In the rubric "Fundamental Research in the field of Information Society"  there is an article by Candidate of Historical Sciences Eugeniy Pleshkevich "Documentary and Information Component of the Modern Society" in which the author analyzes the organization of the documentary and information segment of modern society.

Further Andrey Korenyuk proves in his article "Information Activity as a Means of Overcoming Social Orphanhood", that "the mass media, including the Internet, are the most important source and way of forming public opinion. Thanks to their activities, the public, businesses and other structures can be involved in solving the problem of social orphanhood."

The article by Victoria Prozorova, Candidate of Historical Sciences, is devoted to long-time preservation of digital records. Further, in the article of researchers from the St. Petersburg National Research University of Information Technologies, Mechanics and Optics Dmitry Brazevich, Victor Vasilenok, Anna Gerasimova and Irina Tolstikova the evolution of the world blogosphere as a special information and communication space providing new social opportunities and prospects is analyzed. It is argued that the global blogosphere is developing as a new public sphere, a special form of personalized journalism and business, a discussion platform for discussing topical social, political and economic problems.

The article by Candidate of Sociological Sciences Aleksandr Yefanov discusses a strategy for covering the election campaign in mass media from the viewpoint of their impact on electoral interest. The research objects are electoral processes in Russia and United States of America in 2016. The studies were conducted with the use of materials from news, several public and political programs on federal and regional TV channels, as well as posts made by Orenburg region residents on social networks. The applied methods were quantitative content analysis and discourse analysis.

The article by Evgenia Petrova from Higher School of Economics focuses on the research of the Common Government Services Portal (CGSP) in the paradigm of the anthropological method. The empirical base was collected in Rostov-on-Don (Russia) in 2016. The findings of the study help to expand the understanding the citizens’ perception of CGSP and the practices of using the Portal in daily life. The article by Volchenko Olesya reviews approaches towards measuring practices of Internet use and highlights major pros and cons of described indicators. The examples of research questions addressed using different indicators are also provided. All instruments are classified into macro-indicators that allow describing Internet penetration in a country or a region and micro-indicators that allow estimating frequency of Internet use by individuals. Micro-indicators can also be classified into indicators based on automatically collected data and indicators based on survey data.

And finally the article by Valery Kostikov analyzes the peculiarities of sport as a substantive sphere with its system of values, which are integrated in the development of the society, highlights the typological features of sport as a cultural phenomenon, presents models of modern social and cultural projects.