DIGITAL COMMUNITIES OF CIVIL AND POLITICAL ACTIVISTS IN RUSSIA: INTEGRATION, GOVERNANCE AND MOBILIZATION POTENTIAL

Abstract

Aim. Identification the basic types of governance in digital communities of civic activists in social media.Methodology. To establish the density of connections between digital groups representing markers of civic activism in the VKontakte social network, a graph of connections is used, built on the basis of an upload carried out by a parsing program. The program is written in the JavaScript programming language, interpreted inside nodejs. The visual part is made using the jquery VisJS plugin, the Vogel distributed method is applied on the graph. Research cases (digital communities of civic activism) for the analysis of social graphs were selected taking into account their relevance to the research topic, the presence of formal and informal groups in the sample; large coverage of young users (from a thousand to several tens of thousands of subscribers - representatives of the Russian Federation youth).Results. In socio-media information flows, in which civic activists are involved, discursive practices formed in online communities of a political orientation have the greatest potential for opposition and non-conventionality. Among the civil discourses, environmental discourse is the most critical in relation to the current authorities.Research implications. The research results can help to expand the methods and tools of applied political research in the field of behavioral political science.

Keywords

• Digital groups
• social media
• digital communications
• civic activism
• political activism
• opinion leaders