New media and political protest

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the growth of Internet and digital communication in Russia, and in other Central and Eastern European countries, was praised by Anglo-American scholars as a chance for democratization, as free access to political information and pluralism of opinions had to foster political discussion and participation, as both democratic theory and public sphere theory claimed. ¹ This technology-based optimism is depicted in the collections of opinions of the Western experts on Russian media-political development, inter alia by R. Rohozinski ² and A. C. Kuchins. ³ However, since the beginning of the second term of Vladimir Putin’s presidency in 2004, more sceptical views started to prevail among scholars, ⁴ and by the late 2000s the digital potential of democratization continued to be viewed as unrealized. Reuters Institute for the study of journalism even named their report on the Russian blogosphere ‘The Web That Failed’; ⁵ a report in which the authors conclude that ‘the internet route is technically open, but is not much taken – or where taken doesn’t lead to new territories of political and self-expression’. ⁶