ANTHROPOMORPHIC INFORMATION NETWORKS AND CONVERGENT TECHNOLOGIES: A CHALLENGE FOR HUMANITY VS A STEP FORWARD?

Abstract

The influence of convergent technologies on the social processes of the information society is studied. It is substantiated that social modernization requires the interpretation of convergence as a strategic innovation. The lack of social control over the convergence of networks leads to the opposite - divergent processes. It is shown that the latter produce various forms of social exclusion.

At the end of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st century, humanity first received a universal tool for creating, accumulating, processing, saving and transmitting information, which became information networks. Having passed the stage of globalization, the latter revealed their innovative potential in the area of computing power and represented themselves as a space for the realization of social capital. At the same time, the concepts of a conflict-free society, all of which will be directed towards sustainable development, remain theoretical constructions to this day. One of the reasons for this is insufficient analysis of strategies for the development of information networks, which outline the contours of social reality and scientific, technical and technological progress. The vectors of civilizational progress in the plane of development of social relations and internationalization of scientific discourse determine, in our opinion, the main directions of social modernization.

The objectivity of such a philosophical assessment of the orientation of social modernization is based on the results of numerous applied studies in various fields of humanities and socio-political sciences. Their authors substantiate the opinion that in the information age social development relies on the institutional environment of innovation. At the same time, if at the beginning of the 21st century, innovative activity was understood as the activity of creating and implementing technologies separated from social life, then in recent years the opinion about the institutional nature of the innovation process is dominant. The mentioned forces us to ask the question about strategic innovations of social modernization as a method of correlation of social self-organizational processes.

As follows from the conducted research, without understanding and generalizing the future-oriented potential of global information networks in general and convergent technologies in particular, the civilizational progress of humanity in the 21st century risks losing direction and orientations. Over time, its trajectory will turn into a movement through a labyrinth, in which each subsequent step will not be correlated with the previous and subsequent states of society, and its social dynamics will finally be deprived of a reference point for a socio-cultural perspective. And such scenarios of social development have an objective basis. After all, at the turn of the 20th - 21st centuries, information networks are turning into means of projecting social reality, due to which the course of social processes becomes difficult not only for control, but also for understanding at the level of mass consciousness.