Where is the media space audience?

It has been argued in media studies that ICT development has fragmented previous newspaper reading communities, leading to a post-national discursive order (e.g. Pietiläinen, Fomicheva, & Resnianskaia 2010: 54–55).

To a degree, media use fragmentation undermines the shared audience experience enabled by mass media for Anderson’s imagined national

new imagined communities such as “the Russians abroad” through a more niche-targeted media audience (see e.g. Appadurai 1996). Where did media discourses produce their audience in the 2010s?

The definition of transnational departs from the international through its focus on non-state actors (Vertovec 2009, 2), but the distinction between national and transnational media can be difficult. Contemporary media production is often extremely diverse, with several particularities, interests, resources, dependencies, conventions, and other bonds that cannot be simplified in state and non-state affiliated categories, as the popular concept of hybrid media suggests (Chadwick 2017). Similarly, with legacy media and nation-ness in general, the national identification of websites is problematic due to the variety of different identifier criteria. Szulc (2017, 57) criticises scholars for falling into methodological nationalism in trying to nationally categorise the internet. However, Szulc highlights how symbols, deixis, language identifiers, and domain country codes are silent and unnoticeable reproducers of nation-ness. The specifics of Russian-language domains include the Yandex search engine, which is more popular than Google and social media, including VK, which I examine in Article 3. In several cases media falls into the category of transnationalism “from above” (Smith & Guarnizo 1998).

Government influence on the media varies globally in its scale of control, from granting licences to full dominance. For example, the media field in Russia and Finland deals with publicly owned media companies with various government affiliations. Finland belongs to a group of states that includes the Scandinavian countries, the UK, and Switzerland, in which the state has established a public broadcasting agency as a public service independent of political control (Mytton et al. 2016, 3). Russia has a low World Press Freedom Index ranking⁴, and has a notable history of violence against journalists covering politically sensitive topics, while the authorities have been criticised for the low sentencing rate for perpetrators⁵. However, the regulation of relationships in the Russian media field is often far from straightforward. It

4 https://rsf.org/en/russia

5 https://cpj.org/reports/2020/10/global-impunity-index-journalist-murders/

comprises complex and often informal relationships and regulation through ad hoc bureaucratic incentives and self-regulation (de Smaele 2009; Oates 2009; Bordunova, Litvinenko & Nigmatullina 2020). Meanwhile, the Finnish media, though praised in media freedom indexes, has been criticised for being too consensus-oriented and its lack of point-of-view pluralism (Karppinen 2015: 106).

At the beginning of the 2010s there was a large gap between what was addressed on Russian TV and in the Russian-language internet, RuNet. During the decade media companies gradually expanded their platforms from TV, radio, and press to the internet. Starting with Putin’s third term, the authorities’

tolerance of critical and independent media significantly decreased in campaigns to either change their editorial boards or bureaucratically freeze their assets and ability to work. The ability of the Kremlin loyalist TV to influence public opinion is difficult to assess. Many experts have suggested that this strongly depends on the topic’s concrete closeness to the viewers.

For example, it is more difficult to influence views of consumer price shifts than views of foreign politics (Lipman, Kachkaeva & Poyker 2018: 160–164, 170).

In the Finnish-Russian media space, content is produced within national territories, but it is channelled, translated, and consumed transnationally (Davydova et al. 2016; Oivo 2021 unpublished). Language is a medium within the media that is a wider and more imposing limit to the media space than the borders of nation states. Statistically, the majority of Finnish and Russian speakers resides within their titular states, but a considerable number also lives in other countries (Suslov 2017: 5; Ministry of Interior Finland 2019).

Hence, neither language media discourse is bound singularly to the national territories. For example, this is manifested in the Russian-language Wikipedia editorial wars between Russian speakers from various countries (Dounaevsky 2013). Talk of the “Finnish” and “Russian” media can produce an equation between languages and national media. However, phenomenological approaches to human geography (e.g. Winchester & Rofe 2010: 7) can enlighten trans- and post-national dimensions of people’s experience in and about online places and events. People producing transnational spaces are

not necessarily themselves mobile, but their locality is significantly affected by the activities of others abroad, or vice versa (Vertovec 2009: 19).

The transnational perspective highlights the significance of the bondedness of international, national, regional, and local socio-spatial levels. Several subnational, regional, and cultural niche models regulate media discourse.

For example, the Finnish provincial press represents a more experience-based media than the national media (Valtonen & Ojajärvi 2011: 29). Russian television is de-localising and even globalising its audience, because federal and global news are quantitatively more imposing than local news (Novikova 2014: 155). However, envisioning the “local” or “national” cultural space is often strongly connected with “global” signifiers and vice versa (see Darling-Wolf 2015).

Despite the potential of a borderless web, lingual and cultural belonging enables the creation of nationally influenced ingroup-outgroup social and political structures in online interaction. For example, in studying the online discussion groups of Germany’s Russian and Turkish speakers, Kissau and Hunger (2010: 257) note that even in the virtual space national borders are often drawn by the behaviour of media users. Kissau and Hunger distinguish strong divisions in Russian speakers’ online interactions between topical orientations that emphasise the possibilities in either the host country or the country of emigration (see also Golovnev, Belorussova, & Kisser 2018;

Mihelj & Jiménez-Martínez, 2020).

Despite the transnationalisation of media use, much of the contemporary news media worldwide continues to domesticate representations of global events by making them nationally meaningful (see e.g. Madianou 2005;

Eide, Kunelius, & Phillips 2008; Hahn 2008; Davydova-Minguet et al. 2016).

Conventions of journalistic professionalism tend to allow space for a culturally domesticating storytelling, particularly when reporting dramatic transnational media events: “In moments of crisis, journalists act as members of an imagined community and their professionalism is pushed aside (or complemented) by the role of a ritualized storyteller” (Kunelius & Nossek 2008: 255). This undermines the critical deliberation between global and local meanings. Several scholars (e.g. ibid.; Appadurai 1996; Davydova-Minguet 2018) suggest the inclusion of transnationally bound and “dislocated” people

in media production as a remedy to expand the horizons of discursive reading in rationalising global media flows, and to create a transnational or “diasporic public sphere”⁶.