Ecology of the Digital Environment as an Attempt to Respond to the Civilizational Challenges of the Digital Age

Abstract

The article is devoted to the analysis of the impact of digital technologies on the brain, consciousness and human nature as a whole. According to the author, this kind of impact is one of the most serious civilizational challenges of the dig­ital age. In her analysis, the author relies on the ecological approach as a holistic interdisciplinary methodological principle. The most important part of this ap­proach is the ecology of the digital environment. The digital environment in the article is considered as a new environment for a person, a new Umvelt, that is, the immediate environment that affects his inner world. Therefore, signs and stimuli that arise in the process of digital communication have such a signif­icant impact on cognitive processes. The communication situation of modern man is paradoxical in a certain sense: despite the ever-increasing complexity of technology, the communication process itself is impoverished and standard­ized. This negatively affects the evolution of the brain, as the emergence of new neural connections is not stimulated. The way out of this situation can be a pur­poseful stimulation of the development of critical thinking. Within the frame­work of an integrated ecological approach, the author relies on an ecological ap­proach to the visual perception of J. Gibson and the concept of Umwelt J. von Uexküll, substantiating a much broader theoretical applicability of environmental science than it is accepted in classical biological ecology. The author comes to the conclusion that the ecology of the digital environment contributes to find­ing answers to the civilizational challenges of the digital era and becomes the main weapon in the fight against the information and environmental crisis.