Political Communicativistics: The Evolution of Understanding the Role of Information in Political Process

Abstract

Introduction. The article is a survey study, the purpose of which is to analyze the evolution of concepts in the field of political сommunicativistics, aimed at understanding the role of information in the system of political processes from the middle of the 20th Century to the present day. Methods and materials. As the main toolkit for working with scientific texts, methods of qualitative text analysis, focused on the study of the conceptual description of social problems, aspects of the interaction between government and society were used. As materials for the analysis, the texts of Russian and foreign scientists devoted to the study of the role of information in public administration and in political processes and published in one of the leading scientific periodicals or central scientific publishing houses were used. Analysis. The article establishes the objective factors of enhancing scientific research in the subject area of political сommunicativistics in the 20th Century, examines the modern understanding of the role of information in the processes of public administration, the influence of the general information theory and the cybernetic approach on the development of Russian political communication. Result. Modern political science concepts do not demonstrate a unified understanding of the “information future” image that emerges under the influence of the “digital revolution”. The range of approaches is wide, from the libertarian assumption of a gradual weakening of the state functions and the transition to direct democracy, when citizens are in direct contact with each other using the technologies of the information and communication system of Internet and do not need the mediation of professional state administrators, to the revival of totalitarian forms of government based on control over information flows. The tendency of Russian scientists to correlate with the trends of state policy, shifting their research topics to the political aspects of information security, social networks and the activity of opposition public associations on the Internet, was revealed as the dominant trend at the current stage. This trend is ambiguous – it corresponds to the nature of modern challenges and threats in the information sphere, but in the future it can negatively affect the volume and quality of fundamental theoretical developments, and decrease the interest in them.