Description
Conflict simultaneously destroys subjectivities and identities and creates myths that come to define social groupings. Meanwhile, scholars argue that social media equally fragments individual realities and allows users to bond around shared truths in bubbles of (un)reality.
In this talk, I explore how Russians on a range of platforms, including VK and Telegram, have navigated these divides to—drawing on Baudrillard—engage in shared discursive practices that see ordinary users and the state come together to co-create an “epic”—in Bakhtin’s terms, a closed and harmonious world—of the war against Ukraine. The fluid and fast paced social media platform allows this epic to be constantly created and recreated in response to perceived setbacks in the war. Users thus immerse themselves in an online hyperreality where the present war is always certain to match up to, and even eclipse, the great myths of the nationalist past.
