Digital reality: meaning and significance

Abstract

The article analyzes approaches to the study of digital reality and identifies the features of the concept of “digital reality.” The naturalistic, disciplinary, functional, structural, and communicative-procedural approaches to the study of digital reality are outlined. In contrast to these approaches, the article shows the possibility of studying digital reality based on identifying the dynamics of meanings and significance that emerge in subjects (individuals) who demonstrate varying degrees of immersion in digital reality through active, cognitive, and communicative interaction with it. Employing the procedural approach to the analysis of digital reality, the article identifies its ontological characteristics based on the “bonding” of natural, social, and technical levels of reality by information processes occurring within them. Therefore, the genetic aspect, the aspect of actual existence, and the semantic aspect of digital reality are examined. Within this framework, such attributive features of digital reality as “digital time,” “digital space,” and the “digital context of human existence” have been identified. The meaning of time in the digital realm is transformed in such a way that, on the one hand, it represents a set of processes of human interaction with technical devices and with the virtual reality formed in this interaction, and, on the other hand, this sequence of mathematical operations in technical devices contains the emergent quality of existence (“to be”) outside natural, social, and existential time. “Digital space” is a semantic object of informational meanings that exists within the conventions of a subject’s interaction with technical devices. For a person who, through a cognitive and practical relationship with the objectively existing world, forms the meaning and significance of reality, digital reality reveals a spectrum of the same meanings of reality, but in absolutely invariant forms that are open to infinite combinatorics. Therefore, the “digital mode of human existence” signifies the priority of all meanings reproduced by digital reality in the consciousness of a subject who perceives it in a value-based, cognitive, and practical relation to everything that exists as a whole.