Meaning, Subjectness and Responsibilityin Digital Communications

Meaning, comprehension and sense formation, subjectness as a responsible self-consciousness and action form the core of human being provided by communication. This paper contains an attempt to answer the question — what do digital communication formats change in this core. There are used the concepts of pragmasemantics and deep semiotics, which allow concretizing the role of socio-cultural practices as meaning-formation interfaces, as well as showing the role of subjectivity as a source, means and result of meaning-formation. The challenges to social and humanitarian knowledge generated by digitalization are systematically considered. It is significant that the consideration of each of the challenges leads to the problem of sane subjectivity. Thus, the analysis of the ethical and legal challenge leads to the need to further clarification of the relationship between control technology and personal parrhesia, to overcome the imbalance of rights and responsibilities. Consideration of the political economic challenge reveals the fact of the emergence of existential rent and, in this regard, new inequalities, perspectives for a new stratification of society. The metaphysical challenge shows the emergence of a human-option and “non-human” subjectness — with the prospect of building a social reality between these two poles. The anthropological challenge opens up prospects for stratification depending on the degree of acceptance and implementation of responsible subjectivity. Thus, the conducted analysis shows the non-eliminable role of subjectness as an integral interface of meaning formation and a key factor of procreativity and pre-adaptation, which ensured and continue to provide the development of civilization. This positions humanitarian knowledge in a new way, the demand for it, and sets also the task of institutionalizing a complexe humanitarian expertise not only of the consequences of new technologies, but of the stages of their design, development and implementation.