An event in the digital age: the status of the actor

The main objective of the article is to address the question of how to approach defining an actor in the modern context, interpreted as the digital age. The article provides a brief overview of the concept «digital» and the latest digital technologies characterized by the use of neural network approaches. The work presents a critical review of existing approaches to defining the status of an actor in the context of social studies of technology. The review shows that the main existing approaches largely retain features of anthropocentric and instrumental principles of considering technologies. However, such approaches lead to a dichotomy between humans and technology, which does not fully in accord with the challenges of contemporary social and technical realities, characterized by a deep integration of technologies into the sphere of human existence. All this leads to difficulties in distinguishing between human and technical contributions to a specific outcome. In light of this thesis, a critique of concepts such as actor, agent, and subject is proposed in the article. As a result, from the perspective of practical activity and the underlying modern realities, it is more appropriate to consider humans and technology as a hybrid actor. In this perspective, the approach is linked to event ontology, as the phenomenally observed outcome of an activity can be interpreted as an event in which a quasi-subject is constituted primarily by the configuration of Dasein, and actors become indiscernible. The article proposes a critique of various approaches to defining agency and subjectivity specifically from the positions of these foundations and outlines vectors for the development of the topic.