Communicative and cultural memory is essential for the formation and functioning of communication practices within the boundaries of generations, overcoming intergenerational and intercultural communication barriers. The study relevance is based on the fact that for the first time in the history of civilization, digitalization has led to the emergence of a special intergenerational gap associated with various communication practices implemented in different media spaces. This leads to cultural changes mediated by the media. The work analyzes materials of 'analogue' and 'digital' media generations in urban media. The analysis is based on the Jan and Aleida Assmann's theory of communicative and cultural memory, the media generations author's concept and methods of statistical analysis.
The study is intended to identify communicative-cultural memory markers of 'analogue' and 'digital' generations of Russians in mass media texts.
The analysis of more than 551,000 words using Sketch Engine identified two linguistic subcorpora. The manual checking revealed 1400 of the most frequent words occurring in one generation and not included into another. We came to the following conclusions:
- Thematic markers of the 'analogue' generation are lifetime and space (territory), business production activity, training, the state and local government, family dynasty, faith, history, culture, and art.
- The 'digital' generation frequent themes are physical health, business, self-realization, time and place of action, family, the legal environment that is associated with crimes and punishments, civic activism, recreation, and culture.
- Family is significant for both generations, however, for the 'analogue' generation the family is important as a social institution, for the 'digital' generation – specific individuals.
Thus, the results of the study show different generational thematic-semantic ensembles and only partially overlapping life worlds due to differences in communicative-cultural memory.
This work was supported by the Russian Science Foundation (No. 19-18-00264).