Digital transformation of the public sphere: from offline communications to online dialogue between government and society

Abstract

The subject of this article is modern innovative trends occurring in the context of communication between Russian state and municipal authorities and civil society. The essence of this transformation, taking place in the conditions of the digital information society, lies in the progressive reconfiguration of the “traditional” public sphere into a digital public sphere, civil society into a digital civil society, and the usual offline dialogue between government and society into a digital online dialogue. Unfortunately, many of these changes until now remain a completely unexplored and poorly researched aspect of info-communicative reality. The main goal is to clarify the ontological foundations of both the digital transformation of the public sphere and the reconfiguration of discursive practices from offline dialogue formats of communication into a digitalized online dialogue between government and society. The main methods that the authors used when writing the article are a systems approach, a structural-functional method and discourse analysis. The result of the work done is the conclusion that the digitization of the media, the rapid development of Internet communications and the digital information society at the end of the 20th and beginning of the 21st centuries allowed the public sphere to enter into the process of digital transformation. The novelty of the work lies in the fact that it specifies the infocommunication trend aimed at increasing dominance in the public sphere of digital online communications in the format of intersubjective interaction between government and society.