Methodological background for studying Society-Network

Internet is a new socio-cultural reality which provides us with new opportunities not just for scientificresearch but for philosophizing as well. At the present the Internet is still understudied. The same is true for the Society-Network forwhich the Internet is the modification and the very 'substance'. The objective of the article is to analyze concepts by N. Luhmann,R. Collins, M. Castells, and A. Toffler as methodological bases for studying the Society-Network, which is the object of communicationstudies and social philosophy. Today Information Technologies of the last century have been developing so fast that almost all thepeople who actively participate in social interaction are Internet users. Many problems related to human existence in digital space moraland ethical issues of Internet communication, influence of the Network on immaterial activity of the society, methodological grounds fordeveloping Internet-communication, and so on, make the Internet itself an object for scientific socio-humane and philosophicalknowledge. The original term 'Society-Network' is represented in the article. It differs from the commonly used term 'network society',which describes the society that fundamentally has network organization in different areas of social activity (scientific, educational,market, etc.). 'Society-Network' depicts the existence of digital information technologies as the major means of transferring informationand connecting people. The terms 'society', 'communication', 'network', 'network structure' are common for all the represented concepts.But each concept has several particular terms and statements which help to understand the processes on the Internet as 'substances' of the'Society-Network'. They also allow understanding basic characteristics of the society. N. Luhmann described such characteristic of anetwork structure as 'autopoiesis' which suggests that a system is a self-reproducing phenomenon. R. Collins emphasized the structure ofthe intellectual networks and specified such parts of them as 'hubs' and 'invisible colleges' connected by horizontal and verticalconnections. M. Castells described the structure of the 'informational' society as he is contemporary with the Society-Network.A. Toffler is a social futurologist, so he characterized the basic principles of the digital network long before its existence. In general allthe concepts are not controversial. Moreover, they complement each other and help to understand the phenomenon of the 'Society-Network' as the object of communication studies and social philosophy.

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