Contours of Digital Reality: Theoretical and Methodological Aspects

Relevance. Digital reality and digital technologies are becoming a more significant part of social life, bringing to life new types of sociability, forms of social practices and interactions. It is digitalization that is becoming now the main vector of technological development and thus becoming an object of research reflection.
However, despite significant interest of numerous scientific disciplines to the problem of digitalization and digital technologies, still the “digital” concept stays utterly vague, there is no clear theoretical and methodological outline of digital reality as an object of research, the categorical framework has not been developed yet. This article is aimed to close these gaps.
The purpose of this article is to study the most important theoretical and methodological outlines of digital reality as a concept of socio-humanistic studies.
Objectives: studying the conceptual framework of digital discourse problematization that appears in various program texts which describe the experience of users’, experts’ and other types of reflection; analyzing potential institutional transformations caused by digitalization: exposing forms of subjectivity created by digital technologies; evaluating the general potential of digital sociology and “digital” methods of sociological research.
Methodology. In the article general scientific methods are used (induction, deduction, analyses, synthesis, idealization).
Results. The basic theoretical and methodological outlines of digital reality research have been studied, which can become a starting point of further development of digital problematic in socio-humanistic studies in theoretical as well as in practical aspect.
Conclusions. Studying digital realty is directly determined by evaluating forms of subjectivity brought by it, by analyzing possible perspectives and risks of digitalization, as well as by studying the broadest contexts of digital discourse problematization. The development of digital sociology as a separate sociological branch does not have significant basis, while sociological methods based on digital technologies are becoming more important.

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