Russian speakers on Lithuanian social networks: communicative modal identification

This chapter addresses the problem of communicative modal identification of Russian speakers on the Lithuanian segment of Facebook and Vkontakte. This issue is regarded through the prism of users’ purposes, ideas, and attitudes to Lithuania, processes in the country, events and memory work. Homo loquence’s communicative modal identification directly or indirectly codes both self-conceptions of a speaker and reflections of other interlocutors about Russian-speaking identities. Correspondingly, I regard communicators following their views, namely, positive/supportive, balanced and critical associating this distinction with the processes of acculturation, integration and adaptation or estrangement happening as a result of living or contacting with Lithuania, and its people for a different period of time. After such sort of analysis, I reflect on the reasons for such variations in users' views grounding this idea with the change in the societal agreement, which resulted in the creation of new realia after the fall of the USSR. This process was accompanied by a significant shift in the scope, meaning and understanding of the realia “responsibility” in post-Soviet times. This chapter reports on research conducted as part of "Connective digital memory in borderlands: a mixed-methods study of cultural identity, heritage communication and digital curation on social networks". The Connective project is funded by the European Social Fund under grant agreement 09.3.3-LMT-K-712-17-0027 with the Research Council of Lithuania (LMTLT)