Home – Home – Jornals – "Philosophy of Education" 2014 number 4

The article analyzes social phenomena, the structure and content of which are undergoing significant changes due to mass introduction of electronic means of communication: the Internet, cellular communication systems, geolocation and various software products that implement the functionality of these technical systems for various human needs. It is concluded that there is a qualitative change of the specificity of familiar social phenomena, requiring, on the one hand, understanding this qualitative specificity, on the other, the necessity of their understanding from the point of view of the well-known concepts of social ontology. In an intellectual environment, agenda-driven by the postmodern rhetoric, there is a tendency of ontologization of the social phenomena of digital age: one can often hear the opinion that digital technology is fundamentally changing not only the content of communication, but also the very nature of man, his relation to reality, including social reality; that the existing social concepts are not able to adequately describe and correctly explain the new phenomenal specificity, and there is required the creation of fundamentally new concepts, able to describe and explain the new social reality. There have appeared such fields as media-philosophy and trans-humanism. Indeed, many social phenomena owe their attention to them to communication technologies; they often produce a discouraging effect on government and society, not capable to cope with the negative aspects of these phenomena with the help of technical, political and legal means. However, it is important to understand that this problem of compensating for the adverse effects is not that humanity is faced with radically new socio-ontological phenomena, but that it is faced with a new qualitative characteristics of the long-ago described and explained social phenomena, resulting from the complexity of communication systems, namely, the condensation of communication environment by many numerical orders. This qualitative specificity requires not the creation of a brand new digital ontology or media-ontology, but reflexive rethinking of the balance between the costs of new technologies and their benefits to create an adequate balance of the ethical, legal and policy frameworks for the regulation of the sphere of public communications.