For a person whose occupation is closely related to current news, the information picture of the world merges into one continuous multi-colored kaleidoscope. You know, there is such a battered genre of urban photography: a long exposure of some significant road artery in the dark. And tens of thousands of marker lights of cars merging into long uneven stripes. I wrote almost 200 replicas of the radio this year. And this is not counting everything else: columns, posts on social networks (and each of them also has a reason), comments, telephone calls to newspapers, websites and radio stations.
Well, that is, I don’t remember what happened yesterday, not like what happened during the year. Therefore, let the special people take care of summing up the beautiful, structured results of the year (losses, gains, phenomena, memasics). But I want to separately note the story, which began not at all this year. But this year, which reached some kind of transcendental degree of absurdity. Which can only be in Russia - a country that knows how to laugh at itself. Although carefully hiding it from potential adversaries.
This is a story from Telegram. Which, as we recall, was created by a man who has good reason not to love the Russian state. The work of which in our country was limited by court order. Or maybe now it’s limited - no one canceled the court’s decision. The FSB wanted Telegram to change its algorithm of work. And police in the regions believe that the presence of Telegram in the smartphone is strong evidence in favor of the fact that the owner of the smartphone or drug addict, or, conversely, a drug dealer.
And in this reporting year, which is also extremely inconvenient for communication, in the reporting year almost the entire Russian political context finally moves. And (only shh!) They say that there was a high indication: use, they say, but as long as we pretend that there is no Telegram, the dark forces can finally occupy it.
Now we have a paradoxical situation: a program officially limited by court order, designed for anything, but not for a comfortable discussion of anything, in fact becomes the most important platform in the country for discussing important issues, and not only by journalists and political scientists , but also by current politicians, officials and even the presidential spokesman. The ministries broadcast their position through Telegram, the parliament broadcasts their position through Telegram, the official websites of departments are bent because no one else reads them. And Telegram is a kurguzy, uncomfortable, unreliable program, where nothing can be found and where any information lives for a few minutes maximum, continues to absorb in itself more and more circles, influence groups and “brilliant galaxies”.
It is decidedly impossible to explain, but it is an objective reality given to us in sensations.
Yes, any social environment is primarily people, not tools. Once all interested parties were organized by the most primitive forums of the Polit.ru site, then the antediluvian LiveJournal was quite satisfied. And then he began to arrange absurd even in comparison with the "Live Journal" Facebook. It can be explained in different ways to explain why at a certain moment people were removed from their homes and moved to a new one. In some case, the new owners broke the site, as was the case with LJ.
In some case, as was the case with Polit.ru, the site simply ceased to be arranged with privacy and comfort. In the case of Telegram, it seems to be quite understandable: Facebook frankly got it with this artificial intelligence, showing posts do not understand at all and don’t understand to anyone, forming your feed from people you don’t have any idea about. And, of course, by hellish censorship, looking at which even the Privy Councilor Krasovsky would have spread his hands.
Yes, Telegram is not wise with extradition and, in comparison with other social tools, censorship is almost completely deprived. Telegram has little functionality (which is important for those who communicate using letters, and not through stupid pictures) and is strict. But the fact is that there are dozens, if not hundreds, of such programs. But not one of them became for the Russian media and political party what Telegram became. And the complete, unequivocal and unconditional surrender of this very party to the program, which is not even known where it is being developed, seems to me to be one of the most important results of the past year. Just because it determines how we will live, for years to come. “We” here is, of course, not the whole multi-million audience of RT, not the Russian people, not the next “lost generation”. No, the “we” here are those who live in a changing information space. Those to whom Telegram has become a single source of any information - political gossip, departmental plums, official statements, party swearing and simple news.
And you know, sometimes in the conspiracy thesis Telegram generally seems to me a special operation. Durov as an embedded agent, the court in the FSB lawsuit about the keys as an operation of covering and attracting attention, focusing on one site everything that needs to be taken into account with control.
And if this is true (and any conspiracy thesis does not arise from scratch), then we should recognize the outgoing 2019 year of the brilliant completion of the Telegram operation.
With what all of its participants and congratulations.
The author’s point of view may not coincide with the position of the publisher.