The Ego-Medianess of Contemporary Communications as a Social-Philosophical Problem

Anton N. For­tu­na­tov
Lobachevsky State Uni­ver­si­ty of Nizh­ni Nov­gorod

The Ego-Medi­aness of Con­tem­po­rary Com­mu­ni­ca­tions as a Social-Philo­soph­i­cal Prob­lem

Abstract. The aim of the arti­cle is to ana­lyze mod­ern com­mu­ni­ca­tion, which became a self-con­tained sys­tem of social rela­tions, dic­tat­ing a new sta­tus to the sub­ject rep­re­sent­ed in it. The basic the­sis is that com­mu­ni­ca­tion as a social phe­nom­e­non evolves and leads to the dehu­man­iza­tion of social space. The author comes to a con­clu­sion about the degra­da­tion of its most impor­tant prin­ci­ple that is inter­sub­jec­tiv­i­ty, rely­ing on the the­o­ry of com­mu­nica­tive ratio­nal­i­ty by Haber­mas and the devel­op­ing of it. The old notions of com­mu­ni­ca­tion, as an immense space of infor­ma­tion oppor­tu­ni­ties, run into more and more obvi­ous ten­den­cies toward self-iso­la­tion of sub­jects, to the impos­si­bil­i­ty of find­ing a com­mon lan­guage between rep­re­sen­ta­tives of var­i­ous com­mu­nica­tive sys-tems. The research tasks include the iden­ti­fi­ca­tion of fac­tors that affect this process. In par­tic­u­lar, it is empha­sized that the tech­no­log­i­cal sup­ply of com­mu­ni­ca­tion links becomes a con­stant val­ue that deter­mines all infor­ma­tion inter-actions in mag­ni­tude. There is a sit­u­a­tion when com­mu­nica­tive tech­nolo­gies begin to replace the very fact of human inter­ac­tion. There is a sit­u­a­tion when com­mu­ni­ca-tive tech­nolo­gies begin to replace the very fact of human inter­ac­tion. Per­son­al­i­ty, forced into the real­i­ty of the com­mu­nica­tive tech­nos­phere, receives at its dis­pos­al unprece­dent­ed tech­no­log­i­cal oppor­tu­ni­ties, which make it extreme­ly impor­tant to raise the ques­tion of the ethics of inter­act­ing sub­jects. Com­mu­ni­ca­tion tech­nolo­gies destroy for­mer moral guide-lines, turn­ing social devi­a­tions into “norm”. The arti­cle rais­es the ques­tion of new eth­i­cal imper­a­tives in the media real­i­ty, based on social antag­o­nism and rejec­tion of the Oth­er, on a hos­tile atti­tude towards it. The results of the research­es con­duct­ed by the author lead him to the para­dox­i­cal con­clu­sion that the evo­lu­tion of com­mu­ni­ca­tion, invert­ed inside itself, gen­er­ates a new phe­nom­e­non, des­ig­nat­ed by the author as an “ego-medi­um”. The indi­vid­ual becomes the source and con­sumer of his own news, iso­lat­ing him­self from the Oth­ers, who appear not as a ref­er­ence group, but as ma-ter­i­al for self-affir­ma­tion. The human ele­ment in per­son­al­i­ty, in con­trast to this, begins to man­i­fest itself in over­com­ing the dic­tates of tech­nol­o­gy. The method of inter­pre­ta­tion and recon­struc­tion of social and philo­soph­i­cal con­cepts of var­i­ous authors, the method of sit­u­a­tion­al analy­sis and phe-nom­e­no­log­i­cal descrip­tion is used.

Key­words: com­mu­ni­ca­tion, media real­i­ty, medi­um, infor­ma­tion soci­ety, sub­ject, com­mu­ni­ca­tion tech­nolo­gies, tele­vi­sion, ethics.

DOI: 10.5840/dspl2018119

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