New Сommunication Technologies in the Context of Socialization Processes
in the Information Society

Petrov Mikhail ORCID: 0000-0001-7078-4865 PhD in Philosophy Associate Professor, Department of Philosophy, Siberian Federal University 660041, Russia, Krasnoyarsk Territory, Krasnoyarsk, 82A Svobodny Ave., room 428 mipet@yandex.ru

Introduction

The study of the processes of digitalization and informatization of the social environment at the level of universal laws and conditions is one of the urgent tasks of modern social philosophy. Classical philosophical problems associated with the understanding of the determinants of personality formation, the relationship between personal and social in the formation of communicative reality, acquires a new sound in connection with the analysis of the actual specifics of its development. The communicative nature of the processes of personality formation, socialization as the assimilation of certain social information and its processing skills becomes a prerequisite for raising the question of how new communication technologies affect the implementation of these processes. The philosophical content of this question lies, in particular, in establishing the socio-ontological consequences of the introduction of new communication technologies: how such technologies change the characteristics of social reality, how their use affects the implementation of socialization processes, how they ultimately determine the appearance of the emerging and reproducing information society — all these questions constitute the content of socio-ontological research. The significance of such studies for the completeness and thoroughness of philosophical reflection on the specifics of the information society is revealed by many authors: for example, S.V. Orlov notes the need to analyze the technologies of information management that are currently used ^{[1, p. 13]}, and R.F. Abdeev points out the significant nature of the problem of cognition of the dynamics of organizational processes (including in relation to social structures) ^{[2, p. 26]}. The introduction of new communication technologies has an impact on the dynamics of social organization at both macro and micro levels, and the philosophical task is to analyze the conceptual schemes with which the discussion of this influence can be built, to point out possible ways to identify patterns common to situations of influence, to "fit" it into modern scientific worldview.

Conclusions about the characteristic features of the communicative organization of the information society, which are often found in the literature on this issue, are often postulated without first clarifying the ontological prerequisites and determinants that allow them to be accepted without objections. Thus, Yu.A. Chernavin notes that the processes of digitalization entail a change in the ratio of the spheres of society, during which the sphere of communication comes to the fore ^{[3, p. 33]}. Despite the apparent obviousness of the content, this statement leaves out of consideration the very course of "changing the ratio of spheres", by which the author most likely meant complex transformations of the social structure characteristic of the formation of the information society. In this case, these transformations are described using a mechanistic ontology of the interaction of spheres, the content of which is not reproduced by the author, it remains at the level of assumptions. Nevertheless, it becomes clear that discussing the impact of new communication technologies on the levels of personal socialization and the formation of the communicative structure of society is a multifaceted task, and therefore requires a whole set of preliminary ontological assumptions consistent with the implemented task blocks. We do not adhere to the view that social ontology is a branch of the study of some independently existing marginal level of social reality. On the contrary, we adhere to what R. Lauer calls the pragmatic argument of the importance of ontology ^{[4, p. 23]}, i.e. we share the statement that ontology is rather a kind of conceptual framework for formulating conclusions based on empirical data of social cognition. Social ontology is not the sphere of postulating statements about the foundations of existing social reality, but the field of developing and applying tools that mediate the formation of social knowledge, contributing to the creation of formulations of productive explanations, predictions. Guided by this understanding of social ontology, we can develop conceptual grounds for discussing the role of communicative innovations in the development of socialization processes in the information society.

In this study, we attempt to consider the ontological specifics of the communicative aspects of the information society, focusing on how their actual development affects the implementation of socialization processes. The communicative nature of the processes of socialization and the importance of the development of mass communication media for changing their appearance is noted by a number of researchers of the problems of the information society: for example, A.P. Sukhanov states that the management of information flows moving through numerous communication channels determines the processes of personality formation in society ^{[5, p. 10]}, A.S. Gorbunov notes that the processes of personality formation depends on the fundamental characteristics of social development, and for the information society, such a characteristic is the intensive development of mass communication media and human involvement in their functioning ^{[6, p. 62]}, N.V. Tikhomirov notes the growing importance of network communication tools for the formation of a personal attitude to the world and society ^{[7, p. 62]}.. 195]. The very fact of the importance of the development of communicative means for the formation and development of the information society, therefore, is generally recognized, however, the authors do not always explicitly introduce assumptions about the ontological significance of new means and technologies of communication for the formation of social systems. In this review, therefore, we attempt to outline the general features of the socio-ontological study of communicative innovations.

On the importance of social ontology in the system of knowledge about society

Before proceeding directly to the socio-ontological consideration of communicative and technological innovations and their significance for the implementation of socialization processes in the information society, it is necessary to turn to the role and position of social ontology in the system of social knowledge, since the significance of the provisions of social ontology for the sciences of society and the application of their results in the practice of social management and transformation is by no means is obvious. Speaking about the subject area of socio-ontological research, one can agree with the position of G.I. Lukyanov, according to which the focus of her attention is the connection of the most general conceptual units (concepts, categories) used in the description and study of societies (social reality, social space and time, etc.) ^{[8, p. 152]} However, it is important to clarify what the specifics of the study of this relationship are. It is clear that social ontology is essential in the interpretation of social facts, in the comprehension of empirical and theoretical results of social research, however, what determines and constitutes social ontology? In the light of this issue, the remark of A.Y. Antonovsky and R.E. Barash seems fair that the formation of social ontology should be preceded by epistemological ideas about the foundations of the classifications used applied to social objects and their properties ^{[9, p. 258]}. Social ontology is a certain kind of conceptual scheme of the reality under study, formed on the basis of preliminary methodological and theoretical-cognitive assumptions about the method of studying the selected fragment of social reality. The second of the key tasks of social ontology highlighted by Yu.A. Kimelev is the definition of the basic elements of social reality (objects, their properties, relationships, etc.), implemented by social ontology as a segment of social sciences ^{[10, p. 188]}, as a level of formation of common linguistic means for describing their subject area.

In the formation of social ontology, conceptual elements can be used both directly and metaphorically: for example, N.S. Rozov points out that the ontological description of social development as changes in qualitative and quantitative states in spatio-temporal terms is metaphorical ^{[11, p. 114]}. Moreover, it should be noted that the categories of social space and time themselves have a metaphorical connotation, they are based on a productive analogy in the use of these terms in relation to the description of social reality. However, the use of metaphorics does not contradict the implementation of significant functions of social ontology implemented in relation to the sciences of society — heuristic and conceptually systematizing. Borrowing conceptual and categorical tools and theoretical schemes of other scientific branches is not only acceptable, but also often valuable for the formation of socio-ontological concepts: this is demonstrated, in particular, by M. Deland's research, which assesses the applicability of conceptual tools of evolutionary biology (population terminology, analysis of the category of biological species (species as an abstract class and as an individual entity), borrowing hierarchical schemes for constructing ontologies, etc.) ^[12]. The advantages of social ontology are determined by its heuristic potential for developing new effective descriptions and explanations ^{[4, p. 35]}, in which a particular branch of social knowledge is in need. The target settings for the development of social ontologies are thus formed by the branches of social research.

However, often ontological assumptions about social reality are not developed in a specialized way and have an implicit character. Such assumptions are inherent in various major areas of sociological thought: for example, T. Kerimov in this regard speaks of mainstream sociology with its characteristic ontology, which has an essentialist character, reducing the diversity of social phenomena to "fundamental" entities, autonomizing social reality from other components of reality ^{[13, pp. 111-113]}. Implicit ontologies are by no means always able to realize significant functions in relation to social cognition, on the contrary, in some cases they can complicate the implementation of research goals and reduce the level of reflexivity and criticality of representatives of the social sciences in relation to the ideological foundations of their own activities. In this regard, the task of analyzing the implicit ontological assumptions contained in the studies of the communicative specifics of the processes of socialization in the information society seems to be an urgent task of social philosophy. Implicit socio-ontological assumptions also determine research assessments of certain phenomena in the context of their influence on the dynamics of the development of individual processes or social reality in its entirety. In the following sections, we will address not only the identification and description of ontological assumptions shared by a number of researchers of the communicative specifics of socialization processes in the information society, but also their critical analysis. According to S.V. Orlov's fair remark, a certain "reformatting" of social philosophy is necessary for the study of the information society ^{[14, p. 120]}. A necessary component of such "reformatting" is also a critical revision of existing views and assumptions, which is a starting point for creating new philosophical means of comprehending social reality.

Communicative ontology of the information Society

First of all, speaking about the socio-ontological assumptions underlying the theories of the information society and views on the specifics of its communicative organization, it is necessary to turn to the content of the very characteristics of society as informational. Informatization and the informational nature of modern society are often often spoken of as something self-evident, although in practice the authors often disagree in understanding what is put into these formulations. The uncertainty of the conceptual content and the discrepancy in its understanding is also stated by F. Webster, who notes that sometimes it seems that for some authors the fact of our being in the information society is so obvious that they blithely deny the need to clarify what they mean when they use this concept ^{[15, p. 8]}. This situation is partly caused by the polysemanticism of the concept of information itself: there are many formal theories of information, some of which involve the introduction of the definition of information as a key concept, while for others this task turns out to be redundant and they do not actually disclose its content, referring to other quantitatively interpreted conceptual units (for example, the concept of the amount of information in statistical information theory Shannon).

Philosophical views on information are also diverse: representatives of various directions strive to fill this concept with the ultimate content, to determine its ontological and epistemological meaning, to establish its functions within the scientific worldview, however, there is often no consensus between them on most significant substantive issues. Even in the system of dialectical-materialistic philosophy, whose representatives so actively emphasized its consistency and internal logical coherence, two distinct and irreducible views on the content of this concept were formed — attributivist and functionalist. It is indicative of A.P. Sukhanov's remark that despite the fact that the philosophical basis of both points of view is the so-called theory of reflection, the resolution of the dispute between their representatives and finding common points of contact seems doubtful ^{[5, p. 10]}: although he claims that he adheres to the view of information as meaningful on the side of reflection processes, in fact, he refuses to use the definitions developed by them, synonymizing information with data, knowledge or the content of awareness ^{[5, pp. 11, 13, 66]}. In our opinion, the lack of differentiation of the ontological contexts of the existence of information leads many authors to the internal inconsistency of their views. In this regard, the differentiation of the contexts of the existence of information carried out by T. Stoiner seems justified, in particular, the isolation of the human use of information ^{[16, p. 9]}, as well as the separation of the issues of the use of information from the problem of understanding its nature ^{[16, p. 12]}.

In the context of human use, information is often synonymized with knowledge transmitted by means of communicative means and used ^{[17, p. 117]}. For example, A.P. Sukhanov identifies the accumulation of knowledge by mankind with the development of the information sphere of its life, as well as with the expansion of the information field — the field of communication, the movement of information flows ^{[5, p. 90]}. In turn, M. Castels defines communication as the collective use of meanings in the process of information exchange, determined both by the cultural and target specifics of actors, and by the technological means and frameworks of communication processes used by them ^{[18, p. 73]}. It is the transformation of the practices of using knowledge and methods of communication that becomes for many authors the basis for describing the current state of society as informational. They use metaphors of "information explosion" (A.P. Sukhanov ^{[5, p. 118]}), "information revolution" (M. Castels ^{[19, p. 35]}) to comprehend qualitative transformations of the social system. M. Castells' remark is important, according to which the information age of society's development is characterized not by the key role of knowledge itself, but by its intensive application to the generation of new knowledge, to the processing and "direction" of information flows, in the application of knowledge to the organization of communicative interactions ^{[19, p. 35]}. Following the same trend, E. Agazzi speaks about the formation of a "knowledge society" and points out the importance of developing and improving the humanitarian component of human knowledge in order for the communicative system that foundations the knowledge society to be saturated from a semantic point of view and thereby contribute to the formation and improvement of personality in society, i.e., be adapted to the needs of processes socialization ^{[20, p. 16-19]}.

Diverse approaches to understanding society as informational, based on the analysis of various aspects of social reality and trends in their development, can be identified. Thus, in some cases, the basis for assigning the information characteristic to society is the growth of the economic importance of the activity of creating an information product and the actualization of the role of information as a factor of production ^[21]. For other theorists, such a basis is the increasing importance of knowledge and competencies, expressed in an increase in the level of professional requirements and the association of managerial work with highly qualified analysis of information flows of the organization ^[22]. Also, the informational nature of society can be conditioned by the active development of mass communication media and technologies for the dissemination of mass information ^{[23, 24]}. Supporters of these approaches develop valuable intentions, however, it should be borne in mind that in all cases attention is focused on individual ways of existence and use of information. The idea of an information society is rather born as a result of the synthesis of key provisions of significant theories, rather than being formed by means of a single theory.

In a society at any stage of development, socialization has a communicative basis, since socially significant knowledge is acquired precisely within the framework of various forms of communicative practices, both interactive (group and interpersonal communication, education, training) and unidirectional (obtaining information from various sources). But it is precisely the intensification of the production and transmission of knowledge, characteristic of the information society, that leads to the question of how exactly to "fill" the socializing flows of information with socially significant content, and thereby organize the processes of socialization in accordance with the goals of social development. Anomie and destruction of classical behaviors with the development of new communication technologies and spaces are becoming urgent challenges for modern society ^{[7, p. 195]}. In this regard, the question of how to represent the communicative architecture of the information society, the features of the construction of its communication systems becomes relevant. The solution of this question involves an appeal to ontological ideas about communication systems, about their elements and the relations existing between them. Let us turn to the ideas of this nature developed by the philosophers-theorists of the information society.

The ontological characteristic of the communicative space of the modern information society as a network most often appears in works that touch on the relevant issues. The "network" terminology is used to discuss the structural specifics of modern communication by M. Castels ^[19]: network ontology assumes structural polycentricity, an increase in the speed of information dissemination and the variability of its transformations, normative pluralism. The ontology of the network involves a revision of the features of social time and space: the unprecedented growth in the speed of transmission and storage of information erases the space-time boundaries, technological innovations are increasingly being developed that allow remote work in real time ^{[15, p. 18]}. An important feature of the network is a significant increase in the scope of coverage: the boundaries of access to information and communication resources today are increasingly associated with virtual rather than real access restriction factors.

Modern network communications also involve the synchronous implementation of several communicative roles: an agent can simultaneously be involved in several virtual workflows or communication flows. Multiagency can also be called one of the characteristic features of communication with the "network" ontology: the wide coverage of the network and its structural heterogeneity makes it possible to include in communication processes not only "classical" personal and social agents of various plans (starting from individual communication participants represented by such a virtual object as a personal account on a social network, and ending with "collective" participants, examples of which may be accounts of organizations and departments, thematic communities), but also artificial agents — "bots", automated agents of support services, etc. However, the network ontology of communication is not "flat" (in the sense of M. Deland ^[12]): it involves the formation of local hierarchies, as well as areas of content heterogeneity.

The problem of using network terminology when applied to the description of the ontological features of the communicative structure of the information society is that the object of the description is not quite obvious: speaking of "networks", the authors most often appeal to the existence and development of technological systems, whether it is the World Wide Web or the network formed by the devices of users of a particular messenger. But it is obvious that communication cannot be reduced to the technological support of its implementation. The authors, pointing to the properties of network communication structures, clearly claim something more than a simple description of the structure of the mutual arrangement of devices. For example, V.N. Kurilkina argues that in a networked society, personal communication is replaced by "communication in networks" ^{[25, p. 50]}, but the content of the transformation that took place, according to the author, becomes unclear, because network means of communication create new ways of existence of personality rather than eliminate the personal component from the communicative situation. To date, it is no longer legitimate to say that network communication excludes face-to-face interaction: the expansion of the possibilities of transmitting audio and visual content causes an increase in the effect of presence, we should rather talk about a multi-level representation of personality in network communication, rather than that it is replaced by a virtual object, often far from reality. The ability of network communication participants to limit the range of access to their personal information complicates the way an agent exists in the network space, becoming a condition for having a multi-level system of roles and levels of representation.

No less significant is the practice of ontological understanding of the communicative reality of the information society as a virtual reality (or including many virtual areas). Virtuality is interpreted as ambiguity, desemanticization, is associated with continuous and temporal transformations of communicative processes ^{[26, p. 65]}. A.A. Lazarevich highlights the following features of virtual communication: variability of the status of communication agents (social, professional, etc.), possible anonymity, multiple and changeable nature of personal identity, inclusion in the communication processes of iconic means for the transmission of emotional states ^{[27, p. 284]}. The creation of spaces that have no physical analogues, as well as the transformation of the temporal parameters of communication (including due to the availability of opportunities to "save" dialogues) are features of modern communication using electronic means that cannot be denied. But it is impossible to agree that the listed properties will exhaustively characterize new forms of communicative activity. Not all communication practices involve temporal changes: electronic communication often takes place in real time and, moreover, is limited to quite real conditions (starting from the wishes of communication participants and ending with the functioning of communication means). The possibility and permissibility of anonymity may well take place in "real" forms of communication implemented without the use of technological means. The variability and multiplicity of agents' personal identity is also not an immanent feature of modern forms of communication: many communication practices, especially professional ones, assume a fixed identity of agents—participants, therefore, again, we should not talk about variability, but about the complication of the nature of personal identity and the polycontextuality of its implementation. Finally, the widespread partial identification of virtuality with desemanization is quite difficult to reconcile with the fact that modern communicative spaces (including online spaces) often assume the presence of diverse practices of meaning generation: it is hardly possible to agree that network newsmaking and virtual discussions in the comments to the posted content are not examples of meaning-making and interpretive activity of communication agents.

The widespread ontological characteristics of the communicative reality of the information society (network structure, virtuality), therefore, need further clarification and specification. Despite the fact that network models can be successfully used to describe the structure of the technical basis of communicative processes, their heuristics for describing and explaining modern transformations of communicative practices in terms of their content is limited. Moreover, network characteristics can be valuable in the study of social communication at the macro level, however, when moving to the analysis of qualitative transformations of interpersonal interaction, they become practically useless. In the case of the distinguished property of virtuality, the question also arises about the limits of applicability and justification of statements about its fundamental importance, taking into account the accepted methods of determining virtuality. Virtuality is also often understood through the prism of imitativeness and contrasted with real communication, although it would be more appropriate to talk about their complementarity and complex unity. The means and results of socio-ontological reflection on the communicative aspects of the information society, therefore, are largely of a project nature, and are the subject of prospective discussion and improvement.

Communication technologies and the appearance of socialization processes

The improvement of applied communication technologies and the growth of their capabilities naturally affects communication practices. This makes it necessary to update the ontological conceptual schemes used for their comprehension. It is noteworthy that one of the key philosophers-researchers of the problems of information reality — L. Floridi — develops the thesis about the reontologizing role of information and communication technologies. In this sense, the variety of phenomena that is often summarized under the phrase "the formation of an information society" in Floridi's terms can be called "reontologization of the infosphere". An important technological prerequisite for reontologization is the transition from analog devices to digital devices, associated with an increase in the productivity of information transmission, processing and storage operations ^{[28, p. 8]}. The consequence of reontologization is an exponential growth of general knowledge, an increase in the scale and number of directions of movement of social information flows. The growth of the possibilities of informing agents of social communication, according to Floridi, entails an increase in the degree of their moral responsibility for the decisions they make ^{[28, p. 8-9]}. Following these considerations, it can be concluded that the development of communicative technologies not only (and not so much) has a destructive effect on established value dispositions ^{[7, p. 195]}, but leads to the formation of a new, multifaceted and complex system of normative principles governing communicative practices.

Personal socialization is a communicative phenomenon that is also being transformed under the influence of the development of new communication technologies. At the same time, it is necessary to avoid overestimating the role of communication technologies in the socialization of personality. In particular, an illustrative example of the overestimation of the role of communication technology is the statement of A.S. Gorbunov, according to which electronic devices (for example, smartphones) become the primary means of obtaining information about society for representatives of the younger generation ^{[6, p. 62]}. In this case, the device will be a means of access to certain practices of obtaining information, but not to it itself: the creation of content, as well as the improvement of mechanisms for personalizing its search, are complex forms of purposeful activity for processing and transmitting socially significant information. This activity is the responsibility of the people who carry it out, whereas electronic technical devices — the results of the use of communication and information technologies — ontologically represent only mediators through which a person can gain access to information channels. No matter how rapid the development of communication technologies, the function of socialization still remains the prerogative of society and its individual institutions. And the issue of controlling the flow of information about society that affects the individual during socialization should be solved by society and its individual institutions, taking into account the increasing complexity of both the information field itself and technical mediators of access to it.

The position according to which online forms of communication cannot be compared with offline forms in their socializing value is also not fully justified. A similar position is shared, in particular, by A.S. Gorbunov ^{[6, p. 63]}, N.V. Tikhomirov ^{[7, p. 195]}, A. Borgmann ^{[29, p. 219-227]}. The opposition of "network" and "traditional", or "virtual" and "traditional" methods of communication, as a rule, does not take into account the diversity of forms of online communication, including from the point of view of the multiplicity of normative contexts regulating it. For example, the remark of A.S. Gorbunov, according to which online communication is "superficial", seems to be significantly removed from the realities of modern online forms of interpersonal interaction, in its semantic depth and saturation, often not inferior to offline forms, and sometimes surpassing it due to the removal of certain psychological barriers that prevent the completeness of personal disclosure in acts communications.

Statements about the potentially negative impact of online forms of communication on the processes of socialization of the individual are also based on a certain shift in emphasis. Thus, N.V. Tikhomirov's statement that immersion in the digital space becomes a prerequisite for the development of a tendency to deviant behavior ^{[7, p. 195]} is actually based on silence about other determinants of the development of deviation that relate both to the socializing personality itself and to its environment (present both offline, offline, offline, offline, offline, offline, offline, offline, offline, offline, offline, offline, offline, offline, offline, offline, offline, offline, offline, offline, offline, offline, offline, offline, offline, offline, offline, offline, offline, offline, offline, offline, offline, offline, offline, offline, offline, offline, offline, offline, offline, offline, offline, offline, offline, offline, offline, offline, offline, offline, offline, offline, offline, offline and in online communication). By themselves, online forms of communication have no more potential to form models of destructive behavior of their participants than their offline counterparts. The formation of such a pattern of thinking about online communication owes its origin to only a few of its features - greater accessibility and a lesser degree of controllability. However, this does not negate the fact that the condition for the spread of models of destructive and antisocial behavior is not the development of online forms of communication itself and not the improvement of technological means of access to it, but the directed use of a communicative resource with appropriate socially destructive goals. Consequently, the task of society is not only to develop forms of control of the online communication space, but also to improve the communicative culture of the individual and develop models for the socially responsible use of new forms of communication.

The key change that should be reflected in the content of ontological conceptual schemes of socialization processes in the information society is their complication, "stratification" in accordance with the multiplication of the number of contexts of personality activity: personality, the reality of which is informational in nature (the personality of the other is given to us as an array of information, and our own communicative self-presentation is informing the other) ^[28], undergoes structural and functional metamorphoses towards its heterogenization, which, however, does not imply the elimination of the integrating core of socially conditioned personal values and meanings. Modern communication agents are endowed with much higher possibilities of constructing their own personality (both at the cultural and semantic, and at the bodily level) due to the development of information use technologies. Due to the need to conceptualize the fundamental content of these processes, there is a need to develop such ontological ideas about socialization that considered the personality being formed as a complex, polycontextual and actively constructed object, assuming the joint existence of offline and online identity ^{[30, p. 74]}. The task of such ontological schemes is to harmonize "traditional" and "new" forms of communication within the scientific picture of social reality. The need to create such ontologies cannot be satisfied by simply including "virtual reality" objects among the varieties of material existence, as is done by some researchers ^{[14, p. 120]}: to satisfy it, it requires the creation of many competing and pragmatically-oriented descriptions of structurally heterogeneous systems of communicative relationships that form the fabric of the processes of formation of personal identities.

In the context of the implementation of socialization processes, new communication technologies can not only exist in the ontological position of mediators, but also have limited agency (like all technological achievements, they are not endowed with autonomous goal-setting in their existence, but are created by man in order to implement certain functions). The need to take into account the agency of some technological phenomena, such as algorithms (for example, search algorithms or personalization algorithms in social networks), becomes an important feature of online communication, with which its "natural" agents have to reckon ^{[31, p. 47]}. In this regard, the development of digital competencies and skills of organizing activities in the online space, contributing to productive interaction with such systems with limited agency, is of great importance. The importance of such competencies is manifested both at the level of unidirectional communication and information, and at the level of interpersonal interaction. The skills of interacting with such systems become the key to setting up the personalization of the consumed content and the effectiveness of information search. It can be assumed that the gradual improvement of artificial intelligence technologies will lead to an increase in the number of varieties of such technical communicative agents.

Conclusion

In this study, we have attempted to give a brief outline of possible areas of critical reflection on the socio-ontological content of research concerning the impact of new communication technologies on the processes of socialization in the modern information society. The review carried out can be summarized by the following conclusions:

1. Socio-ontological assumptions are often implicitly present in the structure of the social theorist's worldview, however, their identification is of great importance for the critical analysis of the theoretical concepts being formed. In the case of the study of the communicative specifics of the information society, ontological assumptions manifest themselves in the context of research assessments of the actual characteristics of society as informational, as well as understanding the properties of new forms of communication. The characteristics of "virtual", "digital", "network" used in this case are revealed precisely in connection with research ideas about the ontological status of the objects and phenomena described.

2. The development of new communication technologies should be considered as a factor of complication of the processes of socialization of personality due to the increasing number of contexts of the constitution of personal identity. The multiplicity and variability of personal identity in the spaces created by new forms of communication (often called "network" or "virtual") should be associated not with the destruction of the value and semantic core of personality, but with an increase in the number of available practices of communicative self-presentation. The ontological significance of new communication technologies lies in the transformation of the spatio-temporal characteristics of such practices, but not in the formation of their semantic content. Improving technical means of communication are technical means, and the target component of their application is always dependent on the intentions of the user.

3. The specificity of the communicative processes implemented in the information society (including the processes of socialization of personality) determines the development of social ontology as a sphere of creating heuristically valuable for the development of descriptions and explanations of conceptual schemes of the existence of objects / phenomena and the relations existing between them. The multidimensional nature of the emerging social reality and the increasing pace of its change makes the formulation of the question of the unified substantial foundations of sociality meaningless. The development of the mode of existence of social ontology as an analysis of the conceptual foundations of models for discussing social reality and its individual aspects is determined by the actual needs of branches of social science.