The Development of Information Technology and the Problem of Identity

Abstract

The development of information technology has led to the emergence of such a social phenomenon as the information society. The article deals with the problem of the identity of a person who is forced to communicate with his own peers in the realities of the information society. As a philosophical explication of the latter is considered a poststructuralist concept of intertextuality. According to it an individual is a moving fragment of a continuously reproduced hypertext. In such a context semantic unity, treated by philosophical hermeneutics as a necessary condition for the identification of an individual as an understanding being, is an ideological projection. Poststructuralists postulate “natural” dispersion of the primary semantic unity. Henceforth, a person who has got stuck in the intertextual reproduction of communicative space and lost identity, participates in communication only as a producer of a new conceptual meaning. A message sent by such a person remains unanswered, which means the impossibility of communication in the information society. Since communication is an irreducible parameter of human existence, one should speak about an ideological deadlock of the concept of intertextuality and breakdown of an ideological construct of the information society.