During this week we will try to explain why news in post-soviet realm is something different than news in western world. First of all, let's try to respond to the question why post Soviet media landscape is different. The post Soviet media landscape as well as social landscape is often represented as a mix of two sets of elements. Kind of old elements, such as surveillance, state economy, state control, collectivism, etc. And then you implement during this post Soviet times, elements such as market economy, foreign investment, private property, pluralism, etc. And during long time, such coexistence has been explained by the very simple word, transition. The idea was very simple that, during that time these old elements will completely disappear and only the new elements implemented in post Soviet time will remain. Actually we can see this such representation is but false. This transition paradigm in media was very popular during a long time. Just because it referred to political sciences, where this paradigm was born. In Political Studies, that paradigm of transition appears in 1980s and then progressively starts to rule in this field. And starts to be used to interpret differences and change in post Soviet world. And in field of media of course, we can also see some kind of works and studies trying to say that. Progressively Soviet media landscape will disappear and a new post Soviet media realm which will be completely westernized will appear as a new, will completely be developed, etc. And we can see that even some indexes, international indexes appear to measure the degree of such transition. For example, indexes as organization of Reporters Without Borders Reporters sans frontières, the French organization, (Belgium based organization), or Freedom House index of the liberty of press etc. So the problem of transition is that, transition is just one approach and not unique one, which puts forward the agency. First of all let's say that that transitional paradigm is just one approach which puts forward their idea of agency. So the ability of particular leaders, and actors to change the situation. And this is just one vision of any kind of political change. It's the vision defended by Philip Schmitter or by Adam Przeworski, etc. The idea that act as strategy individual, sometimes people, leaders etc are just driving any political change. The oppositional vision, and we are insisting on it, is completely different. This vision is based on the idea of the path dependence and structure. So, this vision means that there are some kind of structural factors affecting any configuration of political change and any political regime. And such structural factors affect the speed of any change. And from this point of view, any change should be much more slower just because there are some kind of structural factors which are working as breaks in this machine. So in reality, these non-finished character, or the dualistic character of post Soviet societies resides in combinations of factors. So we can see coexistence, sometimes very strange coexistence. Mixing of old elements, with new elements, but not the disappearance of these old elements. So just like that, the kind of mix between them. Sometimes very strange mix and sometimes where interpreting such mix as strange, as Impossible etc. But it's quite stable. How we can explain it? We are explaining it in terms of institutional conflict. What is institutions? Institutions are humanly devised constraints that shape the human interaction. Some kind of common rules which shaping our interaction our, say social living. So all kind of rules or institutions are based on two things. Formal rules and informal rules or non formal rules. What is formal rules? Is the constitution laws, some kind of contracts etc. And what is non formal institutions? Habits, practices, etc. What is the main problem is that, it's quite simple to change formal institutions. You just have to write in your law, you just to have implement new constitution. But non formal institutions such as habits, practices, way to do traditions, etc, are based on the culture. They are rooted into the cultural realm. That's why such kind of non formal institutions are very, very difficult to change or needs much more time to be changed. That's why we can see kind of conflict sometimes in any kind of reformist regime. Such as post Soviet regime, where new formal rules doesn't correspond to these old, non formal rules, such as through traditions, etc. And it creates a kind of struggles between rules or mix between them. And sometimes the non formal rules invalidates new one, which are recent which are not rooted into the social practices, etc.
