The article presents a study of the consequences of digitalization of modern Russian education and public life in terms of its impact on the Russian language and its native speakers. In the course of it two opposite estimates were revealed. One point of view considers this influence destructive, making the language primitive, not independent and filled with borrowings. The other one considers the Internet and digitalization as a whole as a means of developing, enriching and updating the Russian language, making it live and modern. Purism and anti-purism are also evident in the differences between conflict and non-conflict-related practices of digital hygiene in the field of communication, including those in educational environments. The Internet language and Internet discourse are either excluded from educational environments or are becoming one of the trends of their development in the conditions of digitalization. The fundamental principle of the research is the principle of anthropocentrism (as opposed to media centrism), which is expressed in the idea of language as a practice that implements the connection between a person and the world, where the media act only as intermediaries, tools. The leading method is trendwatching, i.e. detecting trends in the transformation of the Russian language through content analysis of the blogosphere -a special communication space on the Internet. In addition, the paper used a structural approach and transformational analysis to the study of language, which allowed us to identify the features of the blogosphere, where the Internet discourse unfolds. Among the features of the blogosphere the following ones were noted: cognitivity, interactivity, variability, polyphony, creativity, simulation and hyperreality. The descriptive method was used to determine the mechanisms of changing the Russian language under the influence of the Internet, including: lexical, represented by neologisms and erratives; semantic, including abbreviations and acronyms; and cognitive, which include metaphors, metonymies and lituratives. The selected mechanisms, on the one hand, expand the boundaries of cognitive existence, and on the other, lead to the loss of the possibility of full-fledged transmission and understanding of meanings. Finally, the pragmalinguistic method allowed us to justify the need to develop constructive practices of digital hygiene in the field of network and non-network communication, to determine their repertoire, characteristics and educational potential. The author concludes that digital hygiene practices based on the idea of the conventionality of network and non-network communication norms are insufficiently studied and widespread in educational environments, and that one-dimensional ideas about the vandal influence of Internet discourse on the Russian language are rejected.