One of the consequences of the coronavirus pandemic was a sharp increase of the digital environment’s importance in social and political activities. Distance work and training, remote services, and electronic communication were relied upon instead of personal contact amid lockdown conditions — all this has become, if not a new norm of life, then certainly commonplace, writes Valdai Club Programme Director Oleg Barabanov.
As a result, the epidemic paradoxically contributed to a qualitative increase in the digitalisation of public relations. In the context of the postmodern XXI century, one can see the extremely few positive consequences of the coronavirus. The scrapping of old pre-digital “analogue” habits and behavioural patterns, which under normal conditions would have taken years, if not decades, happened extremely quickly and generally quite effectively under the threat of a pandemic. To some extent, the coronavirus has become a trigger for the total digitalisation of our life.
This change was reflected at the level of global political decision-making. The call for a new “Great Reset” strategy, which has become popular over the past year, in addition to green technologies and a number of other things, places its main emphasis precisely on a qualitatively different total digitalisation of public relations. It connects with this the main hopes for the future development of mankind. It is significant that this topic became one of the main issues at the recent virtual Davos forum at the end of January 2021, and it is actively discussed on other international platforms.