Dear Colleagues,

Presently, our society has transitioned into the Digital Age. This transition is considered to be а digital revolution initiated by unprecedented advances of emerging information and communication technologies hyperconnecting humanity and significantly changing humans’ life. The digital revolution has a meaning beyond its straightforward technological one and represents the revolution in human consciousness and culture. Today, it becomes clear that a progress in such fields as ubiquitous computing, artificial intelligence, and big data is impossible without deep studies in the field of culture.

The digital shift in spiritual, social, and technological components of human culture can be considered as follows.

The spiritual culture of the digital society is sensitive to human personalities. In the digital society, where the distinction between real and virtual objects is blurred, people recognize technological artefacts as functioning according to natural laws, and spiritual culture will definitely overcome serious changes that mainly manifest in a new form of personality—networked personality. 

Social digital culture is manifested in the emergence of the new media, which are probably the most tangible phenomenon of contemporary digital life. The new media are very different from the media of the past and have to be considered as the mainstream of the social culture of a digital society.  

The technological culture of a digital society is the most sensitive to the abundance of data and to free access to knowledge. From the Enlightenment age, the idea of encyclopedic knowledge has constantly been accompanied by both scientific research and the educational system. The abundance of data not only created a new scientific and technologic reality—it also changed the status of technological culture. 

In recent years, an understanding has emerged that the abundance of data is a fundamental shift characteristic of the technological culture of digital society. A new concept called “dataism” created by the emerging significance of Big Data was born and became widespread. Dataism declares that the new culture is based on data flows, and the value of any phenomenon or entity is determined by its contribution to data processing. Needless to say the above emerging issues are the focus of the research agenda of cultural studies.

This Special Issue on Culture of Digital Society is aimed at researchers applying their theoretical and practical works in the above field. The key areas of this Special Issue include but are not limited to:

fundamentals of digital culture; history and philosophy of digital age; spiritual, social, and technological cultures of digital society; digital metaphysics; digital anthropology; digital personality; data abundance; dataism; new media; artificial intelligence in digital culture; and hyperconnectivity.

Prof. Ilya Levin
Guest Editor

• digital culture
• digital metaphysics
• digital anthropology
• data abundance
• new media
• hyperconnectivity