"Did you ever wonder why the Kremlin does not control the Internet as China does?", asks popular Gazeta.ru-observer Julia Latynina in one of her recent reviews. A question that resonated quite often among the RuNet researcher community.

    Pamiatnik klaviature; fragment of a comic strip after a BOR quotation (both from FoR site).

Some few days ago Sonia Zekri, Moscow correspondent of the renowned German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung, dedicated a short article to Dmitrij Medvedev’s videoblog (the article is not online on the newspaper's website, but 'reprinted' in Robert Amsterdams blog). Zekri, whose reports from Russia are always as enlightening as entertaining, notes a change in the Russian president’s media policy: while previous video messages by the Internet freak Medvedev did not allow for commentary (see one of Sudha’s previous posts), Russian users were now enabled to engage in direct discourse with their President. And they did, as Zekri illustrates with a bunch of sometimes comical, sometimes touching citations. These comments are by no way only positive. At contrary, critical questions are put forward concerning the social and economic perspectives of the country (the general topic of the videoblog session was on sports and leisure culture). Zekri’s articles ends nevertheless sceptical with regard to the political potential of the Runet: the trendy presidential video-blog, to her mind, reproduces only an archaic ritual digitally reloaded: tzar Dmitrij talks to his virtual people promising to take care of their needs. Without any results in “real politics”. (here's the original quote in German: "Russland hat eine jahrhundertelange Tradition des Eingabe- und Bittstellerwesens. In einem Ozean der Willkür war die kniefällige Adresse an den Zaren oft die letzte Hoffnung. Das Internet setzt diese Tradition fort, technisch reibungslos, politisch folgenlos").Zekri’s sceptical evaluation of the Internet’s democratic potential is well in line with Runet research in East and West (some words will be said on that by Floriana Fossato in the First Issue of Russian-cyberspace Journal “Virtual power. Russian politics and the Internet” that will hopefully appear on the net in spring 2009). While ‘the Kreml’ is well aware of the web’s ever growing significance for political PR, truly interactive projects by top politicians until now are the exception. And when initiated, researchers, including myself, tend to interpret them as mere efforts to design participation where no real political engagement is wished. Nevertheless, from time to time, I catch myself at the thought that sometimes we tend to judge very spontaneously, while the effects of changes in political communication take more time. In other words: is it really adequate to label the new interactive format of Medvedev’s videoblog a disguised half-Tzarist, half-Soviet communication ritual – already after its very first release? Or does this belong to some kind of reverse, negative self-fulfilling prophecy? This is unfortunately no answer to the questions asked by Sudha in the previous post, but rather some new expression of doubt concerning the methodological problems and potentials of Runet research.H.S.