Ontological foundations of cyberculture in a digital society

Shakirov Al'fred Il'darovich ORCID: 0000-0003-4983-3997 PhD in Philosophy Associate Professor, Department of National and Global Media, Kazan Federal University 420111, Russia, Republic of Tatarstan region, Kazan, Professor Nuzhin str., 1/37, office 122 alfred.shakirov@rambler.ru

Simkacheva Marina Vladimirovna ORCID: 0000-0002-9020-9267 PhD in Philology Associate Professor, Department of National and Global Media, Kazan Federal University 420111, Russia, Republic of Tatarstan region, Kazan, Professor Nuzhin str., 1/37, office 122 mio_2@mail.ru

Technological and communicative aspects of the digital society have been studied quite well, their significance is obvious. The difficulty lies only in choosing useful conceptual tools and methods for analyzing the philosophy of technology, the theory of communication and the philosophy of communication. The use of the Internet has certain cultural aspects, but it is often doubtful that these aspects have any significance for the state and evolution of culture. The Internet does not replace any traditional cultural sphere, media or form of activity; at best, it complements their versions and makes them more colorful or even more complex. The situation is complicated by the ambiguity of the concept of "culture". Many disciplines dealing with the understanding of culture (cultural anthropology, literary theory, semiotics, critical studies of culture, communication theory, sociology, philosophy, etc.) are working on hundreds of definitions of this concept.

Even a simple review, not just an analysis of cultural concepts, becomes a multidimensional task. Nevertheless, the cultural aspects of the Internet are critical to understanding cyberculture. It is the generally accepted interpretations of culture that have a similar basis that most obviously provide the opportunity for this solution. The principles that make a general interpretation possible usually follow a semiotic approach and consider culture as a "system of signs organized in a certain way" ^{[1, 274]} and as a certain interpretation of this ^[2]. The point of view is taken as a basis, according to which the mass media of the appropriate form (for example, texts) are considered as the general basis of culture, and culture is identified with the media being formed or the content expressed by it.

Taking into account mainly the results and problems of semiotic theory and media theory, the relationship between communication and culture can be described by applying computational comparison as the relationship between social equipment and software. Communities that can be developed through communication can be characterized as the hardware of society, and culture as the software of society. By this comparison, we would like to emphasize that communication and culture, the existence and way of functioning of communities, the components of the form and content of social systems can be clearly differentiated. They arise independently of each other; at the same time, their simultaneous presence in the social system and their harmonious functioning are necessary for the entire system of society. Thus, culture can be understood as a program that manages communities. In a more traditional sense, culture is a system of interests and values chosen by a given community, which is preserved in communities and becomes effective in the social system, that is, it is the content of the social system.

The possibility of different versions of culture follows from the characteristics of the nature of culture. To clarify the processes that led to the development of the Internet, we must study the characteristics of modern culture, the symptoms of its crisis, as well as the possibilities and prospects of overcoming the crisis. Modern culture, obviously, implements the "program" of modernity. However, the unfolding program of modernity has led to unbearable social consequences, and as a result, there was a need for a radical revision of the program.

The postmodern point of view reflects modern problems of various kinds and the depth of the crisis of late modernity. The "program" of the postmodern culture of the late Modern clearly dissociates itself from the modern program. The most obvious sign of disunity is the "reassessment" of interests and values associated with power, the restructuring of the world-building individually and in the community, as well as the use of power and a radical break with certain situations of power.

The culture of communicative communities is characterized by the coexistence of virtuality and pluralism in its purest form, which is expressed by information technologies. Thus, cyberculture, the culture of communities based on the use of advanced information technologies, is necessarily postmodern in nature. The content of communities created via the Internet, the "program" that manages them, a lot of interests and values stored, displayed and used, obviously belong to the sphere of cyberculture as its key components. That is, we can characterize the Internet as an empire of cyberculture, as a new human world in which human communities, supported by the support of information technology, are able to understand and virtually realize human ambitions, goals, values and interests of a very different nature. As another important difference between cyberculture and traditional culture, we can highlight the abstract and impersonal nature of the creation and use of traditional culture and the concrete and personal nature of the creation and use of cyberculture.

The essential crisis characteristic of postmodern theories is connected with the crisis of modern human knowledge. One can find a great similarity between the situation of the late Middle Ages and our time. The people of the late Middle Ages had to observe a crisis of faith, and the people of today have to observe a crisis of knowledge. People in the Middle Ages lived in a very limited, hierarchical and closed society. This environment provided a safe, familiar and familiar environment for various members of society, but there were significant and sometimes insurmountable obstacles to the formation of personality. Changes in historical circumstances made it possible to begin individualization in large quantities.

Initially, the ideological background and supporting structure of personality development were created in a religious form in the reformation movements. They mainly sought to leave the formation of a person's relationship with God in the hands of each individual and make them a personal relationship; perhaps we could also say that they sought to make it a personal relationship and eliminate the influence of the religious institutional system in this matter. Individual freedom was created in the context of faith; or rather, individual freedom was required in matters of faith.

Communication with God has become a personal matter of an individual, if possible, without the mediation of priests, experts in the faith. It is obvious that the "technological" background of this decisive change was provided by the printing and replication of the Bible in large numbers. Nevertheless, the individual who developed in this way found himself in a world that was alien and hostile to him and which was full of unknown dangers, including unknown ambitions of other people, and no one protected him from these dangers. Anxiety, fear, and lack of essential security were among the basic experiences of the primitive individual, and he could rely only on himself. These circumstances determined the main features of the modern personality and created an alienated world filled with many selfish individuals ^[3].

This ancient crisis of faith has led to a new era in which knowledge about man has acquired a decisive significance, and now this modern knowledge itself shows symptoms of a crisis. Historical progress based on modern knowledge has lost its credibility. Served and justified by knowledge, the various horrors of modern history have become apparent; the offspring of the domination of abstract rationality endanger the entire human existence. The attitude of modern man to knowledge has become similar to the attitude of medieval people to faith. The reformation of knowledge is necessary and possible. The development of computer networks and their spread around the world create conditions for this reform in the "technological" sense. Knowledge reformers, builders and developers of the network are trying to establish direct, personal relationships between individuals and knowledge in general.

In this process, they limit or eliminate the influence of the scientific institutional system (universities, academies, publishers, libraries, etc.); if possible, they do not want the power of official experts of abstract rationality. The task of postmodern personalities, followers of postmodern reformers is not easy. They must personally bridge the gap between life and knowledge and realize themselves as "Internet citizens" who are just being born. The current state of man is nothing but "a return to a primitive (lightweight) way of communication at a qualitatively new level, which with the current pace of development of computer technology has become not only possible, but also increasingly biologically adequate" ^{[4, 226]}.

Perhaps it is understandable that a person surfing the Web feels in an uncertain situation (in an epistemological sense). Wandering around the web, without the help of experts from the scientific institutional system and the mosaic of knowledge, he is forced to evaluate all the elements of knowledge directly and personally. The task facing the entire human culture weighs on us with a huge burden; unprepared, we are thrown into this immense freedom, and no one will help us. We are left alone with the entire universe of knowledge on the Internet, a strange, unknown world created by other people and threatening us with fatal personal delusions.

Thus, the culture of late modernity is a culture of crisis. In the late modern era, people lost faith in the further validity of all the traditionally applied effects of creating totality, principles and practices of building the world. This is pretty much obvious; it is so "in the air" that any reminder or enumeration can only spoil the full perception and understanding of the situation.

However, a person cannot exist being "deprived of his world", since the existence of a person is being-in-the-world. Obviously, it is not by chance that Heidegger's ideas, so expressively stated in this question, were developed in the critical years of the 20th century ^[5]. Without methods of building a world that could be used with the hope of success, a person either diagnoses his own state of helplessness and exists in despair from being "thrown free" and analyzes human existence, or he satisfies his need to build a world by expanding his identity to being around the world.

The postmodern personality of the late modern, as a result of the complete relativization of reality and the unpredictability of achieving real reality, can rely only on himself. "I am the railing of a bridge on a rushing stream: hold on to me, who can hold on to me. But I am not your crutch" ^{[6, 13]}. The postmodern man of the late modern holds on to online barriers, and he is surrounded by virtual reality. At the same time, individualism becomes the main personality trait in cyberculture, "defined as the possibility of expressing freedom of views and interests" ^{[7, 277]}.

The nature of late Modern culture is also transformed as a result of the peculiar practice of building a late modern world. However, rethinking and transformation is far from an easy task in a crisis situation. We definitely need some kind of "world" for reinterpretation (in fact, for transformation as well), that is, an integral system (a "meaningful whole", a semantic universe, a worldview encompassing a set of experiences and views, etc.) in which the meaning of the thing to be interpreted can be revealed by its adaptation to it. However, in the event of a deep crisis, it is the world that can be identified as a whole that disappears, becomes uncertain or unattainable. When a person of late modernity is forced to expand his own personality and extend it to the whole world, his own world becomes the standard of all things at the same time.

In order to create our own personality as our own world, we need to rethink the circumstances that have already been rethought once. Revaluation and transformation of the social environment is the main task, and this is exactly what a man of the late Modern era does: he overestimates and transforms the circumstances of the individual given by society, and considers the new world of values created in this way as his own culture. Of course, such a reassessment is possible even without a crisis – artists often practice this – but in a deep crisis, it is extremely necessary and presses as a real necessity on a person who exists in a crisis. The world of values that developed in this way in the late modern era is cyberculture.

Culture creates world-like creations, cyberculture explores virtual worlds. We can consider several types of art as historical "precursors" of cyberculture (for example, poetry) or any other activity for "individual creation of the world". In the process of individual artistic creation, virtual, "world-like" works of art are created. The appeal to visual art in the context of digital culture is not accidental, it is the visual that becomes the basis for building relationships between people in the Internet space ^[8].

To create circumstances similar to the world, the artist must re-evaluate and recreate social circumstances. During the creative process, the artist's situation is otherwise very similar to the situation of a person in deep crisis; remember, for example, the requirement to disconnect from reality and other creative artistic techniques. True, an artist usually puts himself in a situation in which an individual of late modernity is "thrown", moreover, for an artist it is a life situation that exists only during the creative process, while for a postmodern individual it is a life situation.

However, the "web citizen", a late modern personality who creates a cyberculture and lives in it, uses other tools for virtual reassessment of the world than the artist. It is the use of information technology that makes the "web citizen" capable of reassessment. On the other hand, the artist uses artistic techniques adapted to his genre. Thus, the world of artistic creativity and cyberculture may be very similar in content, so their differentiation may seem somewhat unjustified, but due to the different nature of their production technology, they can still be separated.

At the same time, it is also of great importance that the use of information technology, in fact, allows everyone to understand the practice, very similar to artistic activity, and, as a result, reduces the "elitist" nature of artistic work and tasks and leads to the "democratization" of the entire sphere of art and makes it accessible to the masses.

In a sense, cyberculture is a popular art. But this is an artistic activity, to which an Internet citizen is forced. Cyberculture – like traditional culture – is supported by something. Traditional culture is supported by communities, and cyberculture is supported by a virtual cyber community supported by Internet citizens. The cyber community has been created by countless users of the world Wide Web. Web life is a kind of entity, the form of which is created by cyber communities, and the content of which is created by cyberculture.

The circumstances of web life are not social circumstances, but overestimated and transformed social circumstances; therefore, web life represents a new human form of existence.  Cyberculture in the strict sense of the word is a relatively new phenomenon. The understanding of its characteristics and novelty is very diverse ^[9]. The Internet is becoming a public sphere of communication ^[10], communities of people are united by a Network ^[11], the culture of which consists of a technocratic belief in the prosperity of mankind and is based on a subculture of people who engage in intellectual creativity on the web.

The main and natural source of cyberculture is the Internet. Nevertheless, traditional culture, of course, is also present on the Internet, indeed, its presence is important and plays a significant role in the use of the Internet. We can identify such representations of traditional culture on the Internet, such as books, newspapers, magazines, consumer goods, official administration, scientific publications, works of art. Cultural services that are available and can be used via the Internet, consider the Internet as a modern tool.

The initiative of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston is indicative in this sense. One of the most famous universities in the world has been displaying all its teaching activities on the Internet since September 2002 (MIT OpenCourseWare 2002). Anyone can connect to the educational process via the Internet for free. The leadership of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology hopes that their initiative will find its followers, and soon everyone will be able to get access to the most reliable sources of university knowledge.

An outstanding example of cyberculture is the World Wide Web itself, it can be classified as a cyberculture in the strict sense of the word. A lot of websites and links that create links between them are two of its defining components. A characteristic form of cybercultural life is the creation of personal (and institutional) websites and pages in social networks and the associated active and passive activities. The websites present a new type of cultural unit based on personal choices and decisions, built from fragments of traditional culture. This version is often incomplete and gloomy, but, without any doubt, it is personal. Personal content is quite noticeable to experienced visitors, even though it often contains exceptionally popular elements. Postmodern personality culture resembles popular, not "high" versions of traditional culture. It seems that the democratic nature of cyberculture not only put an end to the gap between popular and high culture, but also overestimated high culture and put an end to it.

If for a long time the subjects of the production of meanings were outstanding personalities — founders of creeds, philosophers, artists, scientists, politicians and public figures, then in the conditions of universal networking and digitalization, every Internet user gets access to the sphere of the production of meanings, and thereby to the generation of culture ^{[12, 173]}.

New digital identities are emerging, the most common of which are gamers. The gaming industry, which until recently was perceived as a domestic entertainment and an idle occupation, has acquired the functions of a driver of modern media culture, a conductor of newly formed meanings, images and narratives, a source of myth-making in modern reification.  All this, one way or another, allows us to talk about the emergence of a new phenomenon – digital (gaming) identities, to which a considerable part of active gamers explicitly and implicitly refers themselves ^{[13, 153]}.

The proliferation of "blogs" and "podcasts" points in this direction. A person leading a "blog" or "podcast" publishes on the Web his short, random notes, ideas, reflections and associations, in short, his opinion about everything that bothers him in connection with current processes. A web citizen, "blogging" or "podcasting", is a web citizen in itself, a full member of the Network, standing fully armed in front of us, and he is an outstanding creator of cyberculture.

The psychology of information perception in the digital world is changing, the reliability of information is assessed more by its popularity, attractiveness and popularity than on the basis of facts and figures. The absence of strict levers of control over information flows does not allow preventing irrelevant information from entering the network, which can pose a threat to the physical, financial, and mental safety of users ^{[14, 135]}.

The attitude of a person to his body is changing, both the image of the body and the experience of physicality are changing. "There are two main ways to mediatize physicality: body representation, which mainly affects the body image, and extended cyborgization, which affects the body schema" ^{[15, 663]}.

To describe the status of the existence of a digital object, "flat ontologies" have greater research potential, since they overcome the subject-object dichotomy of classical New European thinking. This potential is determined by the fact that in a situation of rapid development of technologies, not only human agents, but also things, in particular digital machines, have a new status of being ^{[16, 167]}. In general, flat ontologies deny the possibility of a privileged status of existence – from the (first) beginning to completely present for oneself – with the assertion of the thesis of the existence of all entities on equal ontological grounds ^[17].

It can be argued that speculative realism is the main and direct indication of a paradigm shift, since it overcomes postmodern correlationism, according to which (in the Kantian key) the world depends on the system of our representations. The external as a manifestation of being-in-the-world in the postmodern paradigm faces the death of the subject and the problematic of the relationship between the external (being) and the subject arises. The external is not reduced to the reduction of being, rather we can talk about the manifestation of being in the external. Object-oriented philosophy rejects both the first and the second, it excludes human representation from the approach to things, arguing that the main subject of ontological research are objects and relationships, and not the post-Kantian correlation between man and the world ^[18].

According to researcher Aden Evans, the basis of digital in the broad sense of the word – digital culture and art, digital media and technology – is a discrete code, mainly binary ^[19]. Joanna Druker believes that only a phenomenally accessible digital object can have an ontological status, while understanding the digital code "inside" the machine leads to undesirable idealization effects ^[20].

Thus, cyberculture differs significantly from culture understood in the "traditional" sense. On the one hand, traditional culture is created by revaluation and transformation of naturally given circumstances and forms the content of the social system as such, while cyberculture is created by revaluation and transformation of social circumstances and forms the content of online life, a new form of existence. On the other hand, culture is based on the real practice of revaluation and transformation of human communities, but cyberculture is based on the virtual revaluation and transformation of the practice of human individuals.