New Images of Social Reality in the Digital Age

The process of increasing complexity of social reality must be seen as historically conditioned. The develop-ment of techniques and technologies that shape both human thinking and life is recognized as a major deter-minant of changing social reality. The main event of recent decades has certainly been digitalization, whose transformative impact on society and its institutions has been so great that a new term has appeared – the “digi-tal age”. Social reality in the digital age is being transformed by social media and virtual or augmented realities. The birth of digital reality from the spontaneous interaction of diverse realities has poorly predicted social and existential consequences. The real driver accelerating the formation of digital reality is the digitalization of the administrative and bureaucratic component of public administration. The most notable here are the provision of public services in digital format, the transfer of intradepartmental and interdepartmental interactions to electron-ic document management, a significant transformation in the nature and quality of feedback, and the manipu-lation of large amounts of data. In the process of digitalization, a reality is born that cannot be reduced to any kind of previously known realities. It is not described in ontological terms of virtuality and human existence manifests itself in it.