Self-producing and communicative social media

The proliferation of ICTs and the hybridisation of media mean the position of legacy media in discursive meaning-making is increasingly challenged by the

“alternative expertise” and para-journalistic online sources that media users and algorithms consider and prefer as their information sources (Donsbach 2010: 26-27; Yagodin 2014; Chadwick 2017). The virtual extension of the public space provides access to new (discursive) resources in forms of frontiers for meeting and exchange of information for people who have been positioned in the margins or “periphery” of social power relations. The internet can provide a space where marginalised groups have a “place at the table” to express themselves, and subjectify and engage in a dialogue with national and global audiences (Mitra & Watts 2002; Szulc 2017). Simultaneously, social

media personalises people’s media use, customising its visibility according to personal, social, strategic (commercial and political), and algorithmic filtering and curation (Thorson & Wells 2016; Hogan 2010). The statements of

“ordinary people” may be received as more interesting, sincere, and credible in certain discourses than traditional expert authorities like politicians and journalists (Chatterje-Doody & Crilley 2019).

Extending beyond their creation purposes, ICTs bring along new possibilities to enforce and challenge discursive imaginations (Coleman and Freelon 2015, 1). In cyberspace, the ambiguity of authorship problematises the representation of authority, which constitutes a considerable part of mediated meaning-making. Foucault (1986b: 109) highlights historical traits in the development of scientific and fictional authorship around the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The scientific presentation of truth defined the authority of representation, which was independent of the name and ownership of its producer’s attribution. Similarly, in contemporary online presentations, Wikipedia articles do not signify their authors, unlike blogs and social networking sites (Hogan 2010: 381). Moreover, Foucault characterises authorship as:

a certain functional principle by which, in our culture, one limits, exclu-des, and chooses; in short by which one impedes the free circulation, the free manipulation, the free composition, decomposition, and re-composition of fiction. […] The author is therefore the ideological figure by which one marks the manner in which we fear the proliferation of meaning (Foucault 1986b: 119).

Hence, authorship enables the problematising of the truth of representation by questioning whose voice is represented, and with what authenticity (ibid.:

119–120). The proliferation of ICTs enables increasing numbers of people worldwide to create online media content and thus engage more in discursive knowledge production. However, even with this possibility a great proportion of online media users do not themselves produce content (Rulyova & Westley 2017). Livingstone (2004: 2–3) connects the ability to create content as part of

a variety of contexts. This highlights the mutually conditioned criteria of the availability of technological resources and people’s personal competences in assessing media representations.

In online and offline media alike the perceived audience relates to the self-censorship contingent of social surroundings and platforms. Self-censorship in social networking sites is partly shaped by the avoidance of sharing opinions or information that is assumed to alienate the self from the audience’s desired and expected identities (Bordunova, Litvinenko &

Nigmatullina 2020: 4–5, 14–15; Hogan 2010; Carlson 2013). In this respect previous research has shown that in Russian journalists’ social media use impressions of platform-specific audiences matter more than its technological affordances. For example, they were more careful when posting on Facebook, which was expected to provoke harsher and more politicising reactions than was the case with VK audiences (Bordunova, Litvinenko & Nigmatullina 2020).

Moreover, recent surveys indicate that increasing legal restrictions in Russia have raised people’s threshold for making online political jokes. Young RuNet users especially have therefore started to use forums that are more closed (Tairov 2020).

Creative do-it-yourself publications, practices, transnational circulation, and consumption in RuNet can be reflected against the historical phenomena of samizdat and tamizdat Soviet (and socialist bloc) cultures. Self-published samizdat and imported tamizdat publications signify a famous and often democratically romanticised alternative medium to the official regime’s power structures (Kind-Kovács & Labov 2013: 1–12). Despite their apparent parallels, there are significant differences between samizdat culture in RuNet self-publications. These include the various forms of control (censorship) practised by the official regime and society, and the relative isolation of or access to publication resources, distribution channels, and the mass audience (Schmidt 2013; Oates 2009; Wijermars & Lehtisaari 2020).

In the 2010s several of the street protest mobilisations and even revolutions globally appeared digitally driven. In Russia the number of internet users doubled between 2009 and 2014 (internetlivestats 2016). Many have connected this development with the 2011 and 2012 protests in Russia and the Arab Spring revolts, and speculated that ICT may help challenge

the dominant authoritarian narratives of major events (e.g. Oates 2018).

Especially since the protests of 2011 and 2012 ICTs, data identifications, and cyberspace, which were previously considered nationally neutral, have become increasingly territorialised in Russia. Among others, these measures include the prohibition of the dissemination of fake news, the restriction of foreign media ownership, and the nationalisation of the internet (Wijermars

& Lehtisaari 2020; Lonkila, Shpakovskaya, & Torchinsky 2020). For example, the Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation (2017, 29) has stated that globalisation, and especially the shift from physical to electronically mediated communication, in Russia has caused a rise of nationalism that transcends national identification, and results in chauvinism and fascism.

From the outset of the ICT proliferation in Russia the authorities have sought to discredit online information as suspicious and a source of suspicious information with a low level of authority (Fedor 2013).

However, grievances concerning the impact of ICT on people’s media use and consequently social order goes well beyond Russia. The idea of ICT as a “game changer” in the political and social fields has gradually shifted from hopes for democratisation to the threats it poses to democratic deliberation and privacy, while enabling non-democratic and criminal mobilisations (Pietiläinen, Fomicheva, & Resnianskaia 2010: 50; Pitkänen & Sutinen 2019:

241–257). Moreover, while the plurality of information sources empowers internet users in Russia and globally, in practice it enables them to narrow their information sources to those to which they best relate (Karppinen 2015, 52–53; Lipman, Kachkaeva, & Poyker 2018).