War, New Media and “Affectivity”: The Case of Ukrainian Society

Maryna Subota
V.N. Karazin Kharkiv National University (Ukraine)
Klaipeda University (Lithuania)

The full-scale war started by the russian federation became a very difficult time for Ukrainian society. However, despite all the crisis phenomena caused or intensified by the war, this society has become more cohesive than it was before the war’s escalation in 2022. Ukrainian society also demonstrates a fairly high level of civic activity. This is evidenced not only by practical cases but also by numerous empirical sociological studies carried out in Ukraine over the past year and a half. The main factors that motivate and unite Ukrainians are the desire to overcome a common threat and the desire for common good and victory.
For Ukrainians, new, or digital, media are an important tool and a space for the implementation of resistance and assistance practices. This can be manifested as institutional volunteering with elements of self-organization, such as an “IT Army”. Or it can be a complete network self-organization, self-regulation and solidarity actions – volunteering, donations, voluntary online propaganda. In recent years, Ukrainian society has been in the phase of an active information war, and actually, it “lives on news” (regardless of an individual’s geographical location of residence, including foreign ones). At the same time, not only information consumption habits have changed, but also the information and communication space of society itself.
Media researchers who study war communications in the Ukrainian segment of the Internet note that this space is distinguished by a fairly significant self-organization. It is also noted that Ukrainian space of new media is not very susceptible to the centralized informational influences of the power centers of its own state. This space generates a lot of meanings, key messages and attractive humor that lead to a social upsurge (which is recorded empirically in the content and in the scale of ordinary citizens’ messages spreading). This was especially noticeable in the first year of the full-scale war.
A number of sociologists and media researchers propose to use the concept of “affective public” to describe these phenomena of network self-organization that occur in times of powerful social disturbances. This is due to the fact that the classic sociological concept of the public, as well as the concept of the public sphere, is based on the realities and parameters of traditional and centralized media functioning. And these classical concepts are not able to fully cover the complex and dynamic processes and structures of public communication and the formation of the network public and public movements caused by digital network communication technologies. Affectivity under this definition is not antagonistic to rational discussion but rather helps to capture the changing dynamics between digital technologies and human behavior. Affective dynamics illuminate the temporal logic by which new online and offline publics emerge in moments of crisis and conflict and how solidarity or collective action is achieved. In such a state, people unite through social media and they are able to work as a single force. However, such a state cannot last indefinitely. On the other hand, in the presence of a developed civil society, the actions of the affective public can be embodied in permanent social movement organizations and processes.
The study of the dynamics of socio-communicative practices and public attitudes in social networks is important. It is important not only from the practical point of view (that is, for the tasks of strategic communications, for information companies, and for mobilization). It is also important for the sociological study of how Ukrainian society experienced the war period in the digital age.