People in a Digital Society: Dynamics of Social and Labor Relations

Abstract

The paper considers the process of transformation of modern society in its unity of technological, economic and social components, as well as its influence on each individual. The author shows that this process conditioned by a widespread use of digital technologies. Their development and implementation lead not only to the change in technological order and to changes in the mechanisms of economic growth, but it creates prerequisites for a radical change in the paradigm of the social order, and changes people’s minds and their worldview. The purpose of the research is to develop conceptual approaches to the study of social transformations in digital economy. The category of scientific analysis — that allows better understand the essence of the transformations that are taking place, and, most importantly, their social consequences, — is a “person in his social incarnation”. At the same time, employment is a mechanism through which these transformations are realized. It refracts all the above processes, forcing the relations that develop here to evolve from the compulsorily solidarity relations of social production of the industrial era to a completely individualized, fragmented, unstable, virtual relationship in different senses of the word. The author concludes that this can lead to the erosion of the previous values of society, make modern society and man more dependent and manipulated. That is why today there is an urgent need for a synthetic theory that allows not only to adequately describe the essence of the transformations that is taking place, but which has a predictive potential for determining the prospects of the society at the time of its total instability.