Regional information policy in the contemporary communicative space

This paper presents the peculiarities of the regional information policy implementation in the circumstances of the contemporary communicative space. In particular, the place of the information in the society’s activity is studied, as well as the problems arising from the mass information consumption. Digital media in comparison with the traditional ones have more democratic opportunities, but in this case the information appears as an economic and political resource. This combination causes the risk of the prevalence of the interests of one or more subjects of the information space, which can be opposed to the public interests and keep down the development, which necessitates the management of the information space. Information policy is regarded as one of the tools for political administration, with technological and content-related aspects in the context of mutual interaction and the necessity of the new system of information and psychological relations development which will insure the next stage of community development. Moreover, the information policy expresses the interests of its units, among which are the state, large businesses, transnational media corporations, civil institutes, non-commercial and non-governmental organizations, transnational social networks, individuals. However, the state plays the leading role. The importance of the activity distribution limits determines the allocation of the regional information policy which is to form the united information space of the region with its integration into the global one. Educational activity in general and media literacy in particular are proposed to be considered as one of the most important strategic directions of the state regional information policy. The important issue of information policy implementation is the politicization of the media which appears in the fact that the media has the state in direct command; or by the presence of the political leaders in the editorial staff administration or media guardianship boards or other types of boards; and also by issuing different state subsidies, government grants and other government programmes for the media. As a result, the regional information space depends immensely on the size and type of the direct or indirect presence of the state and those in power. In its turn, in the basic documents which directly control the state information policy in the regions, the nature and the extent of the presence of the state media in the regional information space are said to be the key performance indicators for the effectiveness of work done to provide the citizens with the information from the substantive aspects point of view, which was examined in the example of Voronezh region. The contemporary media consumption is changing rapidly, and in these circumstances the media need to keep up with these changes to survive. Messengers are growing more popular, gaining huge audience and letting the information to be spread on a massive scale. The media should use this to achieve the maximum of the cross-channel information distribution. The task of the state information policy is to be in the centre of all the changes, study and forecast them, thus developing the strategy of the information space management.