№ 6 - 2002
Solovyov A.I.
Communication and Culture: Contradictions of the Field of Politics

Cultural consequences of the electronic communication and the interactive technologies being both ever perfected under the conditions of the information revolution are analyzed in the article. The author demonstrates in what way modern communications, stimulating ever more intensive attraction of cultural capital into politics, change both the political environment itself and the place of cultural components in it. The following factors among those conducive to transformation of advanced societies’ make-up, are, in particular, singled out: increasing diversity of the political links based upon electronic communications; gradual decrease of publicity in the distribution of power, and the rapprochement of public and private forms of man’s existence; mediatization and humanization of politics; penetration of the technologies and ethics of show-business into the power communications; virtualization of political space and formation of various types of mediacracy. Recognizing as well-grounded the conclusion of a number of specialists about a new political culture arising in the West, the author investigates possibilities for such culture to take root on Russian soil.