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Bowles, Anna (2004): The Teapots are Coming:
the Changing Face of RuNet.
English
Russian (Translation by Maria Artamonova)
Comments are welcome in the  Discussion
Forum.
E-mail: annab@groke.fslife.co.uk
Introduction
‘We’re following the developed countries
– the quality will rise, the prices will fall, and everything
is going to be all right.’ (The Internet in Russia, 2000)
So Maksim Moshkov, founder of lib.ru, the most substantial
online Russian-language library, asserted in 2000 when the International
Research and Exchanges Board (IREX) asked him about the future of the
Internet in Russia. The aim of this essay is to explore the reality
of the process so optimistically predicted by Moshkov: that of RuNet’s
development from an elite club into a mass medium.
Worldwide, early adopters of network technology tend to be technically
educated. The increase in accessibility that comes with the development
of user-orientated software leads first to a trickle and then a flood
of users with limited or no IT skills: people known as chainiki,
or "teapots", in Russian online slang. However, RuNet has
been, and is likely to remain, subject to conditions seldom found in
the "developed" (western) countries. Factors including Russia's
geographic immensity, state desire for control, Soviet traditions of
communality and the absence of certain other traditions, such as respect
for copyright, all combine to make logging on in Russia a subtly different
experience from doing so in Europe or America, above and beyond the
issues of price and reliability identified by Moshkov. Russia's failure
to become a "normal" country after Communism, so wistfully
remarked on by many of its people, affects the development of its Internet
as much as any other part of society.
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