From the vantage point of infrastructuring – an assemblage of technologies and user practices – this study explores the constitution of counterpublics in a Russian militarised and authoritarian context. Following a materialist phenomenology addressing the interrelations between technological materiality and human agency, the research seeks to understand how media technologies have been mobilised as heuristic instruments to reconfigure public attention and as infrastructures for anti-war resistance in a Russian context in the wake of the war against Ukraine.   

Critical scholarship on platformisation highlights how big tech has uprooted societies. Through the processes of datafication, platforms have amassed unprecedented economic and political power, reshaping public space formation. This dissertation contributes to these debates from the perspective of publics, looking at how media technologies have been enacted as sites for publicness, asking how both Russian activists and ordinary citizens reflect on and narrate their involvement with anti-war activism and the role of media technologies as embedded into these processes. In what ways do actors perceive, enact and imagine platform affordances in order to renegotiate forms of communicative interaction? How does technology bridge heterogenous and geographically dispersed actors in an authoritarian political context? By providing extensive empirical analysis based on interviews with core activists and broader publics, underpinned by ethnographic immersion, it is revealed that 1) actors enact platform affordances – negotiating possibilities and constraints of media infrastructures in routines of activism and everyday life. The study also shows how 2) people perceive and imagine infrastructures, treating them not only as pipelines but as compounds in social systems of human practices, deployed for the constitution of semi-public spaces. 3) Finally, the research arrives at the concept of distributed attention, which helps to grasp the struggle for public attention in hostile environments, under governmental restriction and surveillance. 

From the vantage point of infrastructuring – an assemblage of technologies and user practices – this study explores the constitution of counterpublics in a Russian militarised and authoritarian context. The research seeks to understand how media and their affordances have been mobilised as heuristic instruments to reconfigure public attention and as infrastructures for anti-war civic engagement in Russia and in exile.

The study asks how both Russian activists and ordinary citizens reflect on and narrate their involvement with anti-war activism and the role of media technologies, as embedded into these processes. In what ways do actors perceive, enact and imagine platform affordances in order to renegotiate forms of communicative interaction? How does technology bridge a broad array of dispersed actors in an authoritarian political context of strict surveillance? By providing extensive empirical analysis based on interviews with core activists and broader publics, underpinned by ethnographic immersion, this project reveals that 1) actors enact platform affordances, negotiating possibilities and constraints of media infrastructures in routines of activism and everyday life. It shows how 2) people perceive and imagine infrastructures, by treating them not only as pipelines but as compounds in social systems of human practices, deployed for the constitution of semi-public spaces. 3) Finally, the research arrives at the concept of distributed attention, which helps us to grasp how anti-war actors carry out the struggle for public attention in hostile environments, under governmental restriction and surveillance, and in a situation of geographic dispersion.