Digitalization of social reality: key discussions

This article is devoted to the analysis of the impact of digital technologies on the contours of modern society. The author emphasizes that “digitalization”, as an element of a new social reality, has become the subject of numerous discussions and disputes, the key vectors of which are: 1) differentiation of digitalization from similar but not identical processes; 2) scope and breadth of digitalization of various spheres of economic and social life; 3) advantages and disadvantages of digitalization of social reality; 4) directions, social consequences and the future of digitalization. At the same time, each of the selected vectors entails a number of questions that require scientifically based answers.

In particular, within the framework of the first discussion, such questions are: how does digitalization differ from automation, informatization or computerization? What indicators indicate the success of the digitalization process? The second discussion raises the following questions: Which areas of social life are covered by digitalization? What exactly does this manifest itself in? The third discussion raises questions about the undoubted advantages and obvious disadvantages of digitalization, and the fourth discussion focuses on the problem of the social consequences of accelerated digitalization. The search for scientifically based answers to these questions is the main subject of this article.

The author concludes that digital transformation gradually covers all spheres of life of both society and each individual, and over time it will become more and more obvious. However, today it is most noticeably manifested in the field of social communication, which is rapidly being embraced, even “enslaved” by electronic and digital technologies.

The danger of accelerated and unconditional digitalization lies in the fetishization of the role and place of digital technology and science in modern social development, which inevitably leads to the strengthening of technocratic determinism and scientism associated with the absolutization of natural sciences as the only scientific knowledge. However, the leveling of the value of the humanities leads to the leveling of the actual analyzing, reflexive activity of a person, to a decrease in the importance of a person in many, and first of all, social processes, which are supposed to be better handled by “artificial intelligence technologies” or cyborgs. But then digitalization, as in its time – liberalization, and then globalization – can become another manipulatively controlled political project or a totalitarian dogma, on the basis of which an active process of establishing a new world order will be launched.

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