“Among the Canals and Bridges”: Media Reprezentation of Saint Petersburg Cultural Code

The article is about the city’s cultural code representation processes studying in media sphere on the example of Saint Petersburg. The “cultural code” category, as the author believes, is one of the city semiotics research tools, which opens up the opportunity to identify the formation peculiarities of collective ideas about the city among both citizens and target audiences of the external environment — tourists, travelers, investors, potential citizens, applicants. The city cultural code is considered in this article as a system of signs that reflects the city’s uniqueness, captures and conveys its individuality, organizes and summarizes with the help of images a large amount of information about the city into a single context. Each city has its own cultural code, which depends on spatial, natural, historical and many other factors. Among directions of city cultural code research, the study of its representation processes in different texts, including digital media texts take a separate place. Media representation of the city cultural code in digital environment is one of the city’s authenticity and identification in external environment translation ways because in society the definite cultural stereotypes and associations in the relation to the city are fixed by the multimedia content available for mass user. The article presents the results of the various directions online resources content-analysis, in which the digital representation of St. Petersburg cultural code is carried out for the audiences of the external environment: a) official and informational digital media (without differentiation of the addressee); b) digital media resources for tourists; c) digital media for the applicant.