Knowledge of audiences

An important historical context of this research is how ICT development, proliferation, and transnational reach influence how people relate to information about Russianness in the 2010s. Several scholars have highlighted that technological development is the key novelty factor in information influence, while the techniques of cognitive persuasion have stayed roughly the same (e.g. Pitkänen & Sutinen 2019). From waves of mechanisation and electrification to digitalisation and datafication of media infrastructures, the historical development manifests a long but deepening process of mediatisation in which the role of media increases throughout all social processes (Hjarvard 2013, 1–7; Couldry & Hepp 2016). Technological development means information becomes faster, more accessible, and that there is even an excess of it. ICT-mediated ideascapes have become omnipresent in the everyday lives of many, challenging the distinction between being online and offline (ibid. Floridi 2015a). This has increased the importance of power in the media and especially changed the dynamics of transnational networking, imagining commonalities, and homelands (e.g.

Kissau & Hunger 2010; Georgiou 2013; Golovnev, Belorussova, & Kisser 2018;

Mihelj & Jiménez-Martínez, 2020). In addition, the digitalisation of social interactions reflects people’s emotional experiences and relationships (see Goleman 2006). As ICT development increases mediatisation, mediates social relationships, and reshuffles their spatial reach, it is important to examine the discursive audiences.

Media discourses are mediated by default through formatting, editions, communication channels, and often through transcriptions, translators, and algorithms. They regulate sociocultural capacities to make topic-specific statements through mediation for audiences that the message producer does not see. There are several constituting factors to examine here: authority positions to make claims; uneven resources of production and distribution;

and knowledge of the audiences (Locke 2004). The indirectness of the communication relationship calls the message sender to imagine message receivers according to their best knowledge. The audience is a limitedly perceptible, and usually invisible, party of media communications. Knowledge of them is therefore inherently incomplete, but important. The imagined audience generates how self-aware representation seeks to communicate its messages in a contextually effective way. For example, social media users may consider that they personally know most of their invisible addressees, but simultaneously consider that the same message of their self-representation needs to be suitable for multiple audience groups (Hogan 2010; Bernstein et al. 2013). Since the representation depends on the perception of the content’s intended recipients, the audience can be considered co-producers (Waitt 2010, 222, 228).

The bulk of the research on what people do with media is conducted with commercial interests (Mytton et al. 2016 7; Novikova 2014). While social media advertising and politics have attracted increasing attention in recent years (e.g. Prakash Yadav & Rai, 2017; Ramsay & Robertshaw 2019; Martínez-López et al. 2020), the role of the audience itself is often not scrutinised in media studies (Oates 2018, 329). Audience studies, which combines cultural studies, social psychology, literary criticism, and critical research, started to develop in the 1980s. Audience research has highlighted the agency of media users, but the conclusions about their practical power have been ambiguous. Being in a media audience can be a social event with a highly symbolic meaningfulness.

The audience can be subjectified as passive targets of influence, markets, spectators, fans, autonomously organising mutual support groups, active searchers of truth, or as part of a relatable collective such as the nation (Madianou 2005, 44–45; Bendtsen & Johnsson 2013; Hjarvard 2013). The constitution of national belonging through media communications is well rooted in the modernist nationalism paradigm (Appadurai 1996). For example, Gellner (1983, 127) highlights how understanding language and styles in media communications includes and excludes members of a national community.

In studies of banal nationalism the identities of a passive audience are seen as mostly structured by a strong media, whereas audience activity

determinism (Szulc 2017, 64) and can be reflected in the notion of how humans shape technologies, which in turn shape human interactions, and again humans (McLuhan, Fiore & Agel 2001; Ek 2006; Massey 2008; Floridi 2015a). The multiplicity of ICT-enabled choices has arguably empowered audiences, transforming them from passive receivers to more active participants (Bakardjieva 2009, 11–12; Bendtsen & Johnsson 2013). However, even legacy media audiences can choose between channels and abstain from exposing themselves in and to them according to their preferences (Donsbach 2010, 24–25). For example, in a media-event model ritualised spectacles are orchestrated between the media professionals, the event perpetrators, and the audience. Co-productive relations are manifested between the three in adjusting actions in accordance with expectations of presence and responses (Dayan & Katz 1992). From the perspective of critical discourse this relationship not only governs what becomes shown and comprehensible, but what is relevant and considered shared or common knowledge as the basis of social communication (Donsbach 2010, 28).

One can juxtapose media use as a self-expressive and -aware part of people’s lifestyle with the late modern subjectivity against ritualistic, habitual, and passive media use. However, along the lines of the critique against modernity, any clear distinction between the two is merely theoretical (Vartanova et al.

2019, 27; Giddens 1991; Appadurai 1996; Hogan 2010). Similarly, offline or legacy media and online or social media are interconnected. For example, legacy media companies have active websites and activity in social media, where their audiences have the opportunity to directly engage and give their views in the comment sections of news articles. The interactive features of contemporary information technologies can thus establish more listening, reciprocal, emotional, and empathetic relations between media content users and content producers (Lomborg 2012; Koltsova & Nagornyy 2019).