Philosophical and Methodological Potential of Categories “Social Time” and “Social Space”

Abstract

The article is dedicated to one of the most relevant issues of contemporary philosophy: methodology for analysis of social space and social time. It considers the cognitive foundations of perception of space, some aspects of the design process of spatial models and their reflection in a natural language. Understanding of space is impossible without linguistic constructions, as many peculiarities of environment including spatial and ontological facts can be formed and fixed in human consciousness through linguistic concepts. Two dominant structures of social objective reality - i.e. social time and space - have been discussed: processes of genesis of informational society and world globalization. It is revealed that usage of category of “identity” gives principally new opportunities to reflect specificity of social space and time under globalization. The article considers social networks as a principally new form of social space in information society: they are deprived of constant localization and calendar determinants, abide by their internal laws and are not vulnerable to unification processes. It is also shown that in the general context of world globalization the character of mutual determination of social time and space is changing. Not so long ago the main tendency of social time and space was seen in accelerating its “going”. Nowadays, under contemporary hyperdynamic globalization of social objective reality the objective measure of social time is power of substance streams in social space, energy, and information, and this power is mediated by new forms of social objective reality, including global market, international corporations, electronic stock exchange and money, Internet etc.