MASS

The concepts of intelligentsia and elite reflect different historical periods of evolution of the educated class. Intelligentsia is the product of the epoch of democratic rise. It solves the problem of overcoming rupture between advanced enlightenment and real people life. Elite is the subject of the avant-garde culture in the post revolutionary society.

The article covers the analysis of the aesthetic taste problem in the context of changes of relation structure: elitist – mass. Attention is focused on some social and aesthetic categories and conceptions reflecting the specificity of the modern consumers culture. The quality criteria being the key component of the latter is the underlying cause of the social-structural progress, and the taste phenomenon is the measure of disparity in the field of aesthetic and cultural experience.

Authors of this article state that any post-industrial society is divided into an elite and a mass (S. Bauman, P. Virilio). The elite is exterritorial and mobile, masses, on the contrary, are limited territorially and their movements are either tourism, or the labor migration. Culturally elites tend to interact among themselves more often than they do it with their nations. As for masses, they use, on the one hand, different objects of “other” cultures, but, on the other hand, they oppose each other at the level of mythologies.

The article discusses the main studies of the mass/crowd social action in the digital space. The author compares classical social and philosophical mass analysis of society (XX century) and innovations by theorists of a digital society (XXI century). The author’s aim is to substantiate the new concept of mass in the digital society. The author analyzes the socio-philosophical concepts of the masses in the Internet space. The practice of mass social networking is widespread on the Internet. Their distinctive feature is a rational basis.