Authors

Discussion

In the wake of ongoing Russian warfare in Ukraine, many among the politically active youth have left the country and become part of a (re)construction of Russian anti-war movements. I recognise the process of the movements' constitution as a continuum unfolding in time and space and in accordance with the ‘mediatisation’ of everyday life. Russian anti-war movements, as “networks of informal relations” (Della Porta and Mattoni, 2014), are emerging as an overlap between publics (so-called followers) and the core activists, those who for years were in contention (Tilly, 2008), involved in parties, organizations and other informal forms of citizen solidarity. Against this background, the primary interest of this study is to examine the communicative space in between, bridging activists and publics in the process of ‘politicisation’ (Erpyleva, 2018).

 Earlier, and more technologically oriented, studies on ‘networks’ (Castells, 2007), or ‘connective action’ (Bennett & Segerberg, 2012) have emphasized the organizational functionality of technologies. Such an approach, however, has been criticised for overemphasising the role of platform connectivity (Poell and van Dijck, 2015, 2018), while overlooking the role of broader audiences and publics which contribute to the sense of “collective” (Bakardjieva, 2015) via communicative interaction of everyday life.

In this paper, drawing from the “ecological approach”, which points towards studying media as “dynamic systems” (Treré and Mattoni, 2016), I call for the recognition of the overlap between publics and activists, entangled with platform infrastructures (Kavada and Poell, 2020). In line with previous research (Larkin, 2013; Knox, 2017; Grön et al., 2023), I argue for treating media technology infrastructures as part of social relations that become infrastructures “in relation to organized practices” (Star & Ruhleder, 1994), and as “vehicles oriented to addressees” (Larkin, 2013).

 By conducting semi-structured interviews with activists, “volunteers” and “followers”, I shift attention from focusing on media as structures of movements, towards how platform infrastructures have been renegotiated and pushed back by activists and the public, prompting collective deliberation and action. The project seeks to study the constitution of Russian anti-war movements as a process of fixing public attention within an infrastructuring frontier.

Going beyond platform infrastructures, the research is driven by the empirical question of how activists have been disentangling the pro-war consensus, alongside with renegotiating the use of media infrastructures for (re)orienting publics and organising a space of attention. This urges us to take a closer look at the ‘phenomenology’ of attention which is intertwined with technological infrastructures, social practices and imagination.