The article concerns the problematic of digital society and its conceptual characteristics in the discourses of posthumanism. History of digital society is linked to concepts of post-industrialism, postmodernism and late postmodernism. This approach allows to trace conceptual evolution of the idea. Current state of social theory is denoted as “late postmodernism,” that affects the conceptualization of digital society. Posthumanism seems to be the most relevant discourse among the approaches of late postmodernism. However, this term invokes several methodological difficulties, that the authors tried to solve. Starting from its name, posthumanism seeks to grasp something “behind” and “after” human, thus overflowing and broadening problematic of human. Researchers often mean different and sometimes controversial meanings and ideas by using the term. Still, anthropocentrism of Modern Time is replaced by other projects, that decentralize and melt human subject. Opposing movements, that seek to radicalize human potential, rase as well. The authors divide the spectrum of posthumanism discourses according to the anthropological (humanistic) parameter into the following directions: anti-humanism, which fixes the inconsistency of human in the face of new technologies, nature, external, etc.; postanthropocentrism (posthumanism in a narrow sense), which decentralizes human subjectivity and places human in a flat ontological space, abolishing the binary categories of human and inhuman, living and non-living; transhumanism, which develops humanistic and anthropocentric trend taking into account potential of the latest scientific and technological achievements. In addition, there are other independent movements, that oppose themselves to classical humanism and anthropocentrism. They cannot be unambiguously attributed to any of the mentioned directions.
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Bagdasaryan et al. (2022) studied this question.