Virtualization of Reality as a Cultural Universal

The subject of the research in the presented article is the cultural practice of virtualization of reality in the mechanism of socio-cultural reflection, stimulating certain vectors of development of society. The appeal to the cultural understanding of this topic is due to the need to focus on the heuristic limitations of reducing the virtualization of socio-cultural processes in society exclusively to the influence of digital technologies, displacing to the periphery of theoretical reflection the problems of the causality of culture and the ability of society to design, as well as to implement a positive image of the future. The object of consideration, accordingly, is the mechanism of socio-cultural reflection – an objective process of society's reaction to changes in the environment and its own development, including understanding of reality in historical and cultural categories available for their time. The ultimate expansion of the concept of virtualization, allowing us to classify this phenomenon as a cultural universal, makes us ask the questions: is culture possible in principle without the virtualization of reality and where is the line between the virtual and the real in socio-cultural processes? The scientific novelty of the study consists in clarifying the conceptual and terminological apparatus for studying the virtualization of reality, in examining it from a new perspective using examples studied in cultural anthropology, and in establishing individual patterns and typical features of the phenomenon under consideration. The authors conclude that understanding virtualization as a specific way of orientation of a person and society in the surrounding reality excludes the possibility of reproducing culture without virtual realities common to people.

virtual, real, sociality, virtualization of reality, sociocultural processes, autonomy of consciousness, autonomy of personality, models of virtualization of reality, cultural typology, sociocultural frontier