Paper long abstract:

This paper focuses on the use of social media as a channel for informal conceptualisation of identity and culture online. With the fast-growing rates of mobile internet use across the world and increasingly so in Central Asia, the discussions about culture, heritage and nation rapidly moved to the internet. But how does this digitalization change the perception about the "formal" framework of the national culture propagated by the state? For example, how do young people analyse and perceive grand texts of national literature (mainly produced during Soviet Union period) if these are shared and discussed in short snapshots on social media? Even if there are virtual clubs, chat rooms and special groups for these discussions, these processes limit and changes the effects on the ways the state or formal culture framework is perceived on the ground. In this paper, I follow literary discussions on canonical national works (seminal novels, films) and contemporary literary production discussions (theatre, music and rap in local languages) to question how is nation perceived, analysed, shared and commented on digitally and how it changes the nationalistic and also formal canons of what authoritarian states in Central Asia position as "national culture".