Russia Internet And Public Sphere

The Duma elections in2011and presidential elections in2012ended with a change of casting, which did not to be unexpected. However, during the campaign, the voices from cyberspace brought great interests to analysis.Considerable freedom exists in the cyberspace of Russia, where the traditional media (press, TV, broadcast) suffers relatively restrict censorship. During the election, internet played a role as channels for political parties and candidates to do the promotion, while for voters to acquire information and express their opinions. Particularly, the significant attraction of social media, included concreting supporters or revealing scandals.No doubt that internet provides an appropriate and unignorable perspective to observe Russia politics. Above all, the openness of internet seems to turn the slogan "Glasnost" of Gorbachev into touchable fact with its technical feature. Within the digital environment, internal participators of Russia society can set the political expression in a relatively free degree, as well as the external observers obtain the tool to access relevant information at low cost. Since the information asymmetry, previous researchers always established their knowledge system on the base of speculation, for instance the study of political bureau’s seating order, as mysterious as archeology. By contrast, cotemporary researchers can acquire the first hand materials with the help from internet, unnecessary to be excel at Russia language.Secondly, the public feature of internet leads itself to be limitless space where citizens and political organizations communicate and argue through blog, websites, social media, etc. The player with huge financial and social resource can start the game in traditional media, nevertheless, internet brings more fairness and costs less.Main content of this paper is to study the interaction between Russiainternet and political ecology from the perspective of public sphere. Theoretical part of the paper focuses on the relationship between internet and public sphere, through three dimensions—politics, media and citizen. The supporting part of the paper is divided into three parts:measurement of content output of political parties’websites during2011Duma election; the relations between state and internet; the protesting movement raised by internet. Purpose of the paper is to prove that Russia cyberspace has the characters of public sphere.