The main focus of my paper is on certain aspects of the transformation of the cultural sector in post-communist countries of Eastern Europe. I am dealing with the importance of emerging cultural institutions and activists, which I think play a considerable role in the process that these countries have undergone since the fall of communist regime. My assumption is that these organizations are going to take over the role of the state as the main actor in the cultural sphere (as it was the case in past decades). Today it is obvious that new digital technologies, especially new communication networks connected within the Internet, are one of the main tools that enabled the establishment of radically new models of cultural production, management and information distribution.
However, it is not well-known in what ways and scales cultural NGOs and individuals from Central and Eastern Europe are using new technologies, especially the Internet, and to what extent it is changing the whole cultural mechanism. That is why I want to focus on the following questions: What is the impact of this new medium on the transformation process? How does it differ from traditional media? How (and by whom) is it used in the post-communist countries? Why is the Internet so important in the cultural sphere? I will then analyze a new international socio-cultural phenomenon that is strongly related to the Internet and use of new technologies in connection with art – I will call it ‘new media culture.’ This phenomenon leads us to new definitions related to new forms, new modes of expression, as well as new social discourses. My aim is to describe the overall picture of this movement that has emerged in the last couple of years, and to compare the new media culture development in the post-communist countries to that of the Western ones, which are also undergoing a cultural transformation as regards to new possibilities offered by digital technologies.
