Editors' Introduction to the Special Issue on "Human Being in the Digital World"

The stormy progress of information and communication technologies (ICT) since the end of the 1980s has wonderfully changed not only professional but also everyday life of very many people in the world. Now it is possible to speak with a friend across an ocean and to see your friend; due to cell telephones, the mothers are able to immediately find out what and where their children are doing; we do have the possibility to obtain in several minutes the e-versions of thick books stored thousands miles away from our terminals, etc. However, during last decade many scholars from different countries have observed and discussed a number of negative tendencies in the development of the personality and society caused by the expansion of ICT and globalization processes. The authors of the papers presented below look for constructive ways of contributing to harmonic development of the personality in modern information society. The common feature of the papers is that they either relate to the new scientific discipline called Cognitonics or correspond to its goals. Cognitonics is a new scientific discipline emerged in the first half of the 2000s (its prenatal stage of development covers the years 1993 – 2003). It aims (a) at explicating the distortions in the perception of the world caused by the information society and globalization and (b) at coping with these distortions in different fields by means of elaborating systemic solutions for compensating the negative implications of the kind for the personality and society, in particular, for creating cognitive-cultural preconditions of the harmonic development of the personality in the information society and for ensuring the successful development of national cultures and national languages. Two factors seem to be especially important from the standpoint of achieving the goals of Cognitonics:-information and communication technologies have been developing extremely quickly and have been expanding unusually broadly, they penetrate not only into every office and laboratory but also into every school class and every family;-it is necessary and promising to use the power of modern ICT in order to very quickly and broadly disseminate the elaborated effective methods of compensating the negative distortions in the development of the personality and of national cultures in information society. From the standpoint of educational practice, Cognitonics proposes an answer to the following question: what precious ideas and images accumulated by the mankind, at what age, and in what a way are to be inscribed into …