Formation of digimatic civilization: key concepts. Part 1

The article examines the validity of various researchers’ calls for a digital sociology that involves a significant transformation of the modern sociological science’s theorist and methodology. The author examines the arguments put forward by a number of scholars in favor of such a transition, related in particular to the justification of the process of becoming a new digital society, whose technological infrastructure includes the four latest digital technologies: networks, big data, algorithms, platforms. At the same time, it is emphasized that the conceptual construct to which scholars dealing with the processes of digitization, algorithmicization, cybernetization, plat-formization, and networking, showing the main characteristics of the digital society, have not yet been established. In this regard, the article presents an attempt to identify those characteristic features that usually define the general evolution of societies, as well as to identify the features of the formation of a particular type of society, and then try to conceptualize and clearly operationalize the interdisciplinary conceptual apparatus that characterizes the formation of a “digitally diverse” society. This apparatus primarily includes such categories as “digital”, “digitization”, “digitalization”, “digital transformation”, which are actively, but not always consciously, used by scholars analyzing the process of becoming a digital society.