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This article explores aspects, transformations, and dynamics of the ideological control of the internet in Russia. It analyses the strategies of actors across the Russian online space which contribute to this state-driven ideological control. The tightening of legislative regulation over the last 10 years to control social media and digital self-expression in Russia is relatively well studied. However, there is a lack of research on how the control of the internet works at a structural level. Namely, how it isolates "echo chambers" of oppositional discourses while also creating a massive flood of pro-state information and opinions. This article argues that the strategy of the Russian state to control the internet over the last 10 years has changed considerably. From creating troll factories and bots to distort communication in social media, the state is progressively moving towards a strategy of creating a huge state-oriented information flood to "litter" online space. Such a strategy relies on the generation of news resources which attract large volumes of traffic, which leads to such "trash information" dominating the internet.

To punish Russia for the annexation of Crimea from Ukraine, the United States and the European Union introduced a set of economic sanctions against Russian state companies and individuals closely affiliated with the Kremlin. The goal of this article is to look at the sanctions in relation to the process of the current consolidation of media assets and revenues in the hands of Russia's biggest media empires, most of whom are close to the Kremlin. It questions whether the sanctions achieved the intended goal of undermining economic stability inside Russia or if, rather, they benefitted major state-aligned media corporations.
The main conclusion drawn from the study is that the international sanctions have radically changed the structure of Russia's media in a manner contrary to their intention. The sanctions unwittingly favored the biggest players to the detriment of the smaller, protecting state-aligned media and their financial incomes. In the climate of sanctions, media tycoons close to the Kremlin used their lobbying capacity in parliament to acquire advantages, primarily in terms of advertisement. Thus, smaller competitors were pushed out of the market and their shares were redistributed among a few major stakeholders.

L'idée de cet article est de mettre en question l'approche bibliométrique dans les recherches en matière des médias dans les pays BRICS. Cette approche est de plus en plus utilisée dans l'évaluation académique et d'une manière paradoxale de plus en plus dans les pays de « la nouvelle croissance économique », dont les BRICS représentent un cas important. Dans ces pays, les gouvernements sont même plus impliqués dans la construction des « universités d'excellence », un nouveau modèle qui remplace l'université comme institution de la reproduction de la culture. Dans ce processus, les bases des données des publications académiques deviennent un instrument important de l'évaluation managériale de l'efficacité de l'Université qui constitue à son tour le système des classements dans lequel les établissements russes, chinois, brésiliens deviennent de plus en plus présents. L'étude empirique sur les outils bibliométriques numériques montre clairement qu'ils privilégient davantage les publications anglophones, ce qui contribue largement à leur domination dans le raisonnement scientifique, les idées véhiculées par des revues scientifiques de la culture empirique anglophone issue des sciences sociales, ce que dévalorise la tradition de sciences humaines plus chère à l'école française. La deuxième conclusion que l'auteur tire de cette étude est qu'il est fort difficile de parler d'un groupe particulier des publications des études médias dans les BRICS tout simplement parce que d'une manière théorique ce groupe est très hétérogène. Parmi toutes les publications indexées dans le domaine des communications et cultural studies dans les BRICS, les deux tiers sont chinoises, ce qui rend ce pays incomparable avec d'autres. L'autre conclusion est qu'à part l'Afrique du Sud où les revues anglophones sont très présentes, les autres pays sont très détachés de l'agenda mondial des publications : les études brésiliennes et russes sont très peu citées par le monde anglophone et vice-versa. Cela est compréhensible du point de vue des classements universitaires dont le système a commencé à affecter ces pays assez récemment. ; This paper is a critical analysis of the bibliometric approach in media research in the BRICS countries. This approach is increasingly used in academic assessments and, paradoxically, among the "new economic dragons" of which the BRICS are a prime example. Even the governments of these countries are becoming more involved in building up "universities of excellence", the new model which is replacing universities as the institutions where culture is reproduced. In this process, databases of academic publications are becoming an important means of managerial assessment of university efficiency, which itself is becoming a classification system in which Russian, Chinese and Brazilian institutions are increasingly represented. This empirical study of bibliometric tools clearly shows that digital bibliometrics produce a bias in favour of publications in English, which contributes greatly to the predominance, in scientific reasoning, of ideas conveyed by scientific journals based on the empirical traditions stemming from the social sciences of the English-speaking world, thus devaluing the human sciences traditions preferred by French schools of thought. The second conclusion drawn by the author of the study is the difficulty of discerning any particular BRICS group of media studies publications, simply because of their theoretical heterogeneity. Of all the publications on communication and cultural studies indexed for the BRICS countries, two-thirds are Chinese, making it impossible to compare Chinese output with that of other countries. The other conclusion is that apart from South Africa, where English-language publications are very much in evidence, the other countries are rather isolated from the worldwide publications agenda : Brazilian and Russian studies are rarely cited in the English-speaking world and vice-versa. This is understandable from the point of view of the academic ranking system which has only recently begun to affect these countries.

Intro -- Acknowledgments -- Contents -- Contributors -- Chapter 1: The Industrialization of Creativity and Its Limits: Introducing Concepts, Theories, and Themes -- 1.1 The Industrialization of Creativity and Its Limits: Introducing Concepts, Theories, and Themes -- 1.2 Understanding Creativity -- 1.3 The Political Economy of Creativity -- 1.4 Part I: Sustainability-Creative Growth, Labor, and Skills -- 1.5 Part II: Ideology-Creative Self-Expression and Aesthetics -- 1.6 Part III: Industrialization-Creative Markets and Technologies -- References -- Part I: Sustainability: Creative Growth, Labor, and Skills -- Chapter 2: Towards Post-Growth Creative Economies? Building Sustainable Cultural Production in Argentina -- 2.1 Introduction -- 2.2 Creativity Economy and Ecological Crisis -- 2.3 Challenging the Growth Imperative -- 2.4 Alternative Models to Growth -- 2.5 Alternative Cultural Production in Argentina -- 2.6 Recuperated Businesses and the Rise of Cooperatives -- 2.7 Cultural Production and Alternatives to Extractivism -- 2.8 Conclusion -- References -- Chapter 3: Creative Workers in Permanent Crisis: Labor in the Croatia´s Contemporary Arts and Culture -- 3.1 Introduction -- 3.2 A Reproduction of Inequalities? Regional, Gender-Based, and Sociodemographic Differences in the Independent Cultural Sector -- 3.3 Regional and Gender-Based Differences -- 3.4 Socioeconomic Differences Between Workers in the Independent Cultural Sector -- 3.5 Everyday Life as a Result of Regional, Gender-Based, and Socioeconomic Specificities -- 3.6 Conclusion -- References -- Chapter 4: The Only Place Where One Can Feel Connected to an International Context and Still Speak Russian: Hybrid Creative Wo... -- 4.1 Introduction -- 4.2 Methodology -- 4.3 New, Sexy, and International: Moscow´s Private Cultural Centers in the 2000s -- 4.4 Open Calls and the New Blat.

The Industrialization of Creativity and its Limits: Introducing Concepts, Theories and Themes -- Towards Post-Growth Creative Economies?: Building Sustainable Cultural Production in Argentina -- Creative Workers in Permanent Crisis: Labor in the Croatia's Contemporary Arts and Culture -- The Only Place Where One Can Feel Connected to an International Context and Still Speak Russian: Hybrid Creative Work in Post-Soviet Contemporary Art Institutions -- Creative writing courses are useless: Creative writing programs and the Italian literary system -- The Art Biennial's Dillema: Political Activism and Spectacle in Aesthetic Capitalism -- Creativity in the Service of Economic Recovery and National Salvation: Dispatches from the Greek Crisis Social Factory -- Production of Cultural Policy in Russia: Authority and Intellectual Leadership -- Manifestos of Rupture and Reconciliation: Do-it-Yourself (DiY) music practices, ethics and the quest for authenticity in the cultural industries -- Creative Industries, a Large Ongoing Project, Still Inaccurate and Always Uncertain -- From Craft to Industry: Industrializing the Marginal Domains of Cultural Industries -- Intellectual Property Rights and the Production of Value in a 'Creative Economy' -- Innovation and Media: Googlization and Limited Creativity.