Competing Narratives of Networked Citizenship in Russia

The final speaker in this 2019 AoIR Flashpoint Symposium session is Tetyana Lokot, who points out the value of ephemerality for citizens living in autocratic regimes. Russia is one example of this: there are significant differences in how the state and its citizens define what networked citizenship means, and ephemerality plays an important role in this context.

Such differences manifest in understandings of whether citizenship is conferred by the state, or achieved by citizens in their actions; this implies different views on individual agency, too. Digital acts of citizenship further complicate this picture, not least also because digital networks do not always follow national boundaries and jurisdictions – but equally also because digital surveillance (or fear thereof) can impinge on citizens’ ability to enact their rights as citizens.

How does this play out in the Russian context, then? The country can now be understood as a networked authoritarian state which – in the name of national security, sovereignty, and safety – employs a series of sophisticated information controls (blocking sites and content), surveillance technologies, and policy settings that restrict citizens’ civil liberties and may also infringe on their human rights.

These interventions are framed by citizens and the state with very different competing narratives. The present project contrasts the narratives produced by the relevant state body as well as two digital rights groups, and shows that both citizens and state are aware of the affordances of digital technologies but advocate for very different forms of networked citizenship: while the Russian state embraces the idea of the dutiful networked citizen, digital rights activists advocate for a networked citizen who exercises their agency by becoming less visible and surveillable to the state.

The latter involves encryption, obfuscation, and anonymisation, and this requires substantial technological literacy and works against the grain of mainstream platforms. Such practices also complicate the work of researchers in understanding practices of networked citizenship in Russia, of course.