Abstract
Socialist autarky and participation in the global exchange of products and services based on IT are mutually incompatible. So Russia’s embracing the Internet is a welcome sign of speedy remove from the Soviet past, and the possibility of any reversal. Compared with the arrival of the Internet in Russia, the changes affecting television programming and the fears expressed about them are far less important than they seem. True, Russian television has experienced major developments, but IT has, as in the West, forced journalists, government agencies, universities, business, wider economic activity and, of course, the private citizen to make huge conceptual leaps from the recent past, in a way in which television has not.
How will a society founded on [paternal] guidance cope with the wilds of x-rated cyberspace? […] They expect that whole highways of data will flow through their city. Yet they also seem to expect that this won’t affect them.
William Gibson
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Notes
Bill Gates, The Road Ahead, Viking, London, 1995, p. 5.
See Robert H. Anderson et al., Universal Access to E-Mail: Feasibility and Societal Implications, Rand Organization, Santa Monica, CA, 1995.
Beglov, Vneshnepoliticheskaya propaganda, 1984, p. 364.
Note the Soviet definition of the New International Information Order: ‘a programme of the decolonisation of the mass media put forward by the developing countries which envisages the liquidation of the gap between the industrialised countries of the West and their former colonies in the material provision of information resources, as well as the removal of the ideological and political dominance of the capitalist monopolies of press in the structure and content in the flow of information broadcast by them’. See Beglov, Vneshnepoliticheskaya propaganda, 1984, pp. 360–61.
Monroe Price, Television, the Public Sphere, and National Identity, 1995, p. 79.
For an overview of the problems of SIW see Roger C. Molander et al., Strategic Information Warfare: A New Face of War, Rand Corporation, 1996 at http://www.rand.org/
Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society, Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, 1954, pp. 121–2.
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© 1999 Frank Ellis
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Ellis, F. (1999). The Internet in Russia. In: From Glasnost to the Internet. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-27076-7_5
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