Specifics of informational and digital socialization: actor‐deterministic approach

Researches of various aspects of socialization aim to solve important problems of social development, society integration and its harmonious functioning. Rapid emergence and popularization of digital technologies forces us to adapt existing theoretical and practical concepts to new conditions, which leads to delay in conceptual understanding. Further development of instrumental solutions, risk and opportunity analysis largely depend on the nature of such conceptualization. Based on systematic review of Russian language scientific literature, we structured the existing approaches to guess the specifics of informational and digital socialization. The paper characterizes the tendencies complicated their semantic and conceptual differentiation (internalization and adaptation aspects debatability, generational debatability of secondary socialization role duality of goal‐setting). Based on a comparative analysis using the principles of actor‐network theory and the socio‐cultural approach, the authors identified the features determining the specifics of investigating categories in the socialization structure (such as: socio‐cultural continuity ambiguity, functional interpretation duality, transformation of socialization actors and changes in the nature of their influence). The fundamentally specifics are determined by emergence of actor who does not belong to a “human” or “non‐human” being and who is capable of transmitting socio‐cultural meanings and experience not only “from past to present,” but also “from potential future to present”. We propose to divide the specified types of socialization depending on key actor specifics, namely: traditional socialization in digital space (the actors are represented on digital platforms real people who carry on the existing socio‐cultural features), digital socialization (with a digital social actor who is the result of generative artificial intelligence technology, but not an immanent carrier of humanity’ socio‐cultural “baggage”) and informational socialization (information as a product of a real social actor who is a carrier of socio‐cultural features). The proposed approach indicates a new perspective for considering the socialization subject and related areas, which reveals a number of provisions requiring further interdisciplinary study, such as: the comparison with foreign cultural research context, analysis of generational specifics, deep socio‐philosophical understanding of digital entities.