State Politics’ Digitalization as the Discourse of Modernity.

Abstract

Digital politics as a new phenomenon of political process, which emerged because of global digitalization, is discovered in the research. It’s stated, that politics’ digitalization is a variable, unstable, ongoing process. This may be explained by the digitalization’ nature as a process, which constantly improves and renews itself. Because of that, political subjects’ modification happens constantly, they keep on improving their digital potential through making communities of a larger scale. Thus, power balance in the world depends on communities’ rapid integration by digital political subjects.

 State politics’ digitalization is observed as a reflection of the digital infrastructure’s constant modifications during political processes. In order to define the influence of politics’ digitalization on the discourse of modernity the categories for studying politics’ digitalization have been set: ‘digital politics’, ‘digital field’, ‘digital political subjects’, ‘digital political practices’. The discourse of modernity is understood as a digital field, consisting of code systems inside which senses are set. A field predetermines a procedure of forming digital political subjects, creating digital infrastructure and mechanisms of integration of fragmented communities. Digital politics is defined as a process of shaping digital discourse within changing digital infrastructure which is constantly modified within network reality  of modern politics and society. Digital political subjects are political actors of a new type. They use the potential of fragmented communities and integrate networks in order to influence the processes of defining and making political decisions. Digital political practices is a procedure of converting / recoding senses into texts, and this generates new texts and new senses.

An ideal model of digital politics was offered for describing peculiarities of modern digital state politics. The model allows to define content and principles of  state politics’ transformations in digital setting, such as: 1) a procedure of making a new type of a political actor – a digital political subject; 2) a transition to a new type of political interactions – creating networks of different types for political activity within digital political practices; 3) the ways of exploiting digital infrastructure for political activity; 4) the principles of production of a new type of political content which changes the structure and formats of political texts. A formal computer model of digital politics was designed.

Specificity of evolution of digital politics in Ukraine, Belarus and Russian Federation under the influence of discourse of global digitalization was defined.  Constant digital political subjects initiate decentralized networks and use direct ways of interactions (with dissemination of viral messages) in Ukraine. On the other hand,  large-scale centralized networks are initiated by episodic digital political subjects in Belarus and Russian Federation. And viral messages aren’t produced on the official level.

Several periods of digitalization of politics were observed: 1) а proto-digital period with transition from offline towards online techniques of political interactions; 2) a personalized period with popular political actors being the centre of networking; 3) a space oriented period with dominance of globalized political subjects.

The author’s typology of modern digital state politics, which occurs within global digitalization, was designed. A stable type with the balanced representation of digital political subjects and a dynamic type with unbalanced one were proposed. Several subtypes were also observed in our research (traditional and network). The types of transformations of digital political practices in the modern world were defined after discovering and comparing the formal computer model of digital politics’ indicators. A holistic type with correlations and interactions between the official and mass media digital practices and an isolated type without ones were discovered.