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Short abstract:

Sometimes collective attempts to address matters of concern avoid publicity. This paper analyses a case of hiding participatory action in a situation of explicit hostility to participation and focuses on the role of digital media in mediating both, the action, and its concealment.

Long abstract:

Public participation tends to be conceptualized as dependent on making issues visible and debatable. Yet, some collective attempts to address matters of concern avoid publicity and, consequently, scholarly attention. This paper analyses a case of hiding participatory action in a situation of explicit hostility to it and focuses on the role of digital media in mediating both, the action, and its concealment. The case is a network of Russian-based volunteers whose action to support displaced Ukrainians is mediated by a messaging app Telegram. There is no identifiable organization or formal authority to enroll members into this network and coordinate them. Rather, the network is decentered, shifting, emergent and loosely connected. Drawing on participant observations in group Telegram chats and 40 interviews with the volunteers, I elaborate how technological particularities of the app and situated practices of its usage afford relative public invisibility of the volunteers’ work. This paper, thus, contributes to the affordances scholarship by highlighting that affordances of digital technologies are not immanent properties of technologies themselves but something that is co-produced in the process of interaction of users and the app in specific circumstances. Further, this paper contributes to understanding depublicized public participation. Practices of endangered collectives I focus on here generate novel solidarities yet being hidden they do not stimulate a public debate and engagement between opposing viewpoints. Instead, those with conflicting commitments attempt to gravitate as far from each other as possible, but remain tied unable to escape their joint implication in the issue of war.