The fourth technological revolution and deep shifts in globalization processes

• Main Author: Yanitsky Oleg N.
• Format: Article
• Language: Russian
• Published: Federal Center of Theoretical and Applied Sociology of the Russian Academy of Sciences 2017-06-01
• Series: Вестник Института социологии
• Subjects: agent; globalization; institutions; cyberspace; interdisciplinarity; metabolism; risk; the net; socio-biotechnical system; society; environment; territory.
• Online Access: http:///files/File/Vestnik_2017_21/Yanitskiy.pdf

While relying on studies in the field of globalization both in worldwide and in Russian sociology, on examining the dynamic of modernization in the USSR, in Russia and abroad, as well as on many years of his own research in the field of social consequences of the technological revolution, social ecology and the theory of risk, the author comes to the following conclusions. Separate agents of global society are currently in different stages of globalization and modernization, however, each one of them is in one way or another integrated into global cyberspace, which emerged as a result of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR). Said space is a new stage of manufacturing industry and social reproduction and at the same time a living environment for the social agents which inhabit the planet. On the other hand, this integration process is transforming the planet into a super-complicated socio-biotechnical system (SBT-system) which develops under it own rules. This article examines and evaluates the ongoing and expected changes in the structure and processes of globalization-modernization under the influence of the 4IR, while determining its key drivers and players, as well as analyzing such an issue as correlation between network and territorial organization of society given these new conditions, and the critical conditions of agents and their communities which emerge as a result of said changes. Accentuated are the role and the shapes of metabolic processes, the latter being a key factor which integrates separate elements of the global super-system. Examined are the functions of bureaucratic structures in this new global situation, as well as new forms of global threats and risks (“hybrid warfare”, precise and scattered attacks by hackers etc.). Noted is the critical underdevelopment of the structure and functions of existing social institutions compared to the nature and tempo-rhythm of the ongoing changes. The article ends with a short list of tasks faced by those scientific disciplines which study this new integrated socio-technological reality. The most relevant of these tasks are as follows: the formation of cyberspace and doubling social reality, metabolic processes, developing social interpretation methods for the new reality, social institutions and decision making methods falling behind this ever accelerating reality, and, finally, the phenomenon of “interdisciplinary” everyday life.