Giving attention to conduct in the social media: Discursive mechanisms of attention structures in mediating governance-at-a-distance in today’s Russia

Some of the recent legal and political interventions implemented in Russia aim at regulating the spheres of the life of the individual, such as sexuality, freedom of speech and information movement. These interventions indicate that the governance in Russia is undergoing systematic transformations requiring the theoretical and analytical attention of the scholarly community. This paper argues that in order to identify the range and the reach of the aforementioned transformations, it is imperative to examine how they affect and sediment into the everyday practices and interactions of individuals. By examining the discursive and semiotic mechanisms through which the actors give attention to the practices of censorship at the computer-mediated site ‘Woman.ru’, the article demonstrates how governance operates at a distance across disciplining and governmental technologies. The analysis makes visible how in their interaction, the actors engage these technologies by inscribing themselves into the arrangements of omnipresent surveillance and strategic conduct.


Keywords
Attention structures, mediated discourse analysis, computer-mediated interaction, multimodality, transnational governmentality, conduct, discipline