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The paper focuses on the engagement and politicization of young people in Russia and considers this process through the perspective of the mediatization of everyday life.
The article will discuss the dual position of audience and activists in a media environment and how these positions are interrelated. I plan to unpack this using the example of young Russian TikTokers, who use the platform for an embodiment of their citizen and protest voices. After the return and arrest of politician Alexey Navalny to Russia in January 2021, and few days before the call for mass-rallies, young people almost simultaneously generated more than twenty thousand videos on TikTok expressing support for Navalny. In a way, this broad public is not made up of political activists and not an actual community, rather they are imagined, networked publics facilitated by digital technologies (Papacharissi, 2017). Papacharissi also employs Jenkins’ perspective and stresses storytelling, and how hashtags on Twitter are used to disseminate stories. In my article, however, I am planning to focus on how through 'small acts of engagement" - likes, sharing and comments (Picone, 2019) audiences experience togetherness by becoming 'collectives of multi-modal communication' (Couldry, 2017).
