Digital Future of the State Legal System and Information and
Communication Culture in Russia: National Regional Component
Galina N. Komkova, Ekaterina N. Toguzayeva and Natalia V. Tyumeneva
Saratov National Research State University named after N.G. Chernyshevsky, Saratov, Russia
Keywords: Digitalization, Information and Communication Culture, Digital Culture, Electronic State, Electronic Law
and Order.
Abstract: The problem of the state and law influence on the Internet space is raised in the article. The authors analyzed
limits of the state influence and underlined reasons of regional inequality, which can directly affect the level
of information and communication culture of the population. In the Russian Internet space, the e-state
structure is successfully formed and functioning, which is modeled on the basis of authoritarian organizational
and managerial mechanisms, which creates serious organizational and administrative barriers to the
development and formation of information and communication culture. The authors ' analysis shows that the
scale of legal regulation in the social sphere and in the Internet space should be different. Modern legislation
already lays down certain prerequisites for regulating Internet communications. In order to preserve the value
of the individual in the field of Internet communications, and to prevent the leveling of human rights and
freedoms for the sake of technology and efficiency, it is necessary to form and improve the Internet culture,
which is based on a certain ideology. The authors come to the conclusion that the development of innovative
state-legal mechanisms operating in the Internet space will increase the level of information and
communication culture.
1 INTRODUCTION
The significance of the Internet in the modern world
can hardly be overestimated. The Internet sphere has
become a “parallel reality”, into which a significant
range of social relations has been merged into. This
objective pattern of development of new paradigms
and modernization of old ones has determined the
digitalization of the Russian economy and all public
life, as it was set by the President of the Russian
Federation in his Message (Message of the President,
2018). In this regard, the need for analyzing the
trends, prospects and risks of the Russian state legal
system development in the context of digitalization
and its role in the formation of an information and
communication culture arises.
2 METHODS
The methodological framework of this research is
based on the use of the scientific methods of
enquiry, including the principle of objectivity,
consistency, induction, deduction, dialectic. The
principle of objectivity harnessed to justify the need
to improve the information and communication
culture in order to manage and regulate the Internet
space. The principle of consistency was applied to
consider the forms and levels of interaction between
the state and society in the context of Internet
communications. The inductive was used not only as
a method of empirical knowledge of sociocultural
processes, but also for methods and forms analysis of
Internet legal regulation. The dialectic method
allowed fully anticipates the development trends of
information and communication culture under the
influence of state-legal imperatives and regulators.
Along with general scientific methods of
enquiry, private scientific methods were used, such
as: functional, system-structural, comparative-legal,
formal-legal.
3 RESULT OF INVESTIGATION
Informatization of all spheres of society’s life, aimed
at stepping up technological equipment, developing
804
Komkova, G., Toguzayeva, E. and Tyumeneva, N.
Digital Future of the State Legal System and Information and Communication Culture in Russia: National Regional Component.
DOI: 10.5220/0010597908040809
In Proceedings of the International Scientific and Practical Conference on Sustainable Development of Regional Infrastructure (ISSDRI 2021), pages 804-809
ISBN: 978-989-758-519-7
Copyright
c
 2021 by SCITEPRESS – Science and Technology Publications, Lda. All rights reserved

digital infrastructure sets the task of developing
adequate mechanisms for managing social processes.
Now the Internet space is practically free of state and
legal influence, because “in most cases, actors do not
set the task of necessarily interacting with the
institutions of power ... but they solve their problems
without the participation of the authorities.
Meanwhile ... the number and intensity of
transactions carrying out without the participation of
state systems and services is significantly higher than
with the participation of the state” (Chugunov, 2018).
In such a case the lack of control in the interaction
between the subjects of the Internet space is not
always inoffensive and harmless for their own sakes.
There is a lot of sad evidence for this.
Therefore, it is unacceptable to exclude state legal
influence from Internet communications. Another
question is, to what extent, in what forms and by what
methods should the state-legal system influence the
Internet space? It would seem that the state system
should offer such methods and means of organization
and regulation when the subjects themselves will be
interested in their active use.
In this regard, the new technological structure
requires a large-scale reformatting of the power
organization and the qualitatively different legal
regulation. These days, experts in the field of
jurisprudence using an interdisciplinary approach
allowing to match multiform conceptual models and
practices offer the introduction of innovative
regulatory-managerial mechanisms that are already
demonstrating their effectiveness.
The cyberdemocracy constructed in the Internet
space, or information democracy with its widely
distributed new technologies of public
administration, "digitalization" of legal forms for the
implementation of the functions of the state, has given
rise to such a large-scale phenomenon of modern
times as the "electronic state" or "electronic
government".
The potential of the electronic state is huge, and
its value is great, because it does not limit the
development of person-centrism - the ideological
basis of democracy. On the contrary, unlimited
technological capabilities make it possible to set a
qualitatively new goal of modern public
administration - to provide for the most favorable
conditions necessary for a person to fully realize his
rights and freedoms by submitting a diverse complex
of electronic public services, electronic data
management, organizing information interaction
between all parts of the political system, expeditious
handling of electronic applications and petitions of
citizens, ensuring open and free access to various
government databases, archives, registers and so
forth.
This comprehensive system for managing
information flows in the public sector (Lipuntsov,
2015) already provides high-quality information
support for the activities of all branches of
government, as well as communication between the
authorities and civil society institutions and the
political system that are actually involved in public
administration. Such a clearly built, efficiently
working feedback, implemented at a high-tech level,
will allow the state to make more accurate decisions
in accordance with the needs of the population, and
the state apparatus will become a platform for public
initiative and social innovation.
4 DISCUSSION
According to experts, since the beginning of the
2000s, control over the implementation of e-
government has practically not gone beyond the
Government of the Russian Federation and the
Administration of the President of the Russian
Federation (Kabanov. and Sungurov, 2015). The
participation of the expert community and non-profit
organizations is often limited by consultations and
technical elaboration of government decisions, which
are not mandatory for implementation, citizens’
capabilities are hindered by low Internet penetration
and insufficient awareness of e-government
capabilities (Internet in Russia, 2014). Thus, the most
serious barriers to the introduction of non-state media
systems are not technological, but mainly
organizational, cultural and administrative.
In any case, the ability to control the activities
of the authorities on the part of the interested public
is noticeably increasing. In this regard, the issue of
openness of the activities of public authorities is
becoming relevant. Unfortunately, experts give a low
assessment of the degree of openness, for example, of
federal executive bodies - only 38.3% of the 78
entities, and even less - 24% among regional
executive bodies (Openness of the Federal Executive
Power, 2014). In addition, the quality of published
open data often has a formal meaning and, in fact, is
not informative. Despite targeted measures to develop
e-participation in Russia, the effect of openness of
public authorities is not the same at the federal and
regional levels. Volume and quality of it are much
lower on the regional level. The unequal distribution
of information technologies turns into inequality of
regional information and technological development,
Digital Future of the State Legal System and Information and Communication Culture in Russia: National Regional Component
805

which can have a negative effect on the state
information sovereignty in general.
Partly, this can be justified by technological
under-equipment, and often backwardness of the
regions, as well as the lack of a proper information
security system. The fact that the authorized bodies
for regional informatization are not authorized to
coordinate the sectoral regional policy of
informatization and not authorized to develop unified
mechanisms of coordinating costs for informatization
does not help to overcome this problem. As a result,
there is still a considerable lack of coordination in the
implementation of the state policy of informatization
in the regions and also there is a difference in regional
budget financing in order to develop information and
communication approaches to the implementation the
tasks of informatization.
At present, one of the priority tasks of the state
should become a minimization of the digital
inequality of the regions. To solve this problem, it is
important to increase the level of information and
communication culture of the population, primarily in
the regions. Various factors can play a key role in the
information development gap of the region
(geographical - distance from the center,
demographic, economic, educational, cultural and
historical, etc.). The level of development of the
information and communication culture of the
population in the region directly depends on the
readiness of the region for information technology
development, and for upgrade of equipment of the
information infrastructure. Only the involvement of
the state in the process of minimizing digital
inequality on a regional scale can influence on
communication processes, creating a vector of a
unified movement.
However, there is a great threat, that with the
cessation of the state’s monopoly on information, the
most important strategic resource of the 21st century,
its uncensored, and often uncontrolled distribution on
the network can lead to the destabilization of state
regime. There are relevant examples in world
practice: in Iceland in 2012, the neo-populists - the
Pirate Political Party - almost joined the parliament
(Boldyreva and Grishina, 2017); US opposition still
questions the legitimacy of the 2016 presidential
election due to cyber attacks (Election Hacking Fast
Facts CNN, 2016). In 2019, the growth of
cyberattacks aimed at stealing information from both
government agencies and private individuals has
become the worldwide trend. The official annual
Cybercrime Report (ACR) for 2019, published by
Cybersecurity Ventures, reports that hackers all over
the world attack every 14 seconds, and by 2021 their
frequency will increase to every 11 seconds (Global
Cybercrime, 2020). Accordingly, the state should
secure the Internet space from such unlawful actions,
in this regard, the degree of information freedom
should be necessarily linked and balanced by
appropriate legal regulation mechanisms (Komkova
et al., 2020).
The development of new technologies of the late
XX - early XXI century made obvious, firstly, the fact
of the lack of proper legal regulation of Internet
relations (Antonov, 2018), and secondly, the
inefficiency of using traditional regulatory and
protective mechanisms in the Internet space
(Sinyukov, 2019), thirdly, the inadequacy of typical
legal regimes for interactions with atypical systems
generated by the Internet environment (for example,
with artificial intelligence, biotechnology, humanoid
robots, androids, etc.). The current legal thinking is
based on the regulatory-protective type of legal
awareness. Therefore, jurisprudence as a relatively
isolated sphere of social relations is increasingly
confronted with problems of adequacy and
effectiveness (Sinyukov, 2019).
Today it has become obvious that the scale of
legal regulation in the social sphere and in the Internet
space should be different, in the latter case it must
allow certain irrationality, inconsistency by using
atypical means, ways, and regulatory methods. For
example, the classical legal regimes of procedural
activity are becoming a difficult and costly obstacle
to innovation in many areas. That is why today
experts are talking about the need to introduce non-
jurisdictional processes that will best "work" in the
Internet space. The cost of the non-jurisdictional
process is minimal (this is only the cost of registering
in the network, it is often free at all, and payment for
the services of the network operator), the form and
process filling are determined by the participants
themselves. Thus, the non-jurisdictional process is
less detailed (Lisyutkin and Arkhipova, 2016), and in
the context of informatization, it can become even
cheaper.
In the very near future, a change in the usual
construction of legal relations - person-person is
expected. In the foreseeable future, subjects of legal
relations may be human robots, androids, artificial
intelligence carriers. The prerequisites for this have
been prepared implicitly in law: since November 1,
2019, digital rights have been enshrined in the Civil
Code of the Russian Federation. Consequently, the
subject-object area of law will be revised, which will
subsequently lead to a revision of the system of legal
values. In order to preserve the value of the individual
in the field of Internet communications, to prevent the
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leveling of human rights and freedoms for the sake of
technological effectiveness and efficiency, it is
necessary to form and improve Internet culture.
The fact that this new phenomenon already exists
is evidenced by the terminological variety of names:
digital culture, information and communication
culture, and electronic culture. This poly terminology
indicates the uncertainty of the concept, features, and
content of this phenomenon, first of all. Secondly, it
shows the multi-aspect content and diversity of
information forms and communication culture in
various Internet areas. Finally, this terminological
"plasticity" leads to a variety of scientific approaches
and requires an interdisciplinary methodology for its
study (Koptseva et al., 2015). Of course, the prospect
of studying information and communication culture
is undeniable and scientists belonging to different
scientific fields, schools, etc., have already begun to
study this phenomenon.
At the same time, the authors of the article set the
task of determining the fundamental question: what
role the state should play in the formation of an
information and communication culture. What
mechanisms can the state legal system offer to
improve the information and communication culture,
what ways for its growth should be developed by the
state and law? We believe that these issues are
extremely relevant and they are addressed mainly to
the state legal system. Since today it is generally
recognized that “the Russian state is the highest
objective form of social consciousness of the people
and their political and legal organization ... It was the
state that was and ... remains the main driver of
Russia's culture and progress, ... as well as an
indispensable condition for freedom and prosperity of
every person and people as a whole” (Ebzeev, 2017).
In this regard, it is natural that the state should be
an active participant in the Internet space, form
guidelines for improving and enhancing the
information and communication culture of users,
employing legal mechanisms to establish the criteria
for lawful-unlawful, legal-illegal in the Internet
environment, establish sanctions for violators of
electronic law and order. The state legal system
should offer not only adequate mechanisms of
organizational and regulatory impact on Internet
relations, as already mentioned above, but also offer
reliable ways of legal protection of users' rights, so
that legal regulators are not replaced by non-legal
ones.
The latter is extremely important, since
completely new regularities operate in the Internet
space - digital, virtual, informational, electronic-
technological, etc. (they may not coincide with the
usual traditional social regularities).
It should be noted that the information and
communication culture currently being formed is a
completely unique form of public consciousness that
did not exist before. This is a special area, it is not
material so along with the traditional subjects who
interact via the Internet, there are atypical phenomena
in it, the nature of which does not fit into the usual
classifications. In particular, “these technologies
(artificial intelligence, androids, robots, etc.)” are
hybrids that unite a person with non-human entities,
and the latter, when created, receive a certain
autonomy from a man” (Sinyukov, 2019). To
comprehend these phenomena and assess their
significance for society, determine their place in the
value system, it is necessary, firstly, to include
information technologies in the subject of legal
regulation, and, secondly, what needs to be done now,
to develop an appropriate worldview, and better - the
ideological basis for the formation and development
of the Internet space.
Internet ideology should become a part of
information and communication culture-a sphere that
has a complex multi-aspect structure, where various
subjects, principles, methods, forms, and regulators
of dialog communication operate, and the subjects of
the state-legal system directly participate in its
formation. And this means that the traditional legal
culture has come close to modifying its form. Along
with the state-legal system, it should be reflected in
the Internet space and used to comprehend the new
Internet relations, which are the subject of legal
regulation of so far preferential information law, new
virtual states, new network phenomena. The obvious
trend here is the evolution of human-centered law into
technocentrism, but the priority of the human over the
technical-material must be maintained.
In this regard, the nature of information and
communication culture should be considered hybrid.
Information and communication culture is formed
under the influence of various regulators, including
legal ones. To characterize the Internet culture, it is
important to take into account the scope of legal
regulation: if it does not expand (the subject of legal
regulation will not include technical processes,
technologies, etc.), then the traditional legal culture
will not fundamentally change in terms of principles,
structure, types, etc. But most likely the technological
Internet processes will enter the object-subject area of
legal Internet culture, the volume of legal regulation
will expand, and accordingly, the legal Internet
culture will qualitatively change (Fig. 1). These
forecasts can be made in connection with the fact that
Digital Future of the State Legal System and Information and Communication Culture in Russia: National Regional Component
807

“technological space, which synthesizes the behavior
of participants in public relations, probably has
normativity .... Synthetic technical and legal regimes
prevail in the new system of law that cannot mature
in a one-dimensional and formal legal culture”
(Sinyukov, 2019). A reflection of these processes is
the appearance in the doctrine of various names of
this phenomenon - “digital culture”, “network
culture”, “information and communication culture”.
The information and communication culture is
diverse, multidimensional and complex. The
combination of many functional values allows us to
consider the information and communication culture
as a state of society, reflecting the level of
development of technological achievements and
opportunities, and as a system of values, and as a form
of public information consciousness, and as a social
institution. At the same time, one should speak not of
a new type of culture in general, but of a part of the
general legal culture that is taking shape in a special
virtual Internet space. The legal aspect is also
presented in the structure of the information and
communication culture. It is determined by the legal
worldview formed by Internet users and the
communications between them.
Considering the information and communication
culture as a system of elements, it seems possible to
single out information literacy, dialogue literacy,
guarantees for ensuring information sufficiency and
information security, information relations, as well as
indicators of the level of development of society's
informatization.
The main characteristics of modern information
and communication culture are:
 ability to reflect the nature of communication
in society;
 ability to determine the development of all
spheres of public life;
 characterized by various forms of
communication;
 one of the determining indicators is the
intensity of information and communication
activity of the individual and society as a
whole.
Information and communication culture in
modern times is an indicator of the maturity of society
and is not determined by territorial boundaries.
Within the framework of information and
communication culture, an important issue is to
identify the features of interaction (communications)
between the state and society. The model of
communicative interaction between the Russian state
and Russian society is defined as authoritarian. This
is evidenced by prohibitive trends in the regulation of
the Internet, a low level of response to grassroots
initiatives, simplification of procedures for restricting
access to information, an increase in the number of
requirements for participants in information
exchange, the introduction of penalties for violation
online (Kulnazarova, 2015).
The presence of the state in the form of control in
the network is increasing. The Internet space is
increasingly covered by state legal regulation with the
prevalence of prohibitive and binding rules. In this
regard, in the near future, the trends of
bureaucratization of the Internet space will increase.
Already, this is causing irritation and criticism from
the public. In order to remove social tension and
public irritation, it is necessary to improve the
legislative framework, taking into account new
approaches to the state-legal regulation. It is believed
that prohibitive mechanisms should be applied to
socially dangerous information, rather than
opposition information containing critical
assessments of ongoing social processes.
5 CONCLUSION
Thus, we believe that the traditional mechanisms of
legal regulation, perfected and justified by more than
two hundred years of history, will not be forgotten.
We believe that it is necessary to combine the usual
state-legal mechanisms with new digital ones, taking
into account the environment of their application. The
traditional legal system should not fade out, it should
be developed and enriched. But at the same time,
digital or information law should be formed in
parallel, not based on copying and reception of
traditional institutions, but containing qualitatively
new methods of influencing the Internet space. It
seems that the parallel coexistence of traditional and
digital state-legal mechanisms will provide an
increase in the level of legal culture in general, and
information and communication culture, in particular.
ISSDRI 2021 - International Scientific and Practical Conference on Sustainable Development of Regional Infrastructure
808

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
The study was supported by the Russian Foundation
for basic research scientific project №20-011-00211
А «Legal basis for the formation and development of
information and communication culture of the
population and ways to improve it in the era of
digitalization
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