Russian 2011-12 
Elections and Digital Media
Digital Icons: Studies in Russian, Eurasian and Central European New Media, No 7 (2012): 111-123.

NETWORKED PUTINISM: THE FADING DAYS OF THE (BROADCAST) ERA

by Vlad Strukov

In this fairly short essay I aim to discuss the emergence of a new form of social and cultural
order in the Russian Federation that I call ‘networked Putinism’. In the narrow sense, networked
Putinism refers to the ways in which Putin’s regime has utilised new media, especially the internet,
to manage new participatory democratic processes in the country. In the
broader sense, the term defines an historical era that is characterised not so much by Putin’s
leadership but rather by the ability of the regime to evolve by responding to the challenges of
global economy and Russia’s local political and social instabilities. My concern then is outside the
dichotomies of technological determinism that have dominated the discussion of
‘Russia’s path to democracy’ from 2005 through 2010; instead I am interested in the new
discourses of power that have been deployed over the past two years. Although my focus is
on the political and media events of the autumn 2011-spring 2012—as the theme of the present
cluster suggests—I write this essay in the hope that in the future a new paradigm of political and
cultural shifts can be developed to include a wider historical and medial context. 
My discussion is based on the analysis of media events shown on national and transnational
television channels (Channel One, Rossiia, BBC and Russia Today, Dozhd, respectively) and discussed in
newspapers (Kommersant, gazeta.ru, The Daily Telegraph, The
Guardian), online resources (Navalny blog,  YouTube) and on various websites. My media
monitoring started in November 2011 and continued until the end of March 2012 and is
complemented by numerous conversations with fellow Russians during my visit to Voronezh
and Moscow in March 2012—I am grateful to all of them for their thoughts and particularly
for enduring and commenting on my own ‘monologue’. 
I present my argument as code, insofar as they signal the difficulty to disentangle the
events of protests from the media frenzy they instigated as well as the post-mortem nature of
the discussion. Each coda employs a specific visual. The visuals are used to evoke certain
events in the electoral process of the past six months as well as to accentuate the ocular, even
cinematic effects of the current political spectacle in Russia. Where possible, I identify the
creators of the phrases and visuals; in a few instances where phrases and images have become
internet memes, their authorship is rendered irrelevant.

[...]

Continua qui: http://www.digitalicons.org/issue07/files/2012/06/7.5.1_Strukov.pdf