limited myself to a period of two weeks - from October 19 to November 1, 2017. Why is that? It's not so much the difficulty of obtaining data of greater depth. As it turned out, this two-week period can be considered as one large synchronous cut, with minimal dynamics. In fact, with my work, I answer the question “What was cyberpunk in October 2017” . A longer period would lead me to the topic “how the ideas about cyberpunk changed”, and this is, albeit a very interesting one, but a completely different story, for which other resources are required.
Overall picture
During this period, over 1,250 records have been published in “VK”, in which cyberpunk is mentioned. Total coverage - 2 133 000 + views.
On the day from 62 to 107 posts were published. At the same time, a rather large number of entries, an average of 35%, are “personal” publications that are published by users on personal pages. Accordingly, the share of the public is 65%.
Find a trend to increase / decrease the number of publications per day, I could not. The only thing that seemed curious (but partly logical due to the weakening of the campaign “Running Blade”) - a gradual decrease in the number of “personal” publications from 43% at the beginning of the period to 31% at the end.
Also on this material I could not find the dependence of the number and type of publications on the age of publishers.
Cyberpunk interiorization
Interiorization is a process when a cultural phenomenon, a concept that is often quite complex and diverse, becomes for a particular person personally experienced, intuitive and recognizable in the outside world. The internalization of a cyberpunk comes at a time when a person begins to call a window view, a picture, news from the media, a musical composition, etc. as “cyberpunk”. And the user is in a hurry to share the news on the social network: “I opened a cyberpunk in the environment!”.
In our case, cyberpunk received a relatively high internalization. It is noticeable, for example, in how often the word “cyberpunk” is used in user reactions : a publisher places certain content (news, picture, etc.) and comments on it as an example, a symptom of cyberpunk. At the same time, no cyberpunk is mentioned in the original news (it may even be from another opera), but the publisher recognizes it in the news and puts a “cyberpunk diagnosis” on to the events.
Reactions make up a significant part of the total sample (more than 10%) , but since most of these are personal records, their coverage is small. What are the users “discovering” cyberpunk?
The main source of “recognizable cyberpunk” (more than 49 reactions from 140+) is news . The strongest, in terms of the number of reactions, news is connected with events and achievements in the field of robotics ( Robot Sophia , Robot in the Government of Leningrad Region ) and artificial intelligence ( example ). The main reaction to them is phrases from the series “cyberpunk, which we deserve”, “cyberpunk is already near”, etc.
Separately, you can note the " contrasting news ." As a rule, these are messages about the manifestation of technologies in unusual areas or about their unexpected, ridiculous application. Publishers see this as a striking symptom of the onset of cyberpunk or cyberpunk “in Russian”. Examples are news about the Tetris game embedded in the onboard computer “Gazelle”, the task about spinners in the computer science competition, the desire of the representatives of the Russian Orthodox Church to monitor virtual life , the criminals who robbed the victim through online banking , etc.
Similar to the previous reaction to memes (more later) or images with funny signatures. The themes are different: IT-humor ( example ), impression of a movie, just “hilarious” pictures ( example ), etc.
The immediate environment is also a generator of cyberpunk reactions, and, apparently, the most personal, demonstrating the active inclusion of elements of cyberpunk in the picture of the world. VKontakte users discover what seems to be a cyberpunk, in their own daily life - in architecture and interior ( example ), clothes, shoes, accessories ( example ), etc.
Separately, I note the impressions of travel: getting to Beijing, Seoul, etc., publishers feel in the cyberpunk citadel
Thus, cyberpunk , with all the “curvature” of representations (that is, their inconsistency with the reference concept), becomes familiar, close and understandable to the user.
This is confirmed by the analysis of personal self-characteristics of users in the social network. They use “cyberpunk”, declaring themselves, their preferences, i.e. conducting “self-presentation” in different situations:
in posts on your own pages, addressed to friends and guests of the profile;
as well as in posts addressed to a wide audience of “like-minded people”, in particular in the public dating and search for partners in role-playing games. During the period, a total of about 30 such “self-presentations” were published, with a declaration of interest / love for cyberpunk.
Another sign of interiorization is the work of various levels, from handicrafts to fully finished works. First of all, these are two types of products:
the first is visual products: art, images, illustrations, handicrafts that the users place on their pages;
the second is texts: poems, fan fiction, various kinds of “LitRPGs”, and so on.
In total, during the study period, at least 50 such publications were published. Some publications combine creative work with monetization and a call to buy art, a book, etc.
Popular cyberpunk: content and contexts
Lists: “Neuromant” and (suddenly) “Cloud Atlas”
Lists are one of the most volatile, easily distributed types of content on a social network. Most of the lists do not have an author, they interfere with a lot of different sorts of phenomena, but they have the effect of encyclopedic, charts. All this, on the one hand, gives them the ability to easily migrate from public to public, collecting a huge number of views and reposts, on the other - predetermines their low involving ability. The lists, en masse, “are hung on the wall so as not to forget” and immediately forgotten.
Naturally, this also applies to those lists that mention cyberpunk.
In total, these are more than 15 different lists that were published over 130 times over these two weeks and received a total coverage of 417,000+ . This is the largest coverage of all other content types.
What side was cyberpunk in the “lists”? Who or what became his “ambassador” in the most popular type of content?
Top positions in coverage are 3 lists related to literature:
a list of “27 books that need to be read up to 27 years old” (there are several variants of the name). The ambassador from cyberpunk in this list is W. Gibson's “ Neuromant ”. (example). Thanks to 66 publications of this list, the audience in 218000+ learned about “Neuromante” as a key work of cyberpunk;
lists of “10 books from the (autumn) depression” (19 publications) and “10 books breaking consciousness” (11 publications) collected a total coverage of 135,000+. Both lists offer audiences as a sample of the cyberpunk book Mitchell's Cloud Atlas .
Interestingly, the Cloud Atlas, thanks to these two and less common lists, has earned the reputation of a “typical” cyberpunk, without being a clear example of cyberpunk for experts.
Without departing from the box office, one can also say, in general, about the context of “cyberpunk in books”. Moreover, it is by no means a top one - ~ 100 entries have a small total coverage of 81000+. Among the books and authors that have become for users of “VK” a manifestation of cyberpunk are the same “Cloud Atlas” and the expected Philip Dick, Sterling, Gibson, Neil Stevenson, and also Victor Pelevin (due to the release of his new novel on artificial intelligence) . The most popular entries are posts linking to the article “Cyberpunk-books: 10 main novels” , which became the main source of ideas about cyberpunk-books in this period.
Memes: “Cyberpunk We Brewed”
Memes in VKontakte are probably the most popular content. Obviously, memes are an extremely effective way of popularizing, creating a noticeably simplified or curved representation of the phenomenon and at the same time transmitting it to a massive and not at all sophisticated audience. At the same time, unlike lists, due to humor, memes have a noticeably greater audience involvement, get more response.
This is confirmed by the example of cyberpunk. Built on the mention of cyberpunk meme content (i.e. pictures with signatures that create a humorous effect) received the largest coverage of all types of content (after “lists”) —– over 325,000. Movies, games, and music give way to memes. What is interesting, almost completely, this coverage created a single meme. The photo with the image of the tea packaging called “Cybertea” and the signature “Cyberpunk that we brewed” was published in 20+ public pages. We can say that this meme is the main thing that VKontakte users learned about cyberpunk during this period.
Games: BadComedian and the rest
The total coverage of publications about games in which cyberpunk is somehow mentioned is relatively large: 271000+. This is more than movies or music. But this leadership is peculiar: about half of the total coverage is created by one “strong” publication in public, which, in general, is quite far from the topic of games, but, apparently, captures and uses “actual trends” quite well. This post covering 103000+ was made by the BadComedian community and is dedicated to The Red Strings Club.
The remaining 107 publications have much lower coverage. In addition to the publication of the World of Fiction website, which gathered 20000+ audiences, about games in the cyberpunk style, among the largest topics are the games Cyberpunk 2077 (13000+), Deus Ex (11400+), Strain Tactics (14000+), and Ruiner, The Last Night, Observer. And in all cases, this coverage is not formed by single “strong”, but by several publications.
Cyberpunk music: it's hard
The more resonance and interiorization the theme has, the more often, at least in VKontakte, it is associated with audio content. Strictly speaking, cyberpunk is not represented in public music. However, publishers actively tie various performers to the cyberpunk “wave”: the cumulative coverage of such posts amounted to more than 235 thousand views, this is the second place after the games. What has become for the users of the social network the musical embodiment of cyberpunk?
From the observations I note the following:
- The set of performers tied to a cyberpunk is quite wide: Dolphin, Perturbator, Taylor Swift, Dope Stars, Glory to the CPSU and many others. From the point of view of music, now everyone has their “own” cyberpunk, and those who “imbued” with cyberpunk, project it onto a more or less suitable favorite track or group.
- top performers are Lizer x Flesh, Scandroid, “Lomonosov Plan”, Taylor Swift. Together, they have half of the total coverage.
- the highest interiorization is in Delphine (specifically, his songs “Cyberpunk”), the song-clip Taylor Swift , as well as the Russian group Lizer x Flesh and especially their composition “Ecofuturistic”. The phrase from it is “... outside cyberpunk, inside baby I” users often used for self-determination.
- with the great popularity of the main event of the month - the release of “Blade Runner 2049”, the soundtrack from it was practically not quoted separately from the references to the film.
- It is noteworthy that although clips with elements of the cyberpunk setting have recently been released by such performers as Pika and Oksimiron , in the views of VK users they are very little associated with cyberpunk. Roughly speaking, Oksimiron separately - cyberpunk separately.
Movies: under the sign of “Blade Runner 2049” ... and anime
Not surprisingly, in two weeks of October, Blade Runner 2049 collected the largest number of posts talking about cyberpunk in the context of cinema. The overwhelming majority of them are reviews and reviews , in which publishers share their impressions of the film viewing of the new “Bladerunner”. In total, in “VK” for the studied period I found 95 published reviews. 25 - in public, the rest - on personal pages. As a result, their coverage reached 57,000+, which, I must admit, is very serious for this type of content.
Since I started talking about reviews, it is worthwhile to briefly talk about how exactly the users describe the movie in the reviews, a kind of “average perception”. It should be borne in mind that the published review is not a direct viewer reaction to the film, but rather the text that the user publishes in order to publicly demonstrate their tastes and preferences, their affiliation to a certain “reference group”. This determines the language and tone of the text.
In general, the distribution of reviews by key resembles the rating of reviews on “Kinopoisk”. A few neutral, 11 negative, the rest (ie, about 80 reviews) - words of recognition, admiration and delight.
Those who did not like the film say, first of all, about deceived expectations, the absence of declared actions, history, unjustified timekeeping and boredom, etc., that the film is a pure marketing product, and its “advantages ” , .
Those whom the film impressed , first of all, speak of it as a film that created a unique “atmosphere”, as “deep”, “intelligent”, “meditative”, “philosophical” cinema, filled with “symbols” and “references ”, As a“ visual and sound masterpiece ”. At the same time, reviewers often oppose it to “the rest of the movie-trash,” “Hollywood cud,” and call it “cinema is not for everyone,” “cinema for connoisseurs.”
And, of course, interiorization is noticeable: reviewers are projecting the film on themselves, their surroundings, for example: “I came out of the hall last, and, as a crush, looked out of the taxi window, not seeing the difference between night Surgut and night California.
Of the other contexts connecting cyberpunk and cinema (movies, etc.), you can call the “Matrix”(and more broadly - the work of Wachowski) with coverage of 15000+, the films “Johnny Mnemonic”, “Kamikaze 1989”, “Revival”, “Gene Generation”. It is noteworthy that very few people remember the “Ghost in the Shell” of 2017. But the largest coverage (45000+) received the context of the anime , at the expense of not only fan communities, but also “neutral” publishers. Among the popular “cyberpunk” anime are GitS, PsychoPassport, Experiment Lane, Cyber-City Oedo.
Arta: a symptom of popularity
Finally, good coverage in the 150000+ received posts containing various kinds of art - illustrations, concepts, etc. Publishers actively post (and readers actively respond to) art resembling a cyberpunk setting, characters, etc.
Events and sales
Cyberpunk, due to the growing popularity of the topic, as well as the “proximity” for users of the social network, of course, attracted the attention of commercial publishers. Among them are two groups.
The first is event organizers. Clubs, quest rooms, anti-cafe began to actively use the theme of cyberpunk to activate (examples). True, the most famous event in terms of coverage (30,000+) was the Man in the Middle festival in the Nekrasovsky library, with free admission.
The second - manufacturers and sellers of clothing, goods and accessories, tattoo workshops , etc .:
Finally
Instead of conclusions (especially since they were already at the very beginning of the article), I will apologize to the readers - in particular, to those whom the article seemed useless or incomplete. In general, this is just the first approach to the topic of “popular cyberpunk”, and I did not want to delay the results until they “turned sour.” Hence the possible disadvantages.
But I think that the topic of mass, popular views is interesting not for me alone. Therefore, I expect to soon present a more voluminous and more complete picture. Thank you for your time!
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/371039/
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