The problem of information hygiene and the relevance of late-antique ethics

Abstract

Today a completely new type of reality – «digital reality» – is being formed, which entails new challenges for individuals and society. Deep involvement in digital reality and the active use of its technical mediators creates a load on the psychophysics of the individual, which, especially in the stage of active growth, not only deforms behavioral patterns, but can also influence the formation of brain structures. Educational practices, through which society helped the individual to form their identity, lose their former certainty in the digital dimension. As a response to these challenges at the turn of the XX-XXI centuries, the concept of information hygiene was formed within the medical sciences, describing ways to minimize the destructive effects of the information environment. However, developed for a narrow field, this concept does not take into account the fact that psychophysical transformations under the influence of destructive influences of modern media threaten to destroy the basic constants of the human body. Positivist medicine, due to the specificity of its subject, does not see the eschatological horizon of the problem, on which the contours of our «posthuman future» are already clearly outlined. At this point, philosophy can and should recall that at the dawn of European civilization, medicine was inseparably an ethical program: a single set of practices – ascetic, hygienic, and mental-aimed not only at minimizing destructive influences but also at discovering and cultivating the individual's own humanity. Thus, in this article, the concept of information hygiene is thematized taking into account its historical and philosophical implications. On the one hand, it is intended to reflect the current specifics of the challenges, on the other – to take into account the experience of preventing destructive influences, practiced by late-antique philosophers in the status of «healers of the soul». For the empirical verification of this concept, the authors performed the following experiment. A group of first-year students were asked to spend a day without the Internet and describe their feelings and thoughts. The analysis of spontaneous ways to overcome deep involvement in digital reality allowed us to identify the most adequate forms of minimizing its destructive influences: avoidance of active leisure in the real world. These forms were in tune with the late-antique practices of self-care in the editorial office of the Epicurean school. This broader ethical consideration of information hygiene opens the way for theming a comprehensive approach to the problem of human survival in the face of digital reality

Information and Environmental Media Hygiene as an Object of Sociological Analysis

“…В качестве ответа на данные вызовы на рубеже ХХ-ХХI вв. в рамках медицинских наук было сформировано понятие информационной гигиены, описывающее способы минимизации деструктивных воздействий информационной среды» [19].…”