Please meet the fourth issue of the scientific and analytical journal “Information Society” for 2024. The main theme of the issue is Large-scale dissemination of digital technologies. The articles in this issue cover the following topics:
Ethics in the field of artificial intelligence
Digital communications and the modern young generation
Business modeling of media
Media consumption among the youth of Donbass
Legal restrictions on the use of AI technologies
Regulation of the quantum communications industry
Technological solutions in oil and gas production and the agro-food sector
Technological capabilities of tax administration
Application of modern digital technologies in insurance
Features of the information society in Tanzania
In her address to readers “Technology: burden and benefit,” the journal’s editor-in-chief Tatiana Ershova wrote:
“It is a mistake to think that technological innovations have a one-sided effect. All technology is both a burden and a blessing: never either-or, but always both.”
These are certainly true words by Neil Postman, an American writer, educator, media theorist, and cultural critic, the author of eighteen books, including Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology (1992), The Vanishing of Childhood (1994), and The End of Education: Reassessing the School System (1995). As a humanist, Postman believed that “new technologies can never replace human values.
His media theory was influenced by the French philosopher and sociologist Jacques Ellul and the Canadian sociologist and philosopher Herbert Marshall McLuhan, whose works I studied with interest 17 years ago while working on the book The Information Society Is Us!
So Ellul surprised me a lot by considering it useless to differentiate technology from its use, because technology generates specific social and psychological effects that do not depend on people’s desires. Therefore, he said, there should be no place for moral considerations in the process of using technology. That’s it, no more, no less! However, some time later he turned to neoconservatism and even began to advocate curbing technical progress. He already considered the technical system a means of oppression and called it one of the factors of human alienation. In his last works, the scientist returned to liberal positions and even went so far as to say that the information society, being “the implementation of ideas of a socialist, anarchist and pacifist nature”, generally presupposes the liquidation of the state, which he called bureaucratic. Such vacillations took place in his life for thirty years.
As for McLuhan, one of his main research topics was connected with the use of technology as a way of expanding human capabilities. Its essence is that the content of any message is inevitably influenced by the technology used to disseminate it. He argued that the emergence of technology brings significant changes to human communication with the outside world (both natural and social) and reorganizes their way of perceiving the world and their way of life. He viewed technology as an extension of the human body and believed that it eventually separates from the human and gains power over him, acquires its own (far from human) logic and imposes this logic on man, whether he wants it or not. In the face of this alienated technological infrastructure, the human turns out to be a weak and dependent creature, with a strange optimism losing himself, like Narcissus, paralyzed by his reflection in the water.
Returning to the quote by Neil Postman, let us not forget about the complex nature of human use of technology. This “double-edged sword” will always remain in the center of attention of researchers. And our authors are no exception. Today, one of the most popular topics among our authors is artificial intelligence with its enormous possibilities and inevitable dangers. But when forming our editorial portfolio, we try to achieve a balance of topics and different points of view.