Antinomies of Values under Conditions of Information Age

Abstract

The information age with its unprecedented acceleration changes a person's world and creates new virtual environments, forms of communication, and creative work. The character of these changes is antinomic to a large degree: information technologies give rise to super-powers, entrust a person with the power in time and space, but they create new challenges to individuality, freedom, and intelligence. Virtualization of communication, education, leisure, art following the evolution of high technology production, and consumption contribute to the substitution of real relations and amenities with virtual versions and simulacra. This chapter is devoted to studying of value antinomies of the modern age: information and knowledge, virtuality and reality, feelings and game, friendship and contacts, etc. Since values are the projections of the future in the present, this chapter helps to elicit to some extent the main trend of the social-cultural dynamics of the modern high-tech society.