Digital hybridity: innovative reality or utopia?

Abstract

The problem of hybridity is a set of relatively new, controversial, complex theoretical, methodological and practical issues that humanity has faced during the period of digital transformation. The purpose of this article is to address the dual nature of hybridity in the emerging digital society. The inconsistency of hybridity is due to the symbiosis of the real and virtual (digital) worlds, which merge into a single integrity. A fundamentally new hu­man habitat has emerged. And a person can no longer always understand which of the spa­ces – real or virtual – he is in at one moment or another, and how does human existence
appear to us in this hybrid innovative world? In this hybrid environment, a person com­municates not only with his own kind, but also with artificial subjects (technosubjects), giving rise to the problem of hybridity of a higher order. Being is complicated by the hy­brid symbiosis of natural and artificial intelligence, new ways of externalization, the ex­pansion of personal identity through digital or network identification. On the other hand, in the joint evolutionary development, a tendency begins to take shape to displace man himself with these artificial self-developing systems, in which human qualities are in­creasingly manifested. At the same time, a person is not always ready to bear responsibil­ity for the consequences and quality of the created artificial self-image. Meanwhile, the world is already entering the next level of complexity of being – the Post-Human world, the hybridity of which is generated by the symbiosis of the human body and the electronic devices built into it. This article examines how the interpenetration of previously hetero­geneous elements occurs in various spheres of life and what risks this generates. The au­thors propose the formulated concept of hybridity as a kind of analytical tool for studying social processes from the point of view of their dual nature, emerging risks and vulnera­bilities.