Polarization of the information society: Digital reset

Abstract

The digital singularity, positioned as a complex of sensational, sometimes paradoxical collaborations and innovations, is a stage in the new civilizational structure, which today is beyond human understanding. The contemporary generation becomes a builder and integrator of digital technologies of the sixth order that develops in combination with the metaverse and Web 4.0. Under the current political risks, post-pandemic recovery, sanction pressure, trade and information wars, increasing levels of cyber threats, and internal cosmopolitanization towards a multipolar world, leadership in the cyberspace development and the harmonious development of the information society become decisive for every country. Certainly, contemporary realities require a fundamentally new approach to developing the social-economic space and to ensuring the sovereignty of decisions. The study aims at identifying reasons for social polarization into network and digital segments and principles of the national trusted metaverse in the light of the social-economic space modifications. The authors conducted a study of the social perception of breakthrough innovations and the information and digital revolutions in Russia’s North Caucasus and Southern Federal Districts (N= 21,348). The result of this survey is a polarization matrix of the information society and the concept of its digital transformation under the recursiveness and generativity of intensively complementary and successive innovations. The strategic guideline of this concept is the metaverse in the paradigm of the close connection between economic development and social regulation through the integration of digital space and physical world in the perspective of unique opportunities for the information-communication interaction in a single trusted environment based on high-tech solutions of the Web 4.0 era. In the new realities, the digital transformation of the social system is inevitable: the dissonance in the information society’s perception of breakthrough innovations and the results of the information and digital revolutions indicate the inevitability of future changes.