Untitled - socium.ge

The Russian network society 87All this has led to a drastic decline in living standards for the majority ofRussians. In early 2003, about 60 percent of Russians were living below aminimum living standard, according to estimated data provided by the Russianmedia. New forms of employment – a combination of low-paid professionalactivity and additional salaries earned in leisure hours – have become the normin the Russian labor market, thus hindering the restructuring of the nationaleconomy. As the result of under-investment in the national social system,many social institutions have lost their social significance and become marginalized.Decline of state-supported education, health care, and pension systems,and a crisis in the state financing of cultural institutions, have seriouslydamaged individual attitudes to outdated social institutions.In these circumstances, many Russians associate the country’s future withthe progress of telecommunications and new media, first and foremost withthe Internet and mobile telephony. The idea of the revolutionizing potential ofinformation technology has been strongly accepted by Russian intellectuals.“Technological determinists” have accepted the leading role of the “West,” theUSA, and some advanced Asian states in hardware and software production,but remain convinced that Russia can benefit both socially and politically fromthe use of the Internet in social communication and interpersonal contact.Many expectations have been raised by the potential of the Internet toconstruct a new social reality, to support the creation of new democratic institutionsin post-communist Russia instead of the outdated social and politicalstructures still existing in the political environment. The idea of transparentonline communication between state and citizens has given birth to naïvepolitical aspirations about the possibility of Russia catching up with the “civilizedworld” and successfully implementing a Western European model ofdemocracy, at least in the online domain (Ovchinnikov, 2002).There is a strong rationale behind this approach. Even taking into accountnew Russian inequalities, the progress of the new media provides a clear caseof the positive adaptation of global changes by modern Russian society,although this is a limited case of fragmented globalization which has involveda small, but advanced and flexible part of Russian society. A fraction of theRussian population, a group of urban dwellers, made up of comparativelyyoung, rich professionals and middle-class intellectuals, the “intelligentsia,”has become the core of the Russian network society.Runet, the Russian-language sector of the Internet, has been defined bycommunication scholars as a new Russian miracle, especially in terms of thegrowth in number of users and increase in supply of Russian languageresources and online services (Doctorov, 1999). The brief, but astonishinghistory of Runet provides some observations crucial to an understanding of theRussian network society.Technically, the Internet first appeared in the Soviet Union as a purely