To the Issue of Information Impacts on Humans in Modern Society

Abstract

The paper considers the role of information in society and its impact on human consciousness. The authors distinguish two opposite trends: tolerant-optimistic and critical ones. The first position expressing moderate optimism (J. Liotar, J. Derrida, P. Kozlowski) emphasizes that the value of information is what can be said and what conclusions can be drawn from it. Hence, information is a measure of choice which leads to a certain degree of human freedom. The human perceives himself as a Creator of his subjective individual space. The world in which humans exist is a set of random discourses. The critical approach (Z. Bauman, J. Baudrillard, P. Bourdieu, Yu. Habermas et al.) says that the reverse side of the boundless openness and diversity of the information field is the absence of elementary boundaries which causes permissiveness and violation of personal space, the absence of any solid foundation for the worldview of the modern human. Immeasurable flows of information generate the loss of a semantic basis, intellectual dissonance which does not allow humans to distinguish "genuine" from "genuine", "feuillet culture" from "authentic culture". Particular attention is paid to the problem of communication as one of the main parameters of the information society. It is emphasized that this problem has its own history. It appeared in the end of the 19th century and became one of the key problems of philosophy, psychology, literature and other areas of humanitarian knowledge. The authors concluded that the key problem of the modern information society is the search for a new way of personal and social interaction.