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3. The Russian network societyElena VartanovaRecent decades have been marked by the emergence of much research on theinformation society which has put technological, economic, and media developmentsinto the focus of international academic discourse (Webster, 1995).However, its ambiguity becomes evident, especially in comparison withalready-existing theories of post-industrial, post-capitalist, globalized societies(Bell, 1960; Drucker, 1993; Giddens, 1993). The concept of the networksociety has brought a new perspective into academic discourse by focusing onthe complexity and multiplicity of interrelations among a variety of socialagents acting in a modern society, thus intertwining contradictory drivingforces into an interconnected reality. Technology and telecommunications, aglobalized economy and labor, nation-states and non-governmental civic organizations,new social and cultural movements, all have been reconsideredthrough their interrelations within a network structure that has become thebackbone infrastructure of a modern globalized world (Castells, 1996–8). Theconcept of the network society applied in social research, as Castells andKiselyova (2000) have shown, has become a universal characteristic ofmodern social reality and structures regardless of their national or economicorigins.For Russia, as for other countries of the former Soviet region, the conceptof a network society has emerged as an academic challenge for severalreasons. The collapse of the USSR led to a total change of intellectual paradigmsand posed many new questions, especially in the field of socialresearch. Although the antagonism between capitalism and socialism, orstatism as Castells (1996–8) has termed it, is no longer a core element of theglobal system, the nature of present worldwide transformations is stillapproached by many Russian academics through a concept of dichotomy.Russia is often viewed as a society of clashing antagonisms: between East andWest, understood first and foremost as Christian and technologically advancedEurope (Kara-Mourza, 2001), democracy and authoritarianism, industrialismand post-industrialism (Inozemtsev, 1999, 2001), center and periphery(Neklessa, 1999), national and global (Segbers, 1999; Delyagin, 2001;Neklessa, 2001; Rantanen, 2002). Some scholars, however, argue that presentRussian society can no longer be described by a commonly shared definition,84