Veche versus the media

After the fall of the Soviet Union and the advent of the market economy, the classical media lost the faith of the Russian people. In this situation the Internet communities came to play a decent role, where the audience members consult with one another of practical matters of survival without middle men. It is simply that these systems of social interaction have yet to become a mass phenomenon. This was the main idea behind our report, which we presented at the World Public Forum "Dialogue of Civilizations". However, Western participants of the forum, it seems, did not really understand this idea. Seymour Papert from MIT voiced the assumption that the Internet in Russia is now at the level of development that it was in Canada five years ago and that in the future we will reach the current Canadian level. Personally I do not doubt that we will overtake Canada, at least in terms of the number of visitors. But the .ru zone will not be the same. For the Westerner with the "self-made-man" and "do-it-yourself" concepts it is sufficient to fill the Internet with services for independent solutions to one’s problems. In Russia, though, with its tendency towards collegiality, platforms have to be created near the services, where your actions can be discussed with a collective group. This is similar to a "veche" popular assembly, such as those applied in ancient Novgorod.