Untitled - socium.ge

90 Elena VartanovaRecent data show that the Russian Internet is growing along the same linesas elsewhere in the developed world. Runet has become an important communicationspace and information channel used by certain groups of the Russianpopulation. Intellectuals and academics have traditionally comprised thebiggest group of users, but now young people go online most frequently dueto investments made by the Soros Foundation, which financed a large-scaleprogram to link 54 Russian universities to the Internet. The student Netcommunity has produced extremely diverse, vivid, and informal resources forthe Runet, and also maintained the use of the Internet during the economiccrisis in August 1998. At the moment, students and schoolchildren form oneof the most considerable groups of Runet users at 23 percent of all users.The growth of the Internet in Russia has produced a number of expectationsamong Russian intellectuals, but, at the same time, it has also raised a numberof concerns. The crucial point is that Russian statistics need to be assessed criticallybecause the core audience, frequent regular users, actually representonly one-third of the audience at most, which is no more than 3–5 percent ofthe population. Consequently, the rapid expansion of the Internet in Russia andthe steady growth in the number of users, which have exceeded indicators formany technologically advanced countries, involve only a minority ofRussians; for example, elite groups including the most educated, highly paidurban residents, widely traveled in foreign countries, and normally with agood command of English. Two additional characteristics of frequent RussianInternet users are of particular significance. A high level of optimism about lifeand a low interest in politics have been revealed as important attitudes amongthose who regularly use the Internet (Ovchinnikov, 2002). Therefore, wewitness the emergence of a new group within Russian society: “well-to-dourban optimists.” For them, access to information and communicationnetworks has become a criterion of social and intellectual wealth and thenetwork society has become a reality. But is this network society open to allRussians?THE NEW ECONOMY: INFRASTRUCTURE FOR THEFUTURE?A traditional way of measuring the progress of the network society is toanalyze the statistics of the new economy. In the Russian case, it is difficult torely upon economic indicators simply because relevant and reliable data areoften missing. Generally speaking, the Russian information-technology sectorremains insignificant in the national economy, although its size is increasingconstantly. In the early 2000s, it represented 4 percent (or 8.4 billion US$) ofthe GDP. The overall production of the information-technology sector was