Post-industrial society, information society, knowledge society. History and modern contexts

Postindustrial (information) society concepts

Society as a social system, the laws of its development have always worried scientists, politicians, philosophers. For many centuries, every major thinker, within the framework of his philosophical and socio-political theory, in one way or another tried to reflect the ways and principles of social development, his vision of the position and role of man in the social system and thus give a more or less general picture of social life.

A serious and, in our opinion, a successful attempt to investigate the concepts of post-industrial (informational) society was undertaken by N.O. Obryvkova in her dissertation on the topic “Electronic democracy in modern post-industrial society”.

The researcher notes that modern ideas about society are many and varied. The complexity of their analysis lies in the fact that the concept of "modern society" intertwines the characteristics of the organization of large communities, and an indication of a qualitatively new type of social system, and the attribution of the phenomenon to historical modernity. The most relevant at the present time is the theory of the "information society". For the first time, the idea of ​​an information society was formulated in a sufficiently distinct form in the late 60s - early 70s. XX century. The invention of the term "information society" itself is attributed to Yu Hayashi, a professor at the Tokyo Institute of Technology.

Japanese researcher I. Masuda put forward the concept according to which the information society will be a classless and conflict-free society of consent, with a small government and state apparatus. In contrast to the industrial society, the main values ​​of the information society are time and information. For I. Masuda, information is, firstly, knowledge of a relatively new type, suitable for further use, and secondly, knowledge, production, storage and application of which are really becoming more and more important for society activities, which gives rise to the corresponding technical and organizational structures. Thus, the increasing role of information and the informatization process is a historical fact that underlies the concepts of the information society. The Japanese version of the concept of the information society was developed, first of all, to solve the problems of economic development in Japan. This circumstance led to it in a sense, limited and applied.

Researchers from other countries have formulated their theories of the "information society" based on broader views on the structure of modern civilization. For us, the most important are the concepts that deal with a new wave of democratization in modern society. Among them, one can single out: the futurological theories of post-industrial society by D. Bell and O. Toffler, the informational concept of M. Castels, the theory of the third wave of democratization by S. Huntington.

American scientist Daniel Bell became interested in sociological problems in his early youth, trying to comprehend the essence of social structure and assess possible scenarios of social progress. Bell is one of the founders of the theory of "post-industrial society", a futurist and a leading representative of social forecasting. In his works "Meeting the Year 2000" (1968) and "The Coming Post-Industrial Society" (1973), he expressed the opinion that the rapid development of technology and science would make social revolutions superfluous, and "industrial society" would turn into a "post-industrial" one. New social relations and structures, Bell believed, will lead to the merger of opposing social systems: capitalist and socialist. The hallmarks of a "postindustrial society," according to Bell, are: the transition from the production of goods to a service economy; occupation of a dominant position in the management of society by a social group of technocratic professionals and "great scientists"; the widespread dissemination of "intellectual technology" (informatics, game theory and modeling, computerization) and the possibilities of self-developing technological growth with a broad development of theoretical knowledge. Bell explained the crisis processes in society by the gap between the "rational" principles of the capitalist economy and a humanistically oriented culture. According to his “religiocentric” version of the crisis of Western culture, overcoming this is seen in a religious revival. Bell strove to develop the technocratic post-industrial concept into a theory of the general sociological level. In contrast to technological determinism, he substantiated the value-based approach to the problems of technology, giving a multifaceted description of social life and including in the scope of analysis the spiritual-value philosophical and anthropological problems. Bell's views have evolved from neoliberal welfare state programs to neoconservatism. Subsequently, Bell questioned the very possibility of a holistic view of society, returned to the theories of the "middle level", limited himself to describing individual social spheres and subsystems.

D. Bell's method of studying society is characterized primarily by the recognition of the relative autonomy of three main spheres of life: social, political and cultural. Given their complexity and indissolubility, he considers it possible to separate them for the purpose of analysis, which makes it possible to penetrate much deeper into the essence of the processes taking place in society.

The first of the three "analytical spheres" he distinguishes is the "social structure", which includes technological and economic elements, as well as the system of social relations that is generated by the existing structure of employment, based on the economic dominance of some and the subordination of others.

The second "analytical sphere" is the political organization of society. The role of political institutions, in his opinion, is “to minimize the contradictions that inevitably arise in the course of the functioning of the economic mechanism, as well as to overcome conflict situations generated by other social contradictions” 1.

Bell attaches great importance to the third area - culture - because, in his opinion, it can bring stability and continuity to society in a "natural and non-violent way" that are necessary in the development process. The stability of society is largely due to the strength of its traditions.

Bell's position was largely formed in the course of polemics with representatives of other theoretical directions, and, above all, with Marxists and functionalists. Despite the fact that Bell distances himself from Marxism and positivism as the dominant paradigms of socio-political thought in the 20th century, he retains the "trinity" in his consideration of the evolution of society. Only instead of three formations of Karl Marx (pre-class, class, classless) and three stages of Auguste Comte (theological, metaphysical and positive), Daniel Bell considers the history of human society as a succession of three eras: pre-industrial, industrial, post-industrial. Some of the modern researchers consider Bell's approach to be more perfect, since there is no template in describing the main properties of the future social state. Let's consider it in more detail.

An American scientist understands a pre-industrial society as a social organization based on primitive forms of production, developing primarily in industries that provide extraction and primary processing of resources most suitable for satisfying the most essential needs. The industrial system marks a radical break with tradition and becomes the most important condition for the formation of a post-industrial system. Within its framework, the extraction of natural resources (extracting) is replaced by the production (manufacturing) of predetermined products; the requirements for the qualifications of the employee are increasing; energy becomes the main production resource; a person turns out to be able to make local technological and economic forecasts. Postindustrial society is a society where production (manufacturing) as a constantly renewing process begins to continuously influence the environment (processing), and each sphere of human activity is closely related to all others. In these conditions, information becomes the main resource, the priority is shifted from semi-skilled workers to engineers and scientists. Further improvement of human knowledge about the world is based on the use of abstract models and systems analysis, and the most important task of scientists is to forecast economic and social processes in perspective. The new technological basis of production changes the very content of labor. Knowledge in the modern post-industrial society is becoming the most important resource. Considering the social structure of society and emphasizing the huge role that information and knowledge play in the modern world, Bell identifies four main status groups based on the qualifications of their representatives:

• 1) a class of professionals;
• 2) a class of engineers and semi-professionals;
• 3) the class of office and sales workers;
• 4) the class of workers in handicraft and unskilled labor.

Bell divides the class of professionals (specialists) into three groups: teachers, engineers and scientists. It is the scientists, according to Bell, are the most important group of the professional class. The growth rates of this group in comparison with other intellectual groups are striking in their speed. If from 1930 to 1965 the size of the entire US labor force increased by 50%, then the number of engineers increased by 370%, and scientists - by 93% *.

Analyzing American science policy, Bell reveals its differences from the European model of interaction between the scientific community and the government. He notes the following features of the US strategy in this area: in new areas, applied research and development with the emergence of special problems, new forms and methods of their solution are created; in the field of theoretical and fundamental research, money is allocated on the basis of projects to those individuals and organizations that can convince the expert committee of the scientific significance of the project or of their competence as researchers.

Let's move on to the second analytical area that Bell highlights - politics. According to Bell, the political system takes on a meaning in a postindustrial society that it has never had before. Since politics is a combination of conflicting interests and values, the intensification of conflicts and tensions in a post-industrial society becomes inevitable. Due to the fact that knowledge and technology have become the main resource of society, some political decisions are predetermined. Since the institutions of knowledge apply for certain state funds, the society receives undeniable rights to present its demands to them. Formation of conditions for rational management of the social organism, balanced distribution and redistribution of benefits and ensuring maximum personal freedom of the individual - this is what, according to Bell, is one of the most important achievements of democracy in a post-industrial society.

Bell identifies three fundamental elements of contemporary public policy:

• 1) the influence of foreign policy;
• 2) orientation of society to the future;
• 3) the growing role of "technical" decision-making.

D. Bell believes that the most important result of all these processes is the transition in the post-industrial society of power from legislative and advisory bodies to executive bodies. This is due to the fact that in modern society, foreign policy has ceased to be "diplomacy" and turned into an endless "cycle of strategic maneuvers, where vital decisions must be made immediately, and new models of social change make the need for policy planning even more urgent than the adoption of laws. which requires initiative on the part of the executive bodies ”. In this regard, it becomes necessary to create a normative theory that could offer reasonable criteria for the functioning of a modern free society, taking into account the inevitable elements of centralized decision-making, expanding the possibilities of public choice and the need for reasonable planning.

For the functioning of society, the main question is: who is in power and how is it exercised? As part of the answer to this question, D. Bell proposes the following scheme that defines the differences between pre-industrial, industrial and post-industrial societies (table).

Stratification and Power 2

We see that in a post-industrial society, technical knowledge becomes the basis, and education - a means of achieving power. As a result, the elite is represented by researchers and scientists. But this does not mean that scientists are acting as a corporate group. In practical political situations, they are able to disagree ideologically, and then various groups of scientists can unite with representatives of other elites. The very nature of politics does not give individual groups (military, scientists, entrepreneurs) the opportunity to be monolithic all the time, and any of them, striving for power, tries to enlist the support of other groups. Having received power, the winners begin to make decisions of an intergroup nature and influence the distribution of power of individual functional elements, which entails a redistribution of influence within the system. In this regard, it is necessary to emphasize two important points:

• - firstly, scientists as a separate stratum in a post-industrial society should be taken into account in the political process, which has never happened before;
• - secondly, science itself is governed by a class that differs from other main social groups (military and entrepreneurs), and this implies a completely different approach of the technical intelligentsia to the political process.

Thus, being one of the first developers of the information society theory, D. Bell defined the future society as post-industrial. Focusing on the problems of political development in the conditions of post-industrialism, he questions the idea of ​​the so-called "participatory democracy". Despite the seeming possibility of all citizens to take part in decision-making, the allotment of power in a post-industrial society is shifting from one elite group to another. At the same time, decisions are made only by a select few - technocrats. The optimal, from Bell's point of view, democracy will be possible if:

• -forming the prerequisites for rational social development;
• - balanced distribution and redistribution of benefits;
• - ensuring the maximum personal freedom of the individual.

Assessing Bell's contribution to the general theoretical paradigm of "post-industrial society", one should note the systematic and multidimensional nature of his concept, analytically covering all spheres of society. His theory has remained relevant for half a century.

American sociologist and futurist Alvin Toffler develops the concept of "super-industrial civilization" in the works "Clash with the Future" (1972), "Report on Ecospasm" (1975), "Third Wave" (1980). Noting that humanity is going through a new technological revolution leading to the creation of a super-industrial civilization, he warns of new difficulties, social conflicts and global problems that the world will face at the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries. Despite the fact that Toffer's book “The Third Wave” was written a quarter of a century ago (1980), on the whole it has retained its relevance.

Like D. Bell, Toffler proposes a "threefold" division of the stages in the development of civilization. In his opinion, humanity is moving to a new technological revolution, that is, the First Wave (agrarian civilization) and the Second (industrial civilization) are being replaced by a new one - the Third Wave, leading to the creation of a super-industrial civilization. Toffler's reasoning is based on the idea that agricultural growth was the first turning point in human social development, and the Industrial Revolution was the second great breakthrough. Today, history is experiencing the onset of a man-made revolution that challenges the industrial era. O. Toffler calls this approach to the study of the development of civilization the analysis of the "wave front" 1.

According to Toffler, each civilization has its own set of rules or principles. The system of industrial civilization consists of six interrelated principles that program the behavior of millions of people: standardization, specialization, synchronization, concentration, maximization, centralization.

• 1. Standardization. The standardization process covered all spheres of life in an industrial society, from the system of weights and measures, banknotes and ending with the procedures for hiring labor and labor.
• 2. Specialization. The more the Second Wave smoothed out differences in language, leisure and lifestyle, the more it generated differences in the world of work. Strengthening them, industrialization replaced the peasant, a temporary and non-professional "jack of all trades", a narrow specialist and a worker performing only one single task when working in a specific production (F.W. Taylor's method).
• 3. Synchronization. The widening gap between production and consumption has brought about a change in the attitude of people to time. In a market-dependent system, time equates to money. Costly machines should not be allowed to stand idle, and so they operate according to their own rhythms. If one group of plant workers was late in completing their task, the groups following it lagged even further. Thus, punctuality, which has never been of great importance in agricultural communities, has become a social necessity. Social life also began to depend on time and to adapt to the demands of machines, certain hours were set aside for leisure. In all countries, families got up at the same time, ate at the same time, went to work, worked, returned home, went to bed, and all this happened in sync.
• 4. Concentration. Whereas First Wave societies existed on scattered energy sources, Second Wave societies were entirely dependent on concentrated reserves of fossil fuels. The second wave also concentrated the population, moving people out of the countryside and placing them in giant urban centers. Criminals were concentrated in prisons, mentally ill people in insane asylums, children in schools, and workers in factories. Concentration also took place in the sphere of capital movement: giant corporations, trusts and monopolies appeared. The concentration process has thus penetrated into various spheres of life in the industrial world.
• 5. Maximization. The second wave made the word "big" synonymous with the word "effective." Cities and peoples pride themselves on having the tallest skyscrapers, the largest dams, or the largest golf courses in the world. The governments of industrialized countries have become fanatical proponents of the idea of ​​continuous economic growth, adherents of the race to increase GNP at any cost, despite the risk of environmental and social catastrophe. The principle of macrophilia is deeply ingrained.
• 6. Centralization in the political sphere. If the agricultural interests of the First Wave were opposed to the concentration of power in the national government, then the commercial interests of the Second Wave dictated the need for a strong central government. It was the process of industrialization that pushed the political system towards centralized control. The emergence of central banks (in the US, UK and other countries) contributed to the centralization of the economy.

The scientist believed that these six principles constitute a single "program" operating in all countries of the Second Wave.

Civilization, Toffler believes, must have the following characteristics:

• - biosphere - the environment in which civilization exists and affects it, and also reflects and changes the relationship between natural resources and population;
• - technosphere - the energy base associated with the production system, which in turn is associated with the distribution system;
• - sociosphere - consists of interconnected social institutions;
• - infosphere - communication channels through which information is exchanged;
• - the power sphere;
• - super-ideology - a culturally determined system of views that structures the attitude to reality and legitimizes a certain way of civilization existence 1.

According to the author of the book "The Third Wave", by the end of the XX century. industrial civilization entered a systemic crisis, which manifested itself in social security, school education, health care, in the international financial system, which together gave rise to a personality crisis. That is why the onset of the Third Wave is not a direct continuation of industrial society, but a radical change in the direction of the historical movement. A complete transformation is taking place as revolutionary as the arrival of industrialism in the 17th century.

Toffler finds a hidden relationship between the energy crisis and the crisis of the personality, which indicates the contradiction and collision of the Second and the new, impending Third Wave. He states the collapse of all social institutions of contemporary society. Unlike Bell, Toffler does not undertake to give a precise definition of a new civilization. Definitions such as "space age", "information society", "global village", "postindustrial society", from his point of view, are unacceptable, since they do not give the slightest idea of ​​the actual dynamics of the ongoing changes and the tensions and conflicts they cause. Therefore, it is not the name that is important, it is necessary to understand the essence of the changes that have come.

Like D. Bell, Toffler believes that information, including the imagination, will become the most important raw material for Third Wave civilization. As the main resource of the new era, information will lead to great changes in the education and research system. There will be a reorganization of the media systems: instead of the cultural domination of several media in the civilization of the Third Wave, interactive, de-massifed means will begin to prevail, providing maximum variety and even personal information requests: a multitude of chips installed in one way or another in every house, hospital, hotel , a car, will provide us with life in an electronic environment 1.

Analyzing the structure of public institutions, Toffler, however, refutes the opinion that with the increasing role of information, the university instead of the enterprise will become the central link of civilization: this is the professional dream of representatives of academic science (including Daniel

Bell) "Developing the idea that workplaces in the era of the Third Wave will be transferred from offices and enterprises to the home, Toffler argues that it is the house, the" electronic cottage ", that will become the central unit of the future - a unit that performs certain economic, medical, educational and social functions.At the same time, the scientist notes that the house as a social institution will not play a central role in the life of society, as the church and enterprises played in the past, because the society of the Third Wave will be built according to the type of a network, and not according to the type of a hierarchy of institutions.

People of the Third Wave, according to Toffler, will develop new ideas about nature, progress, evolution, time, space, matter and causality. The civilization of the Third Wave will be based on a new system of distribution of power, in which the nation as such will lose its significance, but other institutions will take on a more important role - from transnational corporations to local governments. The construction of a new civilization will include the creation of appropriate political structures in states. Toffler believes that all structures, from the United Nations to city councils, will have to fundamentally change, not because they are inherently bad, or even because they are controlled by this or that class or group, but because they do not respond. the needs of a radically changed world. The fulfillment of such a task will attract many millions of people, and in case of resistance, bloodshed is possible. The risk is great, however, if the political system remains unchanged, we risk even more.

The American scientist proposes to build the political life of the Third Wave civilization on the basis of the sin of key principles:

• 1) the power of minorities;
• 2) semi-direct democracy;
• 3) separation of decisions.
• 1. Minority Power. At the turn of a new civilization, the key principle of the Second Wave - majority rule - is becoming more and more obsolete. Society is more and more de-massifed, it becomes more difficult to organize a majority or even a ruling coalition. Instead of a highly stratified society, which is an amalgamation of several large blocs, we have a configurative society, that is, a society where there are thousands of minorities. Many of them are temporary and form completely new transitory models that rarely merge into a 51% consensus on major issues 1. According to the scientist, the absence of political institutions corresponding to this new society today only exacerbates the conflict between minorities. The solution to this problem is to create new institutions that are sensitive to the rapidly changing needs of volatile and multiplying minorities. For this, humanity will have to modernize the entire political system 2. In the era of the Third Wave, according to Toffler, quasi-political institutions will have to be created to help minorities - professional, ethnic, sexual, regional, recreational or religious - to form and break alliances more quickly and easily. Humanity may need arenas where different minorities rotate or randomly come together to exchange problems, negotiate agreements and resolve disputes. Toffler also proposes to elect some officials by lot to strengthen minority representation in politics.

Thus, the Third Wave will demassify society. The politicians of the First Wave were "pre-majority", the Second Wave - "majority" - tomorrow they, predicts Toffler, will be "mini-majority" - the rule of the majority will merge with the power of minorities.

2. Semi-direct democracy. The second principle of the political system of the Third Wave involves the transition from the dependence of the population on representatives to the fact that they represent themselves. The combination of both is semi-direct democracy.

Officials now increasingly rely on the support of in-house assistants and advice from outside experts. Bureaucracy in the executive branch of government complicates the process of making legislative decisions more and more. Trying to create a counterbalance to the executive bureaucracy, representative bodies are increasing their staff of their services, further overloading the legislative process.

Toffler sees the solution to this problem in transferring part of the functions currently performed by a small number of pseudo-representatives to the electorate itself. Of course, this will require new institutions as well as new technologies. The danger of direct democracy, Toffler notes, lies in the excessive emotionality of people and their susceptibility to suggestion. It is assumed that the elected representatives are less emotional and more thoughtful than the public. However, since members of parliaments and other legislatures set up their own committees on matters that they believe are of the highest priority, there is no way for citizens to force them to form committees to tackle an overlooked or highly controversial issue. Therefore, the electorate should be empowered directly, through a petition, to compel the legislature to form such committees as the public needs, not legislators. Toffler, therefore, sees a universal way out in semi-direct democracy, that is, one where the positive features of both representative and direct democracies will be combined.

3. Separation of decisions. The institutional problem of government decision-making is equally important. It is obvious that some problems cannot be solved at the local level, while others are insoluble at the national level. Some require simultaneous action on many levels. At the same time, problems change, but power does not; moreover, too many powers are concentrated in one hand. The decision-making system is best developed at the national level, very poorly developed at the international level. Also, too few decisions are made at the subnational level - in regions, states, provinces, localities or in non-geographic social groups. For Toffler, many of the problems that national governments are trying to tackle are beyond their grasp. Therefore, humanity needs new institutions of the international level, to which it would be possible to transfer powers redistributed in accordance with new problems. This is not about political decentralization as the only guarantee of democracy. The question is that political institutions should correspond to the new structure of the economy, information system and other features of the emerging civilization.

According to Toffler, the above three principles should be guided in the creation of democracy in the XXI century.

So, the author formulates in his work a completely new concept of the future, the concept of the Third Wave, which is close to practice. Unlike utopians, who represent the future only in rosy shades, Toffler admits in practice the presence of diseases, dirty politics, and bad manners. The concept of practopia does not predict life in a static way, it offers a positive, revolutionary and realistic alternative. Third Wave civilization encourages individual development, encourages (rather than suppresses) racial, regional, religious and cultural diversity. It is a democratic and humane civilization that maintains equilibrium with the biosphere and does not fall into dangerous economic dependence on the rest of the world. Toffler admits that the Second Wave will not necessarily be replaced by the civilization he described: any forces can affect the course of history. The decisions that are now being made by people, heads of state, are capable of halting a new direction of development or, conversely, stimulating it. The struggle between the Second Wave people and the Third Wave people does not negate other conflicts: religious, racial, "fathers and children." These conflicts will continue to exist, with some of them only getting worse. However, all of them will obey the superfight, which will basically determine the future of mankind.

The transitional period in which the world is located is characterized by two phenomena. The first is to increase differentiation.

society, its demassification. The second is the acceleration of the pace of historical change. The result is tremendous strain on people and institutions. This tension makes it impossible for people to make competent decisions. Therefore, Toffler considers the main task of humanity to be the creation of a new form of existence - one where both people and social institutions will be comfortable.

In his later work Metamorphoses of Power: Knowledge, Wealth and Power on the Threshold of the 21st Century (1990), developing a strategy for modern American society to enter "superindustrialism," Toffler suggests:

• - to create a council of experts under the President of the United States, which would be engaged in assessing the social consequences of the use of high technologies;
• - to provide futurological planning, which makes it possible to predict possible contradictions and preferences in the future (the choice of certain strategies);
• - to improve democracy, namely: to constantly discuss the upcoming development with the people, involving all segments of the population in the political process as active participants in decision-making;
• - to create an "Assembly of the Social Future" from representatives of all social groups to determine the needs and directions of social development.

One of Toffler's recent works, “War and Antiwar: What is War and How to Fight It. How to survive at the dawn of the XXI century ”(1993) is devoted to the problem of war, which is considered from the point of view of the concept of waves of social development. This is a book about future wars and the fight against them, as well as about peace and war in the conditions of the XXI century, which are created by humanity in the joint struggle for the resources of the future. "

The works of Bell and Toffler aroused keen interest in the scientific community. One can note the desire both to polemize with the authors and to agree with their interpretation of the post-industrial

In the social sphere, Castells divides people into expert workers, who in the information age begin to play a central role, and into "general workers", representatives of manual labor. In the new society, workers of the first type are responsible for almost all areas, from technology creation to regulations. This is why Castells believes that educated skilled workers come to the fore in the information age. Their distinctive feature is flexibility and the ability to quickly adapt to the constantly changing conditions of the surrounding world. Workers of the second type in the new society experience discomfort, their number is decreasing. In the information age, the main social split occurs precisely because unskilled workers find themselves “on the outskirts of information capitalism” and can only find themselves in low-paid and fickle jobs. Based on the technological paradigms formulated by Carlota Perez, Christopher Freeman, Giovanni Dosi and Thomas Kuhn, Castells identifies the main features of the information technology paradigm.

• 1. Technology is created to influence information (as opposed to previous technological paradigms, where information influenced technology).
• 2. The effects of new technologies cover all spheres of human life.
• 3. There is a network logic of systems that use new information and communication technologies.
• 4. The processes taking place in the information society are not irreversible, they are characterized by flexibility. Corporations and systems can change by rearranging their components. Flexibility can be both a positive force and a negative one if the one who changes the rules of functioning is always in power.
• 5. There is a fusion of technologies in highly integrated systems. Thus, microelectronics, telecommunications, optical electronics and computers were integrated into information systems.

The main characteristics of the information technology paradigm are inclusiveness, complexity and network nature. Making conclusions, Castells refers to one of the leading historians of technology M. Kranzberg (1917-1995): “The first Kranzberg Law says: technology is not good, not bad, and not neutral, but its actual deployment in the field of conscious human action and a complex matrix the interaction between the technological forces liberated by man and himself is a matter of research rather than fate. "

In the second volume of his work ("The Power of Identity") Castells continues to prove the inevitability of humanity's transition to a new information era. If in the first volume all the author's attention is concentrated on the economic sphere, then in the second volume it is about the social and political spheres.

Castells argues that liberal democracy is characterized by the following two features:

• 1) the existence of a political sphere, which is a place for social consensus and expression of basic interests;
• 2) the presence of politicians who defend individual rights and freedoms as social values.

However, with the exception of small autonomous entities, there is no need to talk about the existence of liberal democracy, according to Castells. There are only temporary alliances that can be mobilized at the right time. Instead of the political sphere - a place for collective solidarity - there are only dominant opinions and interests that allow other people to be manipulated. Such a society is infinitely fragmented, without historical memory and collective solidarity. It is a society without citizens, and, after all, it is a "non-society." The United States and democracy as such are experiencing a similar crisis.

The processes taking place in the networked society make it possible to talk about the emergence of the so-called "information policy". Its essence is that electronic media (not only television and radio, but all forms of communication, such as newspapers and the Internet) have begun to occupy key positions in politics. Without pictures, sounds and symbols that manipulate the population, as Kastels notes, it is impossible to win elections and come to power. Arguing about the current crisis of the traditional political system and the accelerating rate of penetration of new media into all spheres of society, Castells points out that political and information communications are mainly carried out in the media space. Outside the media are only political outsiders. In the information era, the modified processes of elections, the creation and functioning of political organizations, and political decision-making have finally changed the nature of interaction between the state and society. At the same time, since modern political systems are still based on the organizational forms and political strategies of the industrial era, they become politically obsolete, trying to deny the information flows on which they are completely dependent. This is, according to Castells, the fundamental source of the crisis of democracy in the information age.

New technologies have changed the role of the media in politics, not only because of the effectiveness of the media themselves, but also as a result of the emerging dependence between the media system and the political market in real time. Since the late 1960s, when computers began to be used in the counting of votes, the so-called "voting strategy" has emerged. Its essence lies in testing various political strategies on focus groups of potential voters, when the strategies themselves change as the results appear. Ultimately, image makers and pollsters became, in fact, the main political figures: with the help of information technology and media, they could create presidents, senators, congressmen, ministers.

The growing influence of the media on the content of political programs leads to their total simplification. Images, coded messages and the rivalry between political heroes and villains (periodically changing their roles) in a world of false passions, hidden ambitions and stabs in the back are what American politics is, depending on the electronic media, explains Castells. This policy is being transformed into political virtual reality. But will the "American model" be able to adapt to the political trends of the information age? Castells leaves this question open, in contrast to the next question.

Arguing about whether European politics will be Americanized, the scientist gives an evasive answer. In the processes of interaction between the media and politics in the United States and Europe, Castells distinguishes the following differences:

• - European political systems, to a greater extent than the American one, are based on generally accepted traditions determined by the history and culture of each country;
• - some ways of solving problems, acceptable in the United States, are unacceptable in Europe.

However, the differences end the moment the candidates are identified and the political programs are drawn up. The media (in particular television), as the main source of political information and a medium of information policy both in America and in Europe, use the same news presentation techniques:

• - simplification of information;
• - professional political pre-election advertising;
• - personalization of events;
• - criticism of the political course of the current government;
• - information leakage and false information submission;
• - creating a positive image for candidates by inventing non-existent biography facts.

Comparative analysis of the situation in European countries of the 1990s. suggests that the media play a dominant role in the dissemination of information. Telecracy (the power of television) in France, smoothly moving to the next stage - "virtual democracy", the consolidated power of S. Berlusconi in Italy, directly related to the new role of the media in Italian politics - all these and many other facts allow us to draw the following conclusions. On the one hand, political parties in Europe, using the support of the state, try to stay away from the media. On the other hand, the limited access of political parties to television, the formation of public opinion from external sources not connected with the political system - all this creates a distance between the population and political parties. As a result, despite the fact that political institutions, culture and history make European politics very specific, the emergence of new technologies, globalization and a networked society force the political systems of Europe to accept new conditions and adapt to the new information realities that are already operating successfully in the United States.

Castells identifies the following processes taking place in society, which predetermined the crisis of democracy in a globalized society.

• 1. The crisis of the state as an institution that has lost part of its independence due to the globalization of information and power flows. In particular, this manifested itself in the inability of the state to fulfill the obligations established by law as a “welfare state”. The reason lies in the integration of production and consumption in global interdependent systems and in the restructuring of the economy and political institutions, which led to a departure from Keynesian theory and the reduction of labor parties.
• 2. The crisis of legislation is that the two basic principles of liberal democracy (national citizenship and the priority of individuality) contradict each other. National citizenship implies agreement with the majority opinion on important political issues, while the priority of individuality is expressed in the right to defend one's point of view.
• 3. Crisis of confidence in the political system caused by open confrontation between political parties. Consumed by the media system and dependent on technologically complex manipulations, as well as subject to constant political scandals, the party system has lost its true purpose and ability to be useful to society. It has become a bureaucratic rudiment devoid of public trust 1.

A manifestation of the crisis of democracy is that public opinion, expressed both by individual citizens and collectively, demonstrates growing discontent with political parties, their leaders and all professional politics in general, which is incapable of solving social problems. However, such distrust of the political system does not mean that the people completely refuse to participate in elections or do not care about democracy: the population prefers to vote for non-governmental parties, thus wanting to express their protest.

According to Castells, the processes taking place in society determine the fragmentation of the state, the unpredictability of the development of political systems and the ambiguity of the policies pursued by the governments of different countries. Political freedom is preserved if the people are ready to fight for it, but political democracy in these conditions begins to lose content, retaining only the semblance of form. This does not yet mean the onset of "formal democracy": democracy is preserved, since universal suffrage is in force and civil liberty is respected. However, the new institutional, cultural and technological conditions for the implementation of democracy in a networked society make the existing political system obsolete. The creation of new adequate polygic mechanisms is intended, among other things, to prevent the tyrant from entering the disappearing space of political democracy 1.

Seeing the many sprouts of new democracy around the world, Castells offers three scenarios.

The first way involves re-creating local self-government. In many countries around the world, local democracy has been designed to help societies flourish, at least within the framework of national political democracy. This was achieved in cases where regional and local governments, cooperating with their actions, achieved a certain decentralization and an increase in the level of civic participation. The advent of electronic media not only further stimulated political participation at the local level, but also intensified the fragmentation of nation states.

Discussed in the scientific literature and the press, the second way suggests using electronic communications as an alternative to political participation and the establishment of horizontal communications between citizens and government bodies. Online access to information using personal computers allows citizens to organize political debate and discussion in electronic forums, thereby bypassing control and imposed opinions by the media. Under these conditions, citizens form their political and ideological communities, thus bypassing the political structures established by the state and creating a flexible and easily changing political space.

However, this development option has caused serious criticism of the prospects for e-democracy. On the one hand, the emergence of this form of democracy as an instrument of political debate, presentation of political ideas and decisions is perceived as an institutionalized form of “Athenian democracy”, when a relatively small, educated and influential elite group of people owns important information. As a result, many uneducated citizens find themselves outside this new form of democracy, as was the case with slaves, women and foreigners in ancient Greece. On the other hand, the media often emphasize the "political show" with all its features, replacing real politics. The individualization of politics and society can make it almost impossible and even dangerous to try to achieve integration and consensus. It should also be noted that e-policy can and should limit the openness and accessibility of the e-democracy system.

To restore democracy in a networked society, the third way involves the development of a "politics of symbols" (that is, a policy of a virtual network society based on actual experience in reality) and the concentration of political interests on non-political events. Organizations such as Amnesty International, Medicine Without Borders, Greenpeace and many other local and international groups of activists and non-governmental organizations are the main, most powerful and mobile players in information policy. They speak directly to citizens, calling for their solidarity. Defending the interests of the population, such organizations consider their goal to be participation in the management of political processes in the state. Moreover, it is absolutely not necessary that such organizations will strive for power by introducing their candidates to government bodies at any cost. Without turning into political parties, they nevertheless stimulate new political processes and procedures that will cope with the crisis of liberal classical democracy on the way to creating a new one - electronic 1.

So, the changes that occur in the three main areas of life - production, power and experience - lead to the transformation of the material foundations of society, its spatial and temporal characteristics. Fundamental changes in production concerns the internal fragmentation of the labor force into two components - information producers and labor force, which leads to social exclusion of workers involved in network relations, and the separation of the logic of world networks of capital flows and professional experience. Transformation authorities connected with the crisis of patriarchy: it is expressed in a deep rethinking of the problems of the family and the individual, which in turn leads to essential changes in the field of culture and the media. Regarding changes in the area experience, then the main thing here is its transformation into a system of social interaction. All modern societies are subject to the influence of network logic, although not all social institutions follow it, - this is the conclusion of Castells.

Analysis of the theory of informationalism of Castells makes it possible to draw the following conclusions:

• - the theory of "information capitalism" is a significant contribution to the development of the information society paradigm;
• - revealing the essence of the informatization process and outlining the area of ​​application of information and communication technologies (in economics, politics and culture), Castells substantiated the role of information as the main strategic resource. Castels' theory contains constructive social criticism and outlines measures against deepening social inequality not only between individual classes, but also between developed and developing states;
• -the modern political process, according to Castells, testifies to the crisis of classical democracy. It is expressed in the crisis of the state as an institution, legislation and is accompanied by a “crisis of confidence” on the part of society in the political system as a whole.

American political scientist Samuel Huntington in his writings reflected the features of the process of democratization in a post-industrial society. Military-political and revolutionary events of the late XX - early XXI century. Huntington called the clash of civilizations: the meaning of his idea is that the conflicts of our time have not ended and are not exhausted, but have moved into the plane of confrontation between civilizations. Scientists from many countries have met Huntington's hypothesis with criticism, it sounded especially harsh in Russia and the countries of Southeast Asia. At the same time, despite numerous methodological imperfections and an obvious political and ideological bias of this hypothesis, it has not yet received significant refutations. Nevertheless, it was this hypothesis that brought world fame to the American political scientist.

In his book The Third Wave: Democratization at the End of the 20th Century, Huntington examines the global political process unfolding at the end of the 20th century: the transition of thirty countries from undemocratic to democratic political regimes. He calls it the third wave of democratization. This wave originates in 1974, when the political confrontation in Portugal entailed a change of regime in that country, which became an example for other countries. Huntington gives the following definition of the concept of “wave”: “A wave of democratization is a group of transitions from non-democratic regimes to democratic ones, occurring in a certain period of time, the number of which significantly exceeds the number of transitions in the opposite direction in a given period. This wave usually includes liberalization or partial democratization in those political systems that do not become fully democratic. " Huntington argues that there have been three waves of democratization in the world today. At the same time, he makes a reservation that not all transitions to democracy took place within the framework of these waves, explaining such deviations by the disorder and non-uniformity of events in history. After the establishment of democratic regimes in some countries, there was a return to non-democratic political regimes (rollback).

The structure of The Third Wave: Democratization at the End of the 20th Century consists of chapters; the name of each is a question that Huntington is trying to answer. “What” is the third wave of democratization? Why and How did it come about? "For how long" and "To what extent" will it influence the development of mankind? The American researcher provides a deep comparative analysis of the features of the emergence of democratic institutions in different countries.

Huntington proposes the following tentative dates for the waves of democratization and kickbacks:

• - the first, long wave of democratization - 1828-1926;
• - the first rollback - 1922-1942;
• - the second, short wave of democratization - 1943-1962;
• - the second rollback - 1958-1975;
• - the third wave of democratization - from 1974 to the present 1. A distinctive feature of the third wave of democratization in comparison with previous waves is globalization, since this wave
• 1 The first wave of democratization was associated with the American and French revolutions. The emergence and development of national democratic institutions in most countries continued throughout the 19th century, which is why the timing of this wave has such wide boundaries. Huntington offers two criteria by Jonathan Sunshine for determining whether a country reached its democratic minimum in the 19th century. The first criterion states that 50% of the adult male population has the right to vote. The second criterion assumes that the responsible chief executive retains the support of a majority in an elected parliament or is elected through periodic popular elections. Based on these criteria, Huntington begins counting the countries that have transitioned to democracy from the United States of America, where this process conditionally began in 1828. Then, by the end of the 19th century, the process of democratization took place in Switzerland, France, and Great Britain. By the beginning of the 1930s. in all, about thirty countries have established minimum nationwide democratic institutions. The first rollbacks from democracy took place mainly in countries that established democratic forms of government on the eve of World War I or immediately after it. For these countries, the concepts of "democracy" and "nation" were new and did not become dominant. The flourishing of fascist and communist ideologies testified to the return to non-democratic regimes in the 1920s and 1930s. The second wave of democratization was associated with the Second World War, when the victory over fascism and anti-colonial revolutions contributed to the establishment of democratic institutions in various countries (West Germany, Italy, Austria, Japan, Korea, Turkey, Greece, etc.). At the same time, in some countries of the socialist bloc, the emerging democratic institutions were brutally suppressed by the Soviet Union (Czechoslovakia, Hungary). By the early 1960s. the second wave of democratization is exhausting itself and many countries, mainly Latin America, are returning to authoritarian regimes.

Second rollback. In the late 1950s. political development began to bear a distinctly anti-democratic orientation. The return to authoritarianism began in 1962 in Peru, when the military intervened in the election process to change the results. Since 1964, military coups have taken place in Brazil, Bolivia, Argentina, Ecuador. These events were followed by a rollback from democracy in other countries. According to A. S. Madatov, “according to statistics, one third of the states in which democratic regimes functioned in 1958, by the mid-1970s. had an authoritarian rule. It is significant that during the same period many crisis processes have been observed in Western democracy. The poet covers almost all continents. Huntington explains this process by the following factors:

• 1) the crisis of legitimacy of authoritarian and totalitarian systems;
• 2) the unprecedented growth of the world economy in the 1960s, as well as an increase in the level of education and an increase in the size of the urban middle class;
• 3) major changes in the doctrine of the Catholic Church in the 1960s;
• 4) a change in the political course of the world's leading political forces (USA, USSR, European Community);
• 5) a demonstration effect, enhanced by new means of international communication, which allowed a large group of countries to switch to democracy 1.

Analyzing cultural obstacles to the spread of democracy in the world, Huntington reveals their limitations associated with stereotypes of thinking:

First, we are talking about the opposition of democracy to Catholic culture in third world countries, as well as the impossibility of economic growth for the countries of Confucian culture;

It is no coincidence that in many political and sociological studies of that time, not only the thesis about the inapplicability of the democratic model to developing countries prevailed, but also doubts and pessimistic forecasts were expressed about the viability of democracy itself ”. Third wave of democratization. In the fifteen years after the fall of the Portuguese dictatorship in 1974, democratic regimes have replaced authoritarian ones in nearly thirty countries of Europe, Asia and Latin America. In some countries, there has been significant liberalization of authoritarian regimes. Elsewhere, pro-democracy movements have gained strength and legality.

A democratic regime was established in Greece three months after the Portuguese coup. Then came Spain. In the late 1970s. the democratic wave reached Latin America and Asia. A decade later, the communist countries of Europe also began a gradual transition to democracy. Thus, the movement towards democracy of the third wave was of a global nature. In 1973, 32% of the world's population lived in free countries, in 1990 - 39%, in 2004 - 44%. (Cm.: Huntington S. The third wave: democratization in the late twentieth century. USA, Norman, 1991. P. 13-16; Zaostrovtsev A. A hundred steps back? // A business. 24.01.2005. P. 7).

• 1 Huntington S. The third wave: ... P. 35.
• - secondly, it is noted that Confucianism and Islam are very complex systems of world outlook, in which there are elements compatible with democracy; at the same time, Catholicism and Protestantism have elements hostile to democracy, that is, it is incorrect to directly link one religion (Protestantism) with progress, and another (Islam) with regression;
• - thirdly, the dynamism of cultures leads to the fact that traditionally oriented countries (for example, Spain) begin to develop at a rapid pace under the influence of the processes of globalization and informatization.

In the last quarter of the XX century. the legitimacy of authoritarianism and totalitarianism became increasingly vulnerable. If in the past the legitimacy of authoritarian regimes was based on traditions, religion, the right to inherit the throne (in absolute monarchies), etc., then in the XX century the main factors of the legitimacy of non-democratic systems were totalitarian ideology and nationalism. At the end of the XX century. all these legitimate grounds lost their strength under the onslaught of the democratic wave. Initially, totalitarian and authoritarian political systems were able to ensure significant economic growth due to either complete state control over the economy (the USSR and the so-called "countries of people's democracies"), or a high degree of state regulation of the economy (Brazil, Uruguay, South Korea, Taiwan). Energy crisis and sharp rise in oil prices in the 1970s. played an important role in economic development and strengthening the legitimacy of the regime in the USSR and the oil-producing countries of the third world. However, the sharp decline in world oil prices in the mid-1980s. negatively affected the development of the economies of these countries, and government regulation gradually exhausted itself. Thus, the crisis processes in the economy have become a serious economic prerequisite for the collapse of the legitimacy of authoritarian regimes.

Huntington, like many researchers, noted the close relationship between the level of economic development and democracy. The transition to democracy most often occurs in countries with an average level of economic development or in countries approaching medium-developed ones. It was the explosive economic growth after World War II until the mid-1970s, Huntington argued, that allowed many states to enter the group of middle-income countries, which indirectly created favorable economic conditions for the transition to democracy. The American political scientist noted that economic development became the basis for the emergence of new sources of wealth and power, independent of the state, which in turn revealed the functional need to transfer decision-making powers to other structures - public organizations, business groups, etc. ... Thus, economic development creates the preconditions for changes in the social structure and value system, which enhances the processes of democratization of the country.

In the third chapter of the book, Huntington offers practical advice for overcoming authoritarian regimes. At the first stage, authoritarian leaders begin to gradually alienate their associates: this is a common practice, as democratic leaders often do. If you persuade the dissatisfied with the situation in the country and attract military leaders to your side, then the victory of democracy is assured. It is important that the military refuse to support the existing authoritarian regime at a critical moment.

To consolidate new democracies, it is necessary:

• - education of tolerance;
• - ensuring the supremacy of laws over power;
• - reducing the influence of the military on political processes and

• - increasing the efficiency of democratic institutions;
• - prevention of excessive concentration of powers in the hands of one of the branches of government;
• - the provision by Western countries of all possible assistance to states that have embarked on a democratic path of development.

The successful completion of the third wave of democratization, according to the American political scientist, will not only bring democracy to non-Western and poorer regions of the world, where it does not exist yet, but will also lay the foundations of the “fourth wave”.

However, many political scientists are very skeptical about the irreversibility of the third wave of democratization. L. Diamond, for example, points to a slowdown in the processes of democratization. Tracking the trends of the 1990s. - the continuing growth of electoral democracy and stagnation in the development of liberal democracy, - the author notes the increasing superficiality of the democratization of the third wave.

A.S. Madatov explains the stagnation of democratization of the third wave by the following factors:

• 1) the weakness of the social base of the liberal democratic transition, manifested in the underdevelopment of the middle class, its insignificance or insufficient share in the social structure of society;
• 2) immaturity and insufficient structuredness of civil society;
• 3) the ineffectiveness of a multi-party system, consisting of many small political parties, unable to create real opposition and mobilize citizens to ensure effective control over the power structures;
• 4) low level of liberal political culture of citizens.

However, there is no need to talk about a new global wave of recoil from democratization. Most of the countries involved in the third wave of democratization no longer have strong authoritarian movements with an effective ideology. In these conditions, it is no longer possible to overthrow the democratic regime.

Exploring the waves of democratization, the American scientist F. Schmitter proposed a slightly different periodization and identified four periods:

• - the first wave conditionally originates from the revolution of 1848, after which by 1852 France, Germany, Austria-Hungary returned to authoritarian regimes of government;
• - the second wave is associated with the First World War, when, as a result of the defeat of Germany, as well as the collapse of the Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires, new states with democratic forms of government appeared in Eastern and Central Europe;
• - the third wave begins after the Second World War (1946-1970s);
• - the fourth wave was caused by the political coup in 1974 in Portugal, which eliminated the power of the "black colonels".

The weakness of Schmitter's periodization, according to Madatov, is the narrowing of the spatial and temporal framework of democratization, limited only by continental Europe. The merit can be called the allocation of the period after the First World War as a separate wave of democratization. It is important to note that the beginning of the period of the modern wave of democratization in the assessments of Huntington and Schmitter coincides.

Simultaneously with the work of Huntington, the works of Francis Fukuyama were published. The American professor argues that the third wave of democracy was caused by the first level of consolidation of democracy - ideology. Fukuyama examines four levels of consolidation of democracy: ideology, socio-political institutions, civil society and culture.

Fukuyama believes that the study of the specific mechanisms of interaction between the third and fourth levels will be the main task of future researchers of the democratization process. He explains the decline of the third wave, observed in many parts of the world in 1992-1997, by the different pace of change at the four levels of consolidation of democracy and connects with this the difficulties that liberal democracy will have to face in the future at the third and especially at the fourth level.

Often the works of Huntington and Fukuyama are analyzed in parallel, finding much in common in their reasoning. "The French researcher Guy Erme, agreeing with the opinion of Huntington and Fukuyama regarding the importance of culture in democratization processes, noted that" democracy is a culture to a greater extent than a system of institutions<...>The essence of the idea is that democracy is based on the slow acquisition of tolerance and awareness of its limits: after all, a democratic government cannot solve all issues and is valuable more by its nature than by the results of activities, which do not necessarily turn out to be better in all respects than under illiberal rule. "

It is impossible not to mention another important work of Huntington, which brought him worldwide fame. We are talking about the article "The Clash of Civilizations", published in 1993 in the journal "Foreign Affairs" and was a kind of counterbalance to the acclaimed article by Fukuyama, entitled "The End of History" (1989). In 1996, Huntington's book "The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order" was published, which develops the ideas formulated in the article.

If Fukuyama spoke about the inevitable victory of liberal democracy in the post-totalitarian world, then Huntington sees the picture of the world after the end of the Cold War in a darker form: he proposed abandoning illusions about world harmony after the victory of Western liberal democracy. Huntington identifies eight civilizations of the modern world: Western, Confucian, Japanese, Islamic, Hindu, Orthodox Slavic, Latin American and African. The author asks the question: is democracy with all its attributes exclusively a product of Western civilization or is it a universal human value? He believes that “on a superficial level, much of Western culture has really permeated the rest of the world. But at a deep level, Western ideas and perceptions are fundamentally different from those inherent in other civilizations. In Islamic, Confucian, Hindu, Buddhist and Orthodox cultures, such Western ideas as individualism, liberalism, constitutionalism, human rights, equality, freedom, rule of law, democracy, free market, separation of church and state are almost not found response. Western efforts to promote these ideas often provoke hostile reactions against "human rights imperialism" and help to reinforce the original values ​​of their own culture. The essence of Huntington's concept is that the rivalry of superpowers has been replaced by a clash of civilizations. The author emphasizes that for the first time global politics is becoming multipolar and multi-civilizational, in contrast to the former bipolar and ideologized regional politics. The most important form of grouping of states is not blocs, as in the period of the Cold War, but civilizations characterized primarily by religious and cultural characteristics. The main conflicts of our time are not interstate, but civilizational in nature, which makes them especially acute, since civilizations are much more irreconcilable, less prone to compromises than blocs or states formed on the basis of national interests or the "balance of power."

Investigating the concepts of the "third wave of democratization" and "clash of civilizations" proposed by Huntington, many scientists created their concepts and theories about possible options for the development of civilization and the prerequisites for a future based on globalism. Thus, the American scientist of Polish origin Zbigniew Brzezinski in his work “Choice. Global dominance or global leadership? " (2004) agrees with Huntington that the third wave of democratization is a turning point in the development of both democracy itself and all of humanity. Brzezinski believes that today the global American hegemony is the leading factor in international life. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States felt almost invulnerable, and this self-confidence was in every possible way supported by the admiration of other countries. Operations against Iraq (1991, 2003) and in Kosovo (1999) have demonstrated not only the primacy of the United States in the use of high technologies in military affairs and impunity for striking other countries, but also the perception of American superiority abroad.

Thus, the concept of the “third wave of democratization” declared by Huntington aroused great interest in the circles of the political science community, which manifested itself in a whole series of publications expressing both positive and negative assessments and predicting the features of the development of the third and subsequent fourth waves. This issue has not lost its sharpness. Scientific discussions revolve around the problems associated with assessing the role of the United States in promoting liberal democratization on a global scale, as well as with the admissibility of certain means to achieve this goal.

Thus, based on the foregoing, several significant assumptions can be made regarding the development of the information society at the present stage and the use of ICT in the political system. The theories of Bell, Toffler, Castells and Huntington were considered within the framework of the leading trends in the study of post-industrial society:

• - globalization;
• - informatization;
• - democratization.

These processes are uneven in the world and contribute to the diversity of forms of democracy. Although democracy emerges under industrialism, the transition to a new society requires political modernization: broad citizen involvement in decision-making and control over the state bureaucracy and business structures. In these conditions, information technologies are one of the most important factors influencing the formation of society in the XXI century. They open up tremendous opportunities for achieving mutually reinforcing goals: ensuring sustainable economic growth, increasing social welfare, achieving social harmony, strengthening democracy, transparent and responsible international governance.

Thus, it can be noted that at the end of the XX century. there were two views on the prospects for the development of ICT in political processes: optimistic and pessimistic. Optimistic expectations of the positive impact of information technology on the development of society are linked to the hope that ICT will be able to assert the shaken reputation of democracy. The supporter of the futurological concept G.I. Vainshtein, considering the problem in an optimistic context, points to

The American researcher B. Barber emphasizes that the use of the latest mass communications allows you to move to a new era - the era of referendums and assemblies, when citizens themselves make decisions without transferring this function to the representative authorities. The positive attitude towards the use of information technology is confirmed by a survey conducted in 14 European countries: 75% of prominent politicians in elected office believe that "information technology contributes to the strengthening of democracy."

Along with the optimistic forecasts for the use of information technologies, there was growing anxiety associated with the increased possibility of manipulating public opinion, strengthening the power hierarchy with their help, and realizing the vested interests of media owners. Will not all this lead to the creation of new forms of totalitarianism? There were also doubts about the increase in the political activity of citizens thanks to information technology in connection with the growth of absenteeism and the increase in the number of protest electorate. The actual use of the Internet in one of the most advanced countries in the field of information technology, the United States, where more than 70% of the population have access to the Internet, is much lower than one would expect. In the article "A Revolution That Has Not Began Yet" American scientists cite data: during the 2000 presidential elections, only 6% the electorate constantly visited the websites of candidates in order to obtain the necessary information. According to research by the Pew Research Center, no more than 35% of American citizens with access to the World Wide Web receive political information from the Internet. Researchers P. Golding and E. Wilhelm believe that despite the availability of Internet resources for all users, in reality, political activity on the Internet will only increase among those who have been involved in the political process even without the Internet. The famous American political scientist B. Bimber, who heads the Center for the Study of Information Technology and Society at the University of California, argues based on his research on election campaigns in 1996, 1998 and 2000 that “the Internet, firstly, does not encourage, but only complements traditional means of political communication and, secondly, does not encourage those who have little interest in politics to become active, but only enriches those who are already interested in it with new opportunities ”.

Negative forecasts regarding the role of information technologies in the development of the information society and democracy are associated with the works of Art. Ray, M. Dogan and others. The authors note the following dangerous tendencies:

• - the huge growth of information accumulated and disseminated via the Internet leads to the clogging of the World Wide Web with "informational rubbish" and information overload. In these conditions, a kind of defensive reaction of the majority of citizens is to limit the use of online political sources;
• - the problem of democracy today is not a lack of mechanisms for the political participation of citizens, but the disillusionment of the masses in politics itself, in the strengthening of their dissatisfaction with the activities of political institutions, which causes a loss of faith in the ability of the existing political system to adequately respond to public needs;
• - “digital divide” gave rise to predictions about the emergence of a new online elite, which influences the decision-making process, while the majority of the population is excluded from it;
• - hacking, which is the use of Internet technologies with the aim of harming corporate or individual users of the World Wide Web, has become an integral part of information technology; The Internet opens up opportunities not only for activating citizens in political processes, but also for the development of the electronic space by extremist organizations of various kinds (neo-Nazis, skinheads, racists, religious fanatics) in order to spread their views and involve new followers in their organizations. After the appearance on the World Wide Web of the first extremist site "Storm Front" in 1995, which was created by one of the former leaders of the Ku Klus Klan, D. Black, more and more sites appear on the Internet that promote ideas of violence, racial and religious discrimination and intolerance.

The negative trends noted above indicate that the role of information technologies in democratic processes does not have the same unambiguous character that was emphasized in the futurological concepts of the 1970s. The crisis of the basic institutions of democracy in developed and developing countries, recorded in the works of Castells, is confirmed by the following signs:

• - growing distrust of politicians and political institutions, which permeates all social strata;
• - scandals related to corruption of high-ranking officials.

In countries with a transitional stage of development, in particular in Russia, public policy has become a kind of profitable business. Despite the fact that ICTs are actively being introduced into the sphere of public administration, the population totally distrusts politicians. The norm of elective representation - 25% - automatically turns the results of any elections into fiction. However, this mistrust also has a positive side: dissatisfaction with political institutions stimulates the search for new forms of democracy that can adequately function in a post-industrial society. Under the influence of new information technologies, there are shifts towards openness and transparency of the political process, increased participation of citizens in public life, changes in functions and an increase in the number of political actors, pluralization of interests. All this allows us to speak about the emergence of such a promising form of democracy as "electronic", which is associated with the development of the world information network Internet.

Thus, an analysis of the theoretical concepts of Bell, Toffer, Castells and Huntington, as well as the assumptions made about the prospects for introducing ICT into political processes and public administration, suggest that the movement towards an information society is an inevitable, gradual and very long-term process. World experience shows that each country goes to the information society in its own way, which is determined by the prevailing political, socio-economic and cultural conditions.

• See: Obryvkova I.O. Electronic democracy in modern post-industrial society: Dis. for a job. uch. Art. Cand. polit, science. SPb., 2006.
• Masuda Y. The Information Society as Postindustrial Society. Wash. 1983. P. 29.
• BellD. The coming post-industrial society. M, 1999.S. 293.
• According to Bell, it is this combination of target orientation and research funding that has created unique opportunities for success, achieved by focusing on specific goals and mobilizing large resources to achieve them, as well as stimulating the high scientific output of specialists who can quickly prove themselves as creative personalities. ... Bell drew attention to the fact that science in the United States is an emerging force acting independently. However, due to the lack of a unified scientific policy, it is devoid of internal unity and is still supported by the authority of the government. As a result, science (like industry, workers, farmers and the poor) is one of the contenders for national resources, but due to the absence of a central body for managing scientific policy, it becomes an appendage of political and bureaucratic processes, depending on the specific interests of the relevant departments. Thus, democratization in the scientific sphere boils down to increasing the influence of political structures on the functioning of society. The allocation of the main resource of post-industrial society - scientific personnel - to sectors (industry, government, universities) and functions (production, research and teaching) is the basis of any well-thought-out policy regarding the use of limited social resources. In a post-industrial society, a more perfect social
In the same place. S. 671-672.
• To prove that the media plays an important role in politics, Castells makes the following arguments. On the one hand, the media seemingly impose on society a political choice that is currently beneficial to the government. However, Castells refutes this assumption, arguing that the media are very different from each other and their preferences are highly dependent on the situation in the country, the period of time and the specifics of the media themselves. He gives an example when in the 1990s. In Italy, the media supported a judicial anti-corruption campaign against the government of Silvio Berlusconi, despite the fact that Berlusconi was the owner of three private national television channels at the time. On the other hand, the population can often easily succumb to political manipulation through state media channels, without trying to find more reliable and accurate information.
• Explaining what has been said, Castells recalls that French President François Mitterrand had an extramarital affair for a long time, from which he had a daughter. This fact was never used against him in a political struggle, despite a sufficient number of enemies, and was not touched upon in numerous interviews given by the president. The parallel between Castells and the scandal surrounding US President Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky is obvious. Until the end of the 1980s. Most of European television was controlled by the state, so political leaders' access to television was carefully regulated, and paid political advertising was until the late 1990s. was banned. Even with the liberalization and privatization of television, private channels have continued to pursue a self-regulatory policy of information that allows them to maintain the trust of viewers.
• Castells A /. The Power of Identity. Oxford, 1997.
• As a rule, candidates who post this or that information on electronic networks are not responsible for it when they communicate electronically by the electorate. Political control and electronic accessibility turn out to be mutually exclusive in the existing political system. If political parties and organizations control political processes, and the political participation of citizens in the network is an integral part of information policy, this may result in the formalization of elections and political decision-making. At the same time, the use of the Internet by citizens as a tool for obtaining information, communication and organization can lead to a departure from the main state political course, the consequences of which are difficult to predict.
HuntingtonS. The third wave: ... P. 52.
• Democracy as a political process: [Electronic resource]: energy-mgn.nm.ru/polit/152.htm
• Diamond argues that the number of liberal democracies among all those in the world declined from 85% in 1990 to 65% in 1995. During these years, in many of the most important young democracies of the third wave (Turkey, Brazil and Pakistan), the level of democracy, as measured by the volume of political rights and civil liberties fell markedly. At the same time, political freedom has degenerated in a number of long-established democracies in the developing world, in particular in India, Sri Lanka, Colombia and Venezuela. Thus, if we exclude countries such as North Korea, Poland and South Africa, the general development trend of the 1990s. is a gradual decline in freedom in electoral democracies. Diamond calls this a worrying factor leading to the decline of the democratic wave. (See: L. Diamond Has the Third Wave of Democratization Passed? // Polis. 1999. No. 1. P. 18).
• Madatov A.S. Democratization: features of its modern wave // ​​Bulletin of the Peoples' Friendship University of Russia. Ser. "Political science". 2001. No 3.P. 55.
• Schmitter R. Democratization. Waves of // Encyclopedia of Democraty. N. Y.1995. Vol. 2.P. 346-347.
• Madatov A.S. Spatial-temporal dimensions of democracy // Social sciences and modernity. 1998. No. 1. S. 65.
• 1 F. Fukuyama is Professor of International Political Economy at Johns Hopkins University of America, former Deputy Director of Policy Planning at the US Department of State, author of The End of History and the Last Man (1992), Trust: Social Virtues and the Path to Prosperity (1995 ), etc. 21. The level of ideology is a sphere of rational self-consciousness, in which changes in the perception of the legitimacy of democracy can occur quite unexpectedly. At the same time, ideology is understood as a set of normative beliefs about the correctness or incorrectness of democratic institutions and the market structures that support them.
• The level of socio-political institutions includes the constitution, judicial system, party system, market structures, etc. Institutions do not change as quickly as ideas of legitimacy, but they are easier to manipulate with the help of state information policy. It is at this level that the political struggle has been waged lately, when new democracies, relying on the help of the "old democracies", sought to privatize state enterprises, write new constitutions, consolidate parties, etc.
• The level of civil society is associated with the creation of social structures that are separated from the state and underlie the political institutions of democracy. These structures are taking shape even more slowly than political institutions. They are more difficult to manipulate with the help of state policy, they are inversely dependent on state power, increasing as the state retreats and vice versa.
• The level of culture includes family, religion, moral values, ethnic consciousness, "citizenship", historical traditions. If democratic institutions are based on a healthy civil society, then civil society, in turn, is based on the level of culture. Changes in it occur at the slowest pace. (See: Fukuyama F. The supremacy of culture // Russian journal. 1997. № 7).
• Batalov E. Ya. World development and world order (analysis of modern American concepts). M., 2005; Baranov VP Toffler-Fukuyama-Huntington doctrine and the reality of the world: [Electronic resource]: www.zhumal.ru/nepofoda/tfh doktrine.html; Rakhshmir P. Agenda for the XXI century: the clash of civilizations // New companion (Perm business and political newspaper). December 26, 2000. No. 45 (151): [Electronic resource]: www.nk.permonline.ru.
In the same place. S. 143. Tqffler A. The future Shock. N. Y. 1970. Quoted. Quoted from: Weinstein G.I. Decree. op. P. 19.
• In the same place.
• Bogdanovskaya I. Yu. Electronic state // Social sciences and modernity. 2004. No. 6.P. 108.
• One of the first such organizations was the so-called Theater of Electronic Riots (TEB), which was created in the mid-1990s. American artist and performer Ricardo Dominguez. A group of people who support his organization began to express their social protest with the help of Internet technologies by blocking or overloading the websites of some political organizations, whose activities they were not happy with. These actions were followed by others - not only of hacker organizations, but also of individual hackers. At the same time, there is an opinion, expressed not only by the hackers themselves, that their actions are associated with the need to identify the vulnerabilities of modern information technologies, thereby helping the process of improving software and security systems. However, if such a point of view has a right to exist, then the deliberate, malicious use of the weaknesses of ICT by advanced hacker users in order to destabilize the entire information system, undoubtedly, prevails in most cases of hacking. Sociologist St. Ray, one of the founders and theorist of the TEB group, argues that conventional theoretical concepts view e-democracy too narrowly. He believes that in modern democratic practice, "electronic discussions" should give way to "electronic demonstrations" and other forms of "electronic civil disobedience".
• See / Dogam A /. Erosion of trust in developed democracies // World Economy and International Relations. 1999. No. 6. P. 39.
• See: Series Y. Electronic Russia in the Dark // Man and Labor. 2004. No. 11. P. 52.
• M. Murru identifies the following democratic properties of the Internet, which make it possible to use it in political processes: interactivity, dialogue and non-hierarchical types of communication; low costs for users; speed; lack of national and other borders; anonymity. (See: Murru M. E. E-Govemmcnt: from Real to Virtual Democracy. Brussels, 2003. P. 3).

Postindustrial society concept was nominated by an American sociologist and political scientist Daniel Bell(b. 1919), professor at Harvard and Columbia Universities. In his book "The Coming Post-Industrial Society", the size of the gross domestic product (GDP) per capita was taken as a criterion for classifying the state as such a society. On the basis of this criterion, the historical periodization of societies was proposed: pre-industrial, industrial and post-industrial. Bell considers the ideological basis of this classification to be "axiological determinism" (the theory of the nature of values). A pre-industrial society is characterized by a low level of production development and a small volume of GDP. This category includes most of the states of Asia, Africa and Latin America. European countries, USA, Japan, Canada and some others are at the stage of industrial development. The post-industrial stage begins in the 21st century.

According to Bell, this stage is mainly associated with computer technology, telecommunications. It is based on four innovative technological processes. First, the transition from mechanical, electrical, electromechanical systems to electronic has led to an incredible an increase in the speed of information transfer... For example, the operational speed of a modern computer is measured in nanoseconds and even picoseconds. Secondly, this stage is associated with miniaturization, that is, a significant change in magnitude, "compression" of structural elements that conduct electrical impulses. Thirdly, it is characterized by digitalization, that is, discrete transmission of information by means of digital codes.

Finally, modern software allows you to quickly and simultaneously solve various problems without knowing any special language. Thus, post-industrial society is a new principle of the socio-technical organization of life. Bell identifies the main transformations that were carried out in American society, which entered the era of post-industrial development:

· New industries and specialties (analysis, planning, programming and others) have joined the service sector;

· The role of women in society has radically changed - thanks to the development of the service sector, the institutionalization of the equality of women has taken place;

A turn in the field of knowledge has taken place - the purpose of knowledge was the acquisition of new knowledge, knowledge of the second type;

· Computerization has expanded the concept of "workplace".

Bell believes that the main issue of the transition to a post-industrial society is the successful implementation of the following four equal factors:

1. Economic activity.

2. Equality of social and civil society.

3. Ensuring reliable political control.

4. Provision of administrative control 28.

According to Bell, postindustrial society is characterized by level of service development, their predominance over all other types of economic activity in the total volume of GDP and, accordingly, the number of people employed in this area (up to 90 percent of the working population). In this kind of society, the organization and processing of information and knowledge is especially important. These processes are based on the computer - the technical basis telecommunication revolution... According to Bell, this revolution is characterized by the following features:

· The supremacy of theoretical knowledge;

· Availability of intelligent technology;

· Growth in the number of carriers of knowledge;

· The transition from the production of goods to the production of services;

· Changes in the nature of work;

· Changing the role of women in the labor system.

The concept of a post-industrial society was also discussed in the works of E. Toffler, J. K. Galbraith, W. Rostow, R. Aron, Z. Brzezinski and others. In particular, for Alvin Toffler(b. 1928) post-industrial society means the entry of countries into Third wave its development. The first wave is an agrarian stage that lasted for about 10 thousand years. The second wave is associated with the industrial-factory form of organization of society, which led to a society of mass consumption, the massization of culture. The third wave is characterized by the overcoming of dehumanized forms of labor, the formation of a new type of labor and, accordingly, a new type of worker. The bondage of labor, its monotony, and sweatshops are becoming a thing of the past. Labor becomes desirable, creatively active. The worker of the Third Wave is not an object of exploitation, an appendage of machines; he is independent and resourceful. The birthplace of the Third Wave is the USA, the time of birth is the 1950s.

In the era of post-industrial society, the concept of capitalism... The characteristic of capital as an economic category that measures various forms of social reproduction is historically conditioned by the emergence of an industrial-type society. In a post-industrial society, the economic forms of capital as a self-increasing value are revealed in a new way in information theory of value: the value of human activity and its results is determined not only and not so much by labor costs as by embodied information, which becomes a source of added value. There is a rethinking of information and its role as a quantitative characteristic necessary for the analysis of socio-economic development. The information theory of value characterizes not only the amount of information embodied in the result of production activities, but also the level of development of information production as the basis for the development of society.

Socio-economic structures of the information society are developed on the basis of science as a direct productive force. In this society, the actual agent is “a person who knows, understands” - “Homo intelligeens”. Thus, economic forms capital, as well as closely related political capital, which played an important role in the past, is increasingly dependent on non-economic forms primarily from intellectual and cultural capital.

D. Bell names five main problems that are solved in a post-industrial society:

1. The merger of telephone and computer communication systems.

2. Substitution of paper by electronic means of communication, including in areas such as banking, postal, information services and remote copying of documents.

3. Expansion of television service through cable systems; replacement of transport with telecommunications using video films and internal television systems.

4. Reorganization of information storage and systems of its request based on computers and an interactive information network (Internet).

5. Expansion of the education system based on computer training; the use of satellite communications for the education of rural residents; use of video discs for home education.

In the process of informatization of society, Bell also sees a political aspect, considering information as a means of achieving power and freedom, which implies the need for state regulation of the information market, that is, an increase in the role of state power and the possibility national planning... In the structure of national planning, he identifies the following options:

· Coordination in the field of information (labor requirements, capital investments, premises, computer service, and so on);

· Modeling (for example, following the model of V. Leontiev, L. Kantorovich);

· Indicative planning (to stimulate or slow down by the method of credit policy) and others.

Bell is optimistic about the prospect of world development on the path of transition from a "national society" to the formation of an "international society" in the form of an "organized international order", "space-time integrity due to the global nature of communications." However, he notes that "... US hegemony in this area cannot but become an acute political problem in the coming decades." As an example, Bell cites the problems of gaining access to computerized systems developed in advanced industrial societies, with the prospect of creating a global network of data banks and services.

Daniel Bell called himself a socialist in economics, a liberal in politics and a conservative in culture, was one of the prominent representatives of American neoconservatism in politics and ideology.

All such societies are called open, and in the technocratic sense - postindustrial or informational. The wealth of the West is provided now not only by private property, capital, the market, but also by their combination with colossal resources of the most diverse and generally available knowledge, with information technologies. Such a connection is provided by the post-industrial (informational) society. Its main characteristics are as follows:

Openness of information and access to it for anyone in need at any time and in any place;

The presence of technological systems that guarantee this openness;

Availability of national intellectual potential;

Automation, robotization and technologization of any systems in any field of activity;

Connectivity to global information channels.

The modern information revolution is associated with the invention of intelligent technologies based on gigantic information processing speeds. It gives a colossal (millions, billions of times) increase in information circulating in society, which makes it possible to effectively solve economic, social, cultural, political and other problems.

However, it is precisely in these technologies that Russia today is catastrophically lagging behind the leading countries of the West, and primarily the United States. For all our adversity, the worst deficit is the lack of information. Our society is a society of monstrous lack of information, which predetermines its backwardness. Therefore, our pragmatic goal should be to build a post-industrial (information) society - a society of high technologies or a society based on knowledge ("knowledge economy"). This, of course, is not an end in itself, but a means: modern information technologies in an effective open society open up access to almost all material and spiritual benefits for the vast majority of the population, multiply the intellectual resource, and therefore all other resources, contributing to development. Postindustrial (informational) society is a means of achieving national well-being, understood as prosperity, comfort, spiritual and intellectual wealth, mental and physical health, freedom, justice, security.

Of course, the most developed countries of the West, Japan, began their leap towards the information society, in which the majority of the working-age population is employed in the sphere of services and information, in incomparably more favorable conditions than Russia. And the industry was more developed, and the population was more qualified, and there was no landslide financial and industrial crisis at the beginning of the breakthrough. And yet, structural transformation in our economy and social sphere is taking place. It is paradoxical, but true: it is during the period of the collapse of the previous political totalitarian mechanisms and economic structures and the formation of an open society, new forms of property that deep-seated processes arise that lead us to a fundamentally new stage in our civilizational development - to a post-industrial (informational) society. This reorganization, taking place on the basis of an albeit backward, but still powerful urban and industrial society, is leading us (so far spontaneously) in an objectively correct direction. The sooner Russia develops its own model of a modern society capable of synthesizing our national traditions, culture with the achievements of high technologies, science and market economy, the easier it will be to get out of the protracted crisis.

Without information technology, it is impossible to raise the economy, raise the level of education and qualifications of the population, create a modern credit and financial system, establish rational management of social processes, as well as improve the life of citizens. Ultimately, national, social and political and other conflicts and crises that inevitably accompany any major historical reform, any civilizational shift, proceed more easily and end sooner if the level of well-being, education, culture and awareness is higher in society. That is why the model of post-industrial society as a kind of common historical and social image of the future of Russia, and, moreover, not distant, is not at all a fantasy. Rather, it is an urgent need, unfortunately, not yet understood and felt by our intellectual and administrative elites.

The United States and Japan fit well with the criteria for an information society. For example, in the United States, about 80 percent of workers are employed in services and information production. 17 percent - in industrial production and about three percent - in agriculture. With the highest technological equipment and rational organization of production and management, these 20 percent of workers are able to provide the entire population with one of the highest consumption levels on the planet. The model of social order that Russia should strive for should combine such elements as the protection of human rights, equal opportunities for self-fulfillment, initiative and enterprise, combined with social protection for those who cannot take care of themselves. It should be a high-tech society, but at the same time a society where a robot will serve a person, and not enslave him. It should be an information society, built on knowledge, a society of high culture, which considers human dignity to be the greatest value. In such a society, the principles of morality should be supplemented by a high professional level of specialists, and economic and material well-being should create optimal conditions for spiritual and cultural diversity, and ensure the self-realization of each person. At least four ideals correspond to such a society: the ideal of ecological well-being; ideal of stabilization; the ideal of “participatory democracy”; the ideal of a technological republic as a means of development.

With the end of the Cold War in Russia and in other countries, there is an outflow of financial resources and personnel from the sphere of "pure science" to various fields of applied knowledge and, first of all, to computerization and informatics, as well as banking and financial activities. The "science of corporations" is developing, the field of research of which is rather opportunistic and closed in nature.

In these conditions, the enormous scientific and scientific-technical potential of a number of countries, which was accumulated during the twentieth century, acquires special significance. And, first of all, those countries that have managed to create an independent, dynamic scientific community, to implement high-tech production on an industrial scale. Russia is one of the members of this elite club, for which real prospects of integration into the global innovative economic space open up and, accordingly, the chances of full-fledged participation in the creation and redistribution of the basic commodity, a commodity that is in increasing demand on the world market - knowledge and technologies. The basis of this area of ​​activity is not so much financial as creative, human capital, which Russia (despite the intensive external and “internal” emigration of tens of thousands of scientists and specialists) still has.

As for financial investments, they have already been made, and in this case they are present, albeit in an implicit form, in the form of a certain inheritance. And besides, it is very large-scale, acquiring increased value in the light of current trends in the development of the world economy. This is a general and special education system created in the country. These are numerous qualified scientific, engineering and working personnel (still providing an advantage in a number of defense projects). These are islands of high-tech production and its infrastructure. This is an established production of advanced technologies and developments. This is a significant intellectual and innovative potential of society. In general, everything that fundamentally distinguishes the Russian economy from the resource states of the South and is its specific colossal resource.

In Russia in the twentieth century, almost all of these advantages were concentrated in the system of the military-industrial complex. Hence, the urgent task is to rationally build a new configuration of the economy and, in particular, to transform the military-industrial complex into a scientific and technological complex, to establish sustainable production of an innovative resource and to reasonably organize the export of scientific achievements and technologies, as well as individual, selected categories of science-intensive products. The newest paradigms of Russia's development should be built in the context of long-term global development, relying on the deep characteristics of national consciousness. In this context, the most valuable achievements of the post-industrial model are its information and innovation components, which fully correspond to these characteristics.

Postindustrial society theory

The term “post-industrial society” was first used in 1917 in the title of one of the books by A. Penti, the theoretician of English liberal socialism; at the same time, A. Penti himself recognized the priority in the use of this concept for A. Coomaraswamy. Both used the term to designate an ideal society where the principles of autonomous and even semi-handicraft production were revived, which, in their opinion, could constitute a socialist alternative to industrialism.

In 1958, D. Riesman's article "Rest and work in a post-industrial society." The spread of the theories of post-industrial society was also due to the fact that among liberal-minded sociologists and economists the concept of a single industrial society was widely recognized (R. Aron. 28 lectures on industrial society, 1959, J.K. Galbraith. New industrial society, 1967 and etc.).

Therefore, this idea turned out to be adequate for the study of the historical perspectives of various social systems. 60s - the rapid development of the theories of post-industrial society, becoming a methodological paradigm of social science research. Representatives of virtually all ideological currents contributed to the development of the new concept - from the American conservative W. Rostow and the moderate Japanese liberal K. Tominag to the Frenchman A. Touraine, who adhered to a clearly socialist orientation, and the Czech Marxist R. Richta. A work in which all the main elements of this theory are highlighted was the book by D. Bell “The Coming Post-Industrial Society” (1973) and later “Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism” (1978).

A post-industrial society is a society in whose economy, as a result of the scientific and technological revolution and a significant increase in the population's income, the priority has shifted from the predominant production of goods to the production of services. Information and knowledge become a productive resource.

The developers of the postindustrial theory point to the following reasons:

Improvement of technologies, mechanization and automation of production make it possible to reduce the proportion of people directly involved in material production.

The modern economy has reached such a quality that the majority of workers must have a relatively high educational level.

The well-being of a significant part of the population has risen so much that intellectual growth and the improvement of creative abilities have taken an important place in the value scale of society.

People whose basic material needs are satisfied, engaged in intellectual work, make an increased demand for services.

An increase in the share of skilled labor leads to the fact that the main "means of production" is becoming the qualifications of workers. This changes the structure of society, and the ownership of material "means of production" loses its former meaning

According to the concept of post-industrial society, the history of civilization is divided into three great eras. In the transition from one stage to another, the new type of society does not supplant the previous forms, but makes them secondary.

Pre-industrial - the way society is organized is based on

time consuming technologies,

using a person's muscular strength,

skills that do not require lengthy training,

exploitation of natural resources (in particular, agricultural land).

Industrial - based on

machine production,

capital-intensive technologies,

using extramuscular energy sources,

qualifications requiring long-term training.

Post-industrial - based on

science-intensive technologies,

information and knowledge as the main production resource,

the creative aspect of human activity, continuous self-improvement and advanced training throughout life.

The basis of power:

in the pre-industrial era - the land and the number of dependent people

industrial - capital and energy sources

in post-industrial - knowledge, technology and qualifications of people.

The weakness of post-industrial theory is called the fact that it considers the transition from one stage to another as an objective (and even inevitable) process, but does little to analyze the social conditions necessary for this, the accompanying contradictions, cultural factors, etc.

Postindustrial theory operates mainly with terms characteristic of sociology and economics. The corresponding “culturological analogue” was called the concept of postmodernity (according to which historical development proceeds from traditional society to modern society and then to postmodernity).

Information society

The invention of the term itself is attributed to Yu Hayashi, a professor at the Tokyo Institute of Technology. Thus, in 1969 the Japanese government was presented with the reports "The Japanese Information Society: Topics and Approaches" and "Outlines of the Policy for Assisting the Informatization of Japanese Society", and in 1971 - the "Information Society Plan".

Since 1992, the term has been widely used. The concept of the information society originated in the work of the European Commission's Expert Group on Information Society Programs, led by Martin Bangemann, an expert on the information society.

Modern society is increasingly viewed as an "information society" (Masuda, A. Tofler, N. Moiseev). However, there are other opinions as well. The most famous of them are “post-industrial society” (A. Bell), “technotronic” (Z. Brzezinski), “noospheric society” (V.I. Vernadsky, “open society” (K. Popper), etc.

The fundamental features of the information society include the following:

the growth of the intensity of information communications in modern society;

a high level of development of information technologies that ensure the dynamic development of society;

the possibility of any subject (person, group, etc.) at any time to receive any information on an issue of interest;

automation and robotization of all spheres and branches of production and management;

globalization of consciousness, etc.

In modern society, information turns into the main subject of human labor, etc. Moreover, in the second half of the 20th century, the vision of the world (the picture of the world) is fundamentally rethought. Previously, the picture of the world was represented by such categories as matter, movement, space, time, etc.

However, with the emergence of the category of information (the object of post-nonclassical science), it becomes obvious that this picture is incomplete and needs to be supplemented. Moreover, according to some scientists, academicians of the Moscow Aviation Institute, objective reality is based not on matter, but on information.

The rapidly developing information reality (characterized by such parameters of its being as diversity, organization, orderliness, complexity, consistency), of course, affects the development of all kinds of spheres of human life and the existence of society as a whole.

At the end of the XX century. the terms information society and informatization have firmly taken their place, and not only in the lexicon of specialists in the field of information, but also in the lexicon of politicians, economists, teachers and scientists. In most cases, this concept was associated with the development of information technologies and telecommunication means, allowing on the platform of civil society (or at least its declared principles) to make a new evolutionary leap and worthily enter the next, 21st century already as an information society or its initial stage.

According to Professor W. Martin, the information society is understood as a "developed post-industrial society" that arose primarily in the West. In his opinion, it is not accidental that the information society is being established primarily in those countries - Japan, the USA and Western Europe - in which a post-industrial society was formed in the 60s - 70s.

W. Martin made an attempt to identify and formulate the main characteristics of the information society according to the following criteria.

Technological: the key factor is information technologies, which are widely used in production, institutions, the education system and in everyday life.

Social: information acts as an important stimulator of changes in the quality of life, "information consciousness" is formed and approved with wide access to information.

Economic: information is a key factor in the economy as a resource, service, commodity, value added and employment.

Political: freedom of information leading to a political process characterized by growing participation and consensus between different classes and social strata of the population.

Cultural: recognizing the cultural value of information by promoting the affirmation of information values ​​for the development of the individual and society as a whole.

In doing so, Martin emphasizes the idea that communication is “a key element of the information society”. Martin notes that speaking about the information society, it should not be taken literally, but considered as a guideline, a trend of changes in modern Western society. According to him, in general, this model is oriented towards the future, but in the developed capitalist countries already now it is possible to name a number of changes caused by information technologies, which confirm the concept of the information society.

Among these changes, Martin lists the following:

structural changes in the economy, especially in the distribution of labor; increased awareness of the importance of information and information technology;

growing awareness of the need for computer literacy;

widespread use of computers and information technology;

development of computerization and informatization of society and education;

government support for the development of computer microelectronic technology and telecommunications.

widespread - computer viruses and malware around the world.

Currently, humanity is moving from a post-industrial society to an informational one. The activities of individuals, groups, collectives and organizations now increasingly begins to depend on their awareness and the ability to effectively use the information available. Before taking any action, it is necessary to carry out a lot of work on the collection and processing of information, its comprehension and analysis.

In the development of mankind, it is customary to distinguish several revolutions (qualitative leaps) in information processing.

The first information revolution in the history of mankind took place 30 thousand years ago, when for the first time man began to draw pictures on rocks and trees. Thus, for the first time, information was transferred to an information carrier (rock wall, tree). Following the drawings, letters appeared - writing arose, with the help of which a person began to transfer all knowledge to descendants.

The second information revolution took place with the advent of computers in the middle of the 20th century. Information began to be stored in electronic form, which significantly increased the ease of storage and processing.

The third information revolution is already taking place before our eyes. This is the emergence and development of the worldwide computer network Internet. It makes all the information accumulated over the entire history of human development available to any person from anywhere in the world in a matter of minutes. Toffler

The second and third information revolutions would not have been possible without the invention of computers. It is generally accepted that the first computer was invented in 1943 in Great Britain.

Information society is a sociological and futurological concept that considers the production and use of scientific, technical and other information to be the main factor of social development.

The concept of the information society is a kind of the theory of post-industrial society, the basis of which was laid by Z. Brzezinski, D. Bell, O. Toffler. Considering social development as a “change of stages”, supporters of the information society theory associate its formation with the dominance of the “fourth,” the information sector of the economy, following agriculture, industry and the economy of services. At the same time, it is argued that capital and labor as the basis of an industrial society are giving way to information and knowledge in the information society.

The revolutionary action of information technology leads to the fact that in the information society, classes are replaced by socially undifferentiated “information communities” (E. Masuda).

Toffler contrasts traditional bulky corporations with “small” economic forms - individual activities at home, “electronic cottage”. They are included in the general structure of the information society with its "info", "techno" and other spheres of human existence.

A project of "global electronic civilization" is being put forward on the basis of the synthesis of television, computer services and energy - "telecomputer power engineering" (J. Pelton).

The “computer revolution” gradually leads to the replacement of traditional printing with “electronic books”, changes the ideology, turns unemployment into secure leisure (H. Evans).

Social and political changes are viewed in the theory of the information society as a direct result of the “microelectronic revolution”. The prospect of the development of democracy is associated with the spread of information technology. Toffler and J. Martin assign the main role in this telecommunication "cable network", which will provide two-way communication of citizens with the government, will allow them to take their opinion into account when making political decisions. Works in the field of "artificial intelligence" are viewed as an opportunity for informational interpretation of the person himself. The concept of the information society is criticized by humanistically oriented philosophers and scientists, who point out the inconsistency of technological determinism, pointing out the negative consequences of the computerization of society.

In the traditional understanding, the informatization of society is a complex socio-historical process of transition to a new stage of civilization, the essence of which is an exponential increase in the amount of information of various types required to solve rapidly becoming more complex socio-economic, scientific, technical, domestic and cultural problems.

The report of the International Commission on Education for the 21st Century, Learning: the treasure within, presented to UNESCO, noted that “humanity must be fully armed to overcome the main contradictions, which, without being new, will become the main problems of the XXI century ”.

Among such contradictions the authors of the report include the following: contradictions between global and local realities; between traditions and modernity; between long-term and short-term objectives (between the long and short terms); between the need for competition and concern for equality of opportunity; between the extraordinary expansion of knowledge and human capacity to assimilate it; between spiritual and material values. The resolution of these contradictions depends to a very large extent on the policy of each state in the field of education.

Alvin Toffler defines the future society as post-industrial, and the transition process as a "third wave" that changes the foundations of an industrial society: the economy, the structure of power, family structure, education.

Manuel Castells introduces the term "informational" society, with a specific form of social organization in which, thanks to new technological conditions emerging in a given historical period, the generation, processing and transmission of information have become fundamental sources of productivity and power.

Scientists identify two main theoretical and methodological approaches to the informatization of society:

technocratic (technical and technological), when information technologies are considered a means of increasing labor productivity and their use is limited mainly to the spheres of production and management;

humanistic, when information technology is viewed as an important part of human life, which is important not only for production, but also for the social sphere.

It is important to avoid absolutizing one of the approaches. The absolutization of the technical approach assumes that technical capabilities determine the goals of education. The opposite situation - the absolutization of the humanistic approach in the informatization of biological education leads to an underestimation of technical innovations, a diminution of the role of equipment in determining the possibility of organizing educational activities. In reality, informatization combines technological and social processes. This is not only a new scientific and technical, but also a social phenomenon that arose as a result of the impact of scientific and technological progress on society.

Information technology has made it possible to define an information technology paradigm with the following characteristics:

- information becomes a raw material that must be able to process with the help of technology. At the same time, the avalanche-like information flow "is not structured and not sorted: if we want it to become a source of knowledge, and not delusions, it must be sifted, sorted and comprehended." Manuel Castells sees the specificity of the informational way of development in the impact of knowledge on knowledge itself, as the main source of productivity.

- new technologies are multifunctional: the ways and structure of individual and collective existence and interaction are changing and becoming more complex. According to Toffler, changes in society lead to a change in a person. The changes must correspond to the new reality, otherwise it will lead to incompetence. ... A key feature of the information society is the network logic of its basic structure. The information society can be managed by people who can easily navigate the network structure and are able to change quickly and dramatically.

- modern society is characterized by constant changes and organizational fluidity: “the new paradigm will resemble in its properties a liquid rather than a solid structure. Not only new social norms will appear, the very idea of ​​the norm will become different. "

The transition to information societies is increasingly outlined as a global process, even relatively independent of social structures. Here, a different perspective of the informatization of society appears, which A.D. Ursul points out - in the information society, information and non-information components are interconnected with the decisive role of information, due to which information and technological determinism of development appears. The deep essence of informatization of society lies in the intellectual and humanistic transformation of the entire life of a person and society. The main resource for the development of society is information and information and communication technologies that provide information interaction.

The informatization of society contributes to a change in the fundamental relationship between consciousness and being. In the new conditions, the forming integral consciousness is able to outstrip being, to foresee the consequences of people's actions to transform nature and social relations. "Consciousness outstripping life is a regularity of the information society"

Information and communication technologies open up new perspectives and opportunities for cognitive activity, providing a person with fundamentally new tools in the form of intelligent computer systems. The creation of hybrid integral intelligence complements the human ability to assess, predict and manage the activities of mankind. Information, methods of obtaining it, analyzing it, as well as completeness and reliability are the basis for forecasting and managing activities, thereby ensuring the existence of life on our planet, solving the global problems of civilization, and bringing it out of a crisis state.

In the information society, the structures of activity are rapidly changing, therefore, a person must have the ability to quickly adapt to changing conditions, fill in the missing knowledge, and be able to retrain. V.N. Shestakov concludes that the process of informatization brings society closer to the point of bifurcation, when the smallest changes in external influences, along with fluctuations, can radically change the properties of the system. One of the most important changes in this system is the informatization of education.

In recent decades, sociologists have been talking about the emergence of a new type of society - post-industrial.

The basis postindustrial society is the information that in turn gave rise to. Supporters of the information society theory believe that this society is characterized by processes that are opposite to those that took place in the previous phases of the development of societies even in the XX century. Instead of centralization, there is regionalization, instead of hierarchization and bureaucratization, there is democratization, instead of concentration, there is disaggregation, and instead of standardization, there is individualization. All these processes are driven by information technology.

The people who offer the services either provide information or use it. For example, teachers transfer knowledge to students, repairmen use their knowledge to maintain equipment, and lawyers, doctors, bankers, pilots, designers sell their clients their specialized knowledge of laws, anatomy, finance, aerodynamics and colors. Unlike factory workers in an industrial society, they do not produce anything. Instead, they pass on their knowledge to others or use it to provide services that others are willing to pay for.

As already stated, in the societies of the past, the first technical innovations brought with them amazing changes. What will happen to our culture? Perhaps future sociologists-analysts will speak of the current changes as the fourth revolution. Often referred to as the information revolution, it is based on information processing technologies. In particular, the computer chip is an invention that transforms society, and with it our social relations. The list of changes brought about by this technological advance is almost endless.

Researchers are already using the term “virtual society” to describe a modern society that has developed and is developing under the influence of information technologies, primarily Internet technologies. Virtualization (that is, the replacement of reality by its simulation / image) of society is total, since all the elements that make up society are virtualized, significantly changing their appearance, their status and role. Virtual reality has certain properties, including:

• procreation - virtual reality is produced by the activity of some other reality, external to it;
• relevance - virtual reality exists only "here" and "now";
• autonomy - virtual reality has its own time, space, its own laws of existence;
• interactivity - virtual reality can actively interact with other realities and influence them.

Considering the above, post-industrial society, i.e. "Posteconomic" can be defined as one in which the economic subsystem loses its dominant importance, and labor ceases to be the basis of all social relations. A person in a post-industrial society loses his economic essence and is no longer viewed as an “economic person”, since he is focused on new, “post-materialistic” values. The emphasis is shifting to social, humanitarian problems, and the issues of quality and safety of life, self-realization of the individual in various social spheres are the priorities. On the basis of this, new criteria of welfare and social well-being are formed.

Sometimes post-industrial society is called "post-class". In such a society, social structures and identities, which are stable in nature in an industrial society, lose their stability. The status characteristics of an individual in a post-class society are no longer determined entirely by his class affiliation, but depend on many factors, among which education and the level of culture (what P. Bourdieu called "cultural capital") play an increasing role. Of course, it is too early to talk about the “death” of class society and the final change in status priorities, however, there are undoubtedly significant changes in the structure of society, associated primarily with a change in the role of knowledge and its carriers in society - intellectuals.

The concept of a post-economic society developed by the domestic researcher V.L. Inozemtsev. Here, a post-economic society is understood as a qualitatively new type of society, which is the next stage of development of social life after the post-industrial stage. The main features of the post-economic society are "the exit of individual interests of a person from the purely material plane and the colossal complication of social reality, the multiplication of the variety of models of social life and even options for its development in time." In a post-economic society, in contrast to an economic one, focused on material enrichment, the main goal for most of its members is the development of their own personality.

The theory of post-economics of society presupposes a new periodization of the history of mankind, in which three large-scale eras are distinguished - pre-economic, economic and post-economic. This periodization is based on such criteria as the type of human activity and the nature of the relationship between the interests of individuals and society. In the early stages of history, human activity was motivated mainly by instinctive impulses, like all biological beings. With the development of the human psyche, the motives of activity acquired an increasingly conscious character. The conscious nature of the activity is inextricably linked with its purposefulness, and the goal was the material product of labor. Finally, a new round of development led to the formation of prerequisites for post-economic activity, focused on improving oneself as a person, one's unique individual qualities and abilities. Thus, there is a typology of historical forms of activity: pre-labor instinctive activity - labor - creativity.

Another criterion is the nature of the relationship between the interests of individuals and society. In the early periods of history, the collective interest of a group or community as a whole rigidly dominates individual interests. At the stage of economic society, which is based on labor, personal material interest dominates the interests of the community; all people are actual or potential competitors, since their private economic interests are mutually exclusive. Finally, a post-economic society is characterized by the absence of a struggle of personal interests, since the desire for material success is no longer the main interest of the majority. The world is becoming polyvariant and multidimensional, people's personal interests are intertwined and come into unique combinations, no longer opposing, but complementing each other.

Rice. 6.1. Ideological and political preferences of representatives of various generations of Russians (answer to the question: "What idea do you consider yourself to be a supporter of?"),%: 1 - a supporter of radical market reforms and the fastest rapprochement with Western countries; 2- supporter of the independent Russian way of the country's development; 3 - supporter of socialism; 4 - a supporter of a combination of various ideas listed above, but tending to avoid extremes; 5 - I do not consider myself to be anyone, since I am not interested in politics; 6- I find it difficult to answer

Post-economic type of society is defined as follows: "By post-economic society we mean a type of social structure where a person's economic activity becomes more and more intensive and complex, but is no longer determined by his material interests, is not set by the traditionally understood economic expediency." The economic basis of such a society is formed by the destruction of private property and the return to personal property, the state of the worker's inalienability from the instruments of production. The post-economic society is characterized by a new type of social confrontation - the confrontation between the information and intellectual elite and all people who have not entered it, who are employed in the sphere of mass production and are therefore forced out of the way.
the ripheria of society. However, the members of such a society have the opportunity to make themselves the elite, since belonging to the elite is determined by ability and knowledge.

In this regard, Russian sociologists asked the question: what path of development do different generations of modern Russians prefer? The data of applied sociological research allow us to conclude that there is a tendency to deideologize both the older generation and the youth (see Fig. 6.1).

The results of sociological research indicate the presence among our fellow citizens of adherents of different models of the development of society, represented in various social groups (see Fig. 6.2).

Rice. 6.2. Distribution of Russians by types of worldview in 2004-2007,%: 1 - traditionalists; 2 - intermediate; 3 - modernists