Emergent Media/Arena/Public Communicative Spaces Online

Up next at the ICA 2024 conference is Svetlana Bodrunova. Her study emerged from a research project that sought to examine the transnational communication by migrants from the same countries of origin, which found global cooperation between female Russian-speaking bloggers with migration backgrounds during the COVID-19 pandemic, about global issues and agendas; these might be understood as transnational publics.

What theories can we use to explain such publics? Are they spaces constructed through networked technologies (arenas) or imagined collectives that emerge as the result of the intersection of people, technology, and practices (publics)? What happens when the key actors here are influencers who collaborate to develop proto-editorial forms?

Svetlana’s concept of cumulative deliberation may be helpful here: users are not perfectly deliberative, but elementary deliberative intentions and actions may become deliberation through new forms of collective action, as micro-opinions accumulate over time.

We might understand such processes by exploring patterns of co-posting, temporal dimensions of the discussion, the constellation of posters and commenters, and the accumulation of repeat commenters around specific posters. For the present case, this revealed a mid-level discussion on Instagram, active mainly during the early months of the pandemic, during which posters informed their audiences about current events in their host countries (a journalistic function), collaborated with each other in coordinating their posts (an editorial function), and grew their audience networks of commenters; a returning public formed that provided a communicative arena and can be described as a media platform.

This emerged and disappeared again ad hoc, in response to a specific need, was cumulative over time, computationally detectable and provable, and loosely institutionalised. This calls for a rethinking of terms like media and especially collaborative media.