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

Conduction. The bourgeois public sphere, once described in the writings of the German political philosopher Jurgen Habermas ^{[16],[17],[18]}, currently undergoing another transformation, only this time in digital format. This circumstance is inextricably linked with the ongoing socio-technological transition of almost all aspects of the life of modern society to innovative digital, high-tech, breakthrough intelligent technologies, automated systems, new materials and methods of construction, the creation of mechanisms for processing huge amounts of digital data, robotization of production and artificial intelligence. Therefore, the previously dominant offline dialogue in the field of communication is undergoing a deep modernization, institutionalized in the context of the digital public sphere in the format of a digital online dialogue of such leading actors of public policy in modern Russia as the state and civil society.

The authors see the main purpose of writing this work in identifying new information and communication technologies and methods used in the modern digital public sphere, which replaced the public sphere described by Yu. Habermas, where, from his point of view, symmetrical cooperation of subjects of socio-political communication in an offline dialogical format based on reason and ethics of discourse would prevail (or should have dominated). At the same time, there is a change in the previous paradigm of intersubjective interaction and a transition to a dominating digital online dialogue. The hypothesis put forward by us lies in the transformation processes going on, so to speak, in the plane of transformation of the "analog" model of the public sphere into the digital public sphere of the modern digitalized information society. In this regard, the solution of the above-mentioned problem and the verification of the hypothesis put forward by us acquire not only theoretical, but also, in our opinion, praxeological and applied significance that is particularly relevant in the modern geopolitical situation.     

Review. In accordance with the already classical Habermasian concept, the public sphere is positioned as a transparent space for rational discussion based on openness, symmetry and discursive equality of subjects of socio-political communication. The fact is that it is in the public sphere that what is commonly called "public opinion" is developed during an open dialogue ^{[11, p. 126]}.The public sphere of society has always acted as the leading substance of the information and communication space, where civil society institutions and organizations entered into an intersubjective inclusive dialogue with the authorities on an extremely wide range of various problems and issues ^{[6, pp. 204-205]}. Even before the emergence of modern digital media of mass communication (in accordance with the point of view of Yu. In the sphere of public discourse, there was a progressive process of increasing the volume of production and circulation of socially and politically significant information.

Further – post–Habermasian - expansion of the field of discourse power and society in the context of the public sphere was associated with the emergence of electronic mass media in the XX century. The digitization of mass media, the rapid development of Internet communications and the information digital society in the late XX-early XXI centuries prompted the public sphere of the global world society to once again enter a new stage of its transformation, but in a fundamentally new perspective, built on the basis of digital civil society, digital state, digital media and adequate digital public spheres. At the present stage of the evolution of the public sphere, the former offline dialogue between the government (state) and civil society is gradually being replaced by an online dialogue between these leading actors of public policy ^{[4, pp. 80-81]}. Such a dialogue, mediated by digital media communications, acquires greater practical significance and social and political relevance, shifting into the discursive space of the digital public sphere and digital public policy^{[5, pp. 204-205]}

According to a number of authors, the concept of the public sphere Yu. Under the influence of digitalization of all aspects of life, Habermas is gradually turning into an innovative theoretical and methodological model of digital intersubjective interaction between government and society ^[7],[9], which attaches particular importance to the intention to reconfigure and update the trajectory of institutionalization of interactive online dialogue between the state and civil society in the mediatized digital public sphere of modern Russia. A number of reputable foreign scientists are investigating this problem ^{[21],[22],[23],[24]}. Among the Russian researchers of the process of transformation of the digital public sphere are O. V. Kuzmenko ^[8]. Yu. V. Kazakov ^[7], A. A. Nikitinskaya ^[11], A.V. Sokolov ^[14],[15] and others. authors

The main part. In the context of the digital public sphere, both the processes of cooperation between state authorities and civil society organizations and manifestations of conflict interactions between them are embodied. This circumstance is connected both with the fragmentation of the traditional public sphere and with its pluralization, including the transformation of the once unified public sphere into a multitude of parallel and simultaneously coexisting local (network) public spheres that differ from each other in their dominant narratives and intentional orientation of discourse.It is characteristic that such "digital public spheres demonstrate a number of communicative styles" and "they do not always correspond to the ideas of rationality and politeness, as it is defended in the discursive theory of Habermas" ^{[19, p. 190]}.

The described problem urgently requires modern political science, as well as sociology and philosophy, not only to develop time-appropriate theoretical and methodological foundations for managing digital public policy, digital communication of government and society, but also to solve a whole range of practical and applied problems. The development and institutionalization of technologies for managing digital intersubjective interaction between the government and society, the state and civil society should be considered the most priority among them. The digital public sphere in this context is considered as an area of online communication, participation in which is openly and freely available for everyone who is interested in discussing issues of common (public) interest ^{[19, p. 181]}.

Meanwhile, in the context of the formation and development of the global digital information society, channels, mechanisms and forms of communication between the government and society are becoming more and more important. Many of them, in the conditions of mass digitalization of all spheres of social existence, acquire new, previously unknown qualities, properties, traits, ways of functioning, production and distribution of content. The everyday life of people includes gadgets, communicators, high-speed Internet services, and with them new channels and means of communication, digital mass media, platforms, forums, portals, terminals, social networks, innovative routes of departure, broadcasting, methods of encoding and decoding, delivery and receipt of information, forms and varieties of private and inclusive communication, storage and receipt of content, hosting, services, podcasts, streaming, etc., etc. So, for example, among the most well-known Russian dialogue platforms, such portals as "Public Services" and "Russian Public Initiative", Internet platforms can be distinguished "Change.org " and "Active Citizen", etc.

According to the All-Russian Center for the Study of Public Opinion (VTsIOM), 86% of Russians who use at least one social network or messenger spend time in them almost daily. Regular users of social networks and messengers with communication functionality (VKontakte, WhatsApp, Telegram, Odnoklassniki, etc.) spend an average of 272 minutes or 4.5 hours a day on them. At the same time, the most popular social network is Vkontakte ^[3]. That is why many leaders of public opinion, politicians at the federal, regional and municipal levels, deputies, representatives of executive power, heads of subjects of the federation, ministries and departments have their own pages on social networks, including the most popular of them – Vkontakte. In accordance with these new trends, the governor of the Kostroma region, S.K. Sitnikov, also opened his accounts and public posts in these social networks. Including in VKontakte (https://vk.com/sk_sitnikov ), in Telegram (https://t.me/s/sk_sitnikov ) and in Odnoklassniki (https://ok.ru/sksitnikov ). At the same time, all pages in these social networks are maintained either by S.K. Sitnikov himself (as indicated on his official public pages), or, "at the request", by his official assistants.

  Even a cursory analysis of the context posted on these governor's pages indicates that all three of the above-mentioned S.K. Sitnikov's accouterments are purely image-oriented, covering, like the official mass media, exclusively the circle of his official business and professional spheres of activity. They are not aimed at any open and direct dialogue with the population, instead of communicating with the population, the governor and his team prefer the usual monologue mediated by a digital format of one-sided subject-object type communication. That is, they are essentially the same propaganda. Placed in the public digital sphere of social networks, which are substantially intended not for an imperious propaganda monologue, but for subject-subject formats of live interactive communication and interaction.   

On the pages of the governor of the Kostroma region in Vkontakte and Telegram, visitors not only cannot leave their comments or exchange opinions about the content posted there, but also ask a question to a senior official of the region and, accordingly, get an answer to it. And on the governor's page in the Odnoklassniki social network, a special barrier filter is provided: in order to only enter there, a special additional registration is required. In addition, S.K. Sitnikov himself, apparently, has lost all interest in formally established accounts in social networks, which have long been administered by his "assistants"; he himself is present there only nominally, without entering into online communication with visitors to his pages in any of the three above-mentioned social networks.

Quite deservedly, the most popular among the population of the Russian Federation is such an official dialogue platform as "Public Services". Unlike social networks, where communication between society and the authorities can be called optional, this platform has an officially fixed legal status, and its protocol gives this interaction a completely institutional character. Therefore, the former online communication with the population by the heads of regions and other officials of state and municipal authorities in the subjects of the Russian Federation on the Public Services platform is qualitatively different from the arbitrary discourse on non-judicial platforms. Moreover, after an official decision was made on the further development and improvement of a special platform created during the fight against COVID-19 within the framework of the portal "Public Services" called the Feedback Platform (PIC).

Currently, the Feedback Platform is being implemented within the framework of the federal project "Digital Public Administration" of the national program "Digital Economy". Among its priority tasks is the implementation of the real functioning of the feedback mechanism, which provides for the possibility of a direct appeal of citizens to the authorities with their concerns and guarantees, in a strictly allotted time, to receive a proper response. Moreover, this service (PIC) does not function at the federal level, but in each subject of the Russian Federation and, in the future, the municipality.

The PIC is a single window of digital feedback (dialog).  This mechanism of interaction between the government and society provides the society with a practical opportunity to receive and process messages through a single portal of public services, and then send them to authorized structures and government departments. You can send messages to the PIC through special forms on the portal "Gosuslug", in mobile applications "Gosuslugi. We decide together", through PIC widgets on websites and on official pages in social networks of the heads of the relevant state and municipal authorities. The feedback platform provides a unified standard for submitting citizens' appeals to the authorities, analysis and control of incoming appeals, the timing of consideration and execution, the degree of satisfaction with the response received and the quality of resolution of the raised problem.

Despite the relatively short period that has passed since the beginning of the systematic functioning of feedback Platforms, on September 2, 2022, the Ministry of Digital Development of Russia approved a methodology for determining the rating of regions for working on the Feedback Platform. And already on October 20, 2022, the Ministry of Finance published the first rating of regions on the implementation of the Feedback Platform for nine months of its operation ^[12]. In this rating, the Kostroma Region took 37th place out of 48 subjects of the Russian Federation participating in the implementation of this digital feedback mechanism (See: Table No. 1). The regions participating in the PIC were evaluated according to 23 different indicators. So, for example, the dynamics of the introduction of various technologies and mechanisms of feedback platforms into everyday practice, the efficiency and quality of solving everyday and socially significant problems of concern to citizens, the level of their satisfaction with the reaction from the authorities were evaluated. Also, the rating organizers took into account such indicators as the organization of public (public)  hearings, public voting using these dialogue platforms, the implementation of projects for which the population of the respective territories voted online, etc.

And here is how the indicators of the nearest neighbors of the Kostroma region in the Central Federal District look like:

Table No. 1. 

If this rating reflected the state of affairs with feedback for the period from September 1, 2022 to September 30, 2022, then the next one recorded the state in the interval from January 1, 2023 to March 31, 2023. In this updated ranking, the Kostroma Region moved to the 38th position, losing to the former Chechen Republic ^[13]. Thus, it can be concluded that, judging by the indicators of the Feedback Platform of the digital portal "Public Services", the Kostroma region is a clear outsider in organizing a digital dialogue between the government and society among the adjacent territories of the Central Federal District. And the head of the region himself, too, on his pages in social networks, as it was already noted above, is clearly not disposed to online dialogue formats of interaction with the population of the region.

 Nevertheless, in the Kostroma region in April 2020, a geographically separate structural unit called the "Regional Management Center" (SDG) was opened, whose tasks include the formation of a reliable picture and a range of problems that interest the residents of the region. Thus, according to the SDGs of the Kostroma region, in the first half of 2022 alone, the population of the region sent more than 4,700 messages through Public Services. And the number of such appeals is constantly growing, which indicates a request for dialogue with the authorities from the regional civil society and its individual members and representatives.

 On their accounts in the social networks of the SDGs of the Kostroma region (Vkontakte, Telrgram, Odnoklassniki), a certain functioning of feedback mechanisms between regional authorities and the population is carried out, data is collected on issues of concern to citizens, that is, a dialogue between the authorities and society is taking place. For example, one of the most acute problems, which is regularly discussed on the pages in the social networks of the "Regional Management Center", was the problem of placing a landfill for processing solid household waste in the Kostroma region. Contrary to the intention of the authorities for the construction of this landfill on the territory of the Sandogorsky rural settlement of the Kostroma municipal district, members of the public vigorously and argumentatively oppose this project, entering into a dialogue not only with the authorities of the local and regional levels, but also appeal to the federal authorities.

In particular, a repeated video message from residents of the Sandogorsky settlement to the leadership of the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation has already been published on social networks, informing them of their categorical disagreement with the planned construction of a solid waste landfill. Representatives of the company pay attention to numerous violations committed, in their opinion, at the stage of public hearings and engineering-geological surveys, which can lead to a deterioration of the environmental situation. On this basis, the Chairman of the RF IC, A. T. Bastrykin, instructed to conduct a pre-investigation check on these signals and give a legal assessment of the relevant actions of the regional and municipal authorities of the Kostroma region on the fact of organizing the construction of a solid waste landfill.

Thanks to such communications based on digital feedback mechanisms, significant transformational shifts and changes occur both in the structure and in the infrastructure of social, including political, communications in the format of a dialogue between authorities and structures of power, on the one hand, and citizens, civil society institutions, on the other. The process of mass digitalization affects this most important sphere of information and communication interaction and information exchange between the manager and the managed segments of the political subsystem of society. This, in turn, is inextricably linked with the modernization and socio-technological transition of almost all aspects of the life of modern society to high-tech, breakthrough intellectual technologies. Previously dominant in the sphere of communication between government and society, offline dialogue is undergoing a deep digital reconfiguration, institutionalized in the leading narratives of modern public policy in the dialogic format of online dialogue and digital interactions of subjects and actors of digital public discourse.

Here it is necessary to clarify that by the dialogue between the authorities and society – both "traditional" and digital – we mean first of all their intersubjective communicative interaction, through which socially and politically significant information is exchanged and disseminated. A dialogue is a communication between two (or more) subjects. Its actors (participants, communicants, subjects) are, on the one hand, representatives of various authorities and structures (federal, regional or municipal). On the other hand, individual citizens or voluntary associations of citizens, that is, organizations and institutions of civil society, participate in such an intersubjective dialogue.  At the same time, it is very important that the authorities use in their practical activities "information coming from channels and mechanisms of political feedback" arising in the process of mutual exchange of information between the state, on the one hand, and individual citizens or any civil society organizations ^{[2, p. 93]}.

If in the conditions of the "pre-digital information society" this intersubjective communication and mutual exchange of information proceeded, primarily, directly "face to face" ("face to face"), verbally, then with the digitalization of channels, methods, mechanisms and means of communication, this interaction (dialogue) began to acquire more and more spatially mediated, distant character. In other words, the offline dialogue, which has existed since the ancient Greek agora or the Novgorod Veche, began to undergo an increasingly increasing digital transformation and transformation into an online dialogue "here and now". Geographically separated from each other by large distances, the actors of such communication are virtually located in a digital public space common to them and have the opportunity to communicate, overcoming the distances separating them, as if all of them, regardless of their number, would be next to each other in the same public place.

The digitization of mass media, the rapid development of Internet communications and information society in the late XX-early XXI centuries allowed the public sphere to once again enter the process of a long transformation (but in a fundamentally new socio–cultural environment, rather than in the Habermasian model of transformation of the public sphere), built on the basis of social networks, digital civil society and digital democracy. Digital online dialogue is carried out through intersubjective interaction between government and society on digital platforms, forums, portals, platforms, social networks or websites of government and municipal authorities specially created for such communication.

Conclusion. The institutionalization of digital deliberation of state and municipal authorities and civil society organizations forms the necessary prerequisites "for the coordination of their opinions and positions, and also contributes to the improvement of administrative procedures of public administration" ^{[14, p. 690]}. The main difference between such an online dialogue and the offline model of two-way communication between the authorities and society is a significant reduction in material and time costs for organizing and conducting communication in this format, as well as involving in this discursive process a much larger number of subjects of deliberation than would be possible in an analog offline dialogue. Due to this, decisions made on the basis of collective discussion of certain acute and topical issues acquire much greater legitimacy in the eyes of society than it would be in the conditions of a much smaller and narrow circle of participants in the "traditional" face-to-face deliberation.

Thus, concluding our excursion into the digital public sphere, we can state that the changes taking place here represent a fundamentally different stage of transformation of the public sphere than before. Naturally, Yu. Habermas, creating a normative theory of the public sphere, simply could not know much about its further evolution ^[6]. Moreover, according to numerous opponents and critics, he idealized it, considering it outside the context of the real political process and naively relying on the power of reason and moral constraints not only in the field of public policy, but also real political discourse in the context of a concrete public sphere, not an imaginary one. And scientific and technological progress, which radically changed the infrastructure and structure of public communications, was simply unthinkable at the time when Yu. Habermas created his theory of the early bourgeois public sphere. The trajectory of its further co-evolution turned out to be most closely intertwined not with the progress of moral and cognitive qualities of a globalizing society, but with the introduction of engineering and technological innovations and scientific and technological progress into the sphere of social communications.

It should be noted that in the conditions of institutionalization of the digital information society, the Habermasian concept of the public sphere is not fully adequate to the theoretical, methodological and praxiological tasks of today, and therefore, for greater relevance to modern realities, it should be supplemented with other alternative versions of the public sphere. Such authors, in particular, include X. Arend with her analysis and interpretation of the ancient agonistic public sphere ^[1], K. Schmidt, a conservative thinker who studied the adversarial and militant nature of the parliamentary public sphere ^[20], or S. Muff, who focused her attention on agonistic democracy and the agonal public sphere inherent in it ^[10].  In their interpretations of these and other authors, the public sphere, in contrast to the position of Yu. Habermas is considered not only as harmonious interaction, cooperation, tolerance or consensuality of subjects of public policy, but also as competition, confrontation, competition in the struggle for power and influence using what in modern political science has been called hate rhetoric, various technologies, methods of information warfare, information and communication warfare.

The use of these and other technologies does not cancel the public sphere, but gives it a new, digital configuration, requiring the development of modern information and communication mechanisms, technologies, tools, methods and forms of work in the context of digital public policy in the process of managing political discourse. These tasks, identified in the course of our research, determine the horizons and prospects for further research of the online dialogue between the government and society in the field of digital public space, political communications and political discourse.