ABSTRACT
Focusing on the heterogeneity of Russian-language Twitter responses to the Eurovision 2017 final, from which Russia’s entrant was controversially banned, this chapter challenges the adequacy of the dominant ‘information war’ approach to Russian activity in the global mediasphere. It attempts to understand how such heterogeneity interacts with the multi-platform scope of contemporary broadcasting and diversity within wider Eurovision audiences. It thus sheds new light on both the complex dynamics of Russia’s dangerous stand-off with the West, and the reconfiguration of the now divided transnational Russophone community. In questioning the information war notion of a linear ‘projection’ of broadcaster-initiated narratives to a transnationally diffuse, but digitally engaged, audience, it argues that this notion does not account for a Russophone online community that belongs to a complex ecology incorporating both domestic and international broadcasters. Russian-language Twitter responses to Eurovision, it demonstrates, redraw the lines of conflict and allegiance underpinning broadcaster narratives. They also create space for limited public debate across ideological boundaries, further disrupting the information war paradigm. Moreover, the performative idiom within which the exchanges are articulated gives rise to ambiguous, self-parodic meanings linked to late Soviet discursive practice. This phenomenon offers additional evidence of a transient ‘public sphericule’ in which Russophobes and their nemesis are primarily Russophones. Together, they constitute a translingual meta-community based around a unified language that, paradoxically, transcends the political boundaries dividing groups, even as it re-entrenches them. Information war in its ‘pure’, linear form, the chapter concludes, is illusory.
