MASS SOCIETY AS AN ENVIRONMENT FOR THE TRANSFORMATION OF HUMAN DIGNITY: A SOCIO-PHILOSOPHICAL PERSPECTIVE

Abstract

The article provides a socio-philosophical analysis of mass society as a specific sociocultural environment within which the content and social significance of human dignity are undergoing transformation. The relevance of the study is determined by the processes of globalization, digitalization, and the massification of social practices, which significantly influence the value orientations of contemporary individuals, models of identity, and mechanisms of social recognition. It is demonstrated that under conditions of the dominance of mass communication, algorithmized forms of interaction, and market logic, human dignity is increasingly reduced to indicators of functional utility, public visibility, and symbolic capital, thereby losing its ontological and moral dimensions.
The aim of the article is to identify the key structural and value-based characteristics of mass society that determine the mechanisms of transformation of human dignity, as well as to outline possible strategies for its preservation within a massified social reality. The methodological framework of the research is based on historical-philosophical, structural-functional, and hermeneutical approaches, complemented by the tools of critical social philosophy. The theoretical analysis draws on the concepts of liquid modernity, the network society, simulated reality, and the theory of recognition.
The results of the study indicate that the transformation of human dignity in mass society occurs through the interaction of such mechanisms as depersonalization, the standardization of social experience, the mediation of communication, the economization of social value, and symbolic violence. It is substantiated that mass society has an ambivalent character: alongside tendencies toward the devaluation of dignity, it simultaneously creates conditions for its reinterpretation and restoration through practices of critical reflection, moral autonomy, and mutual social recognition. It is concluded that the philosophical comprehension of human dignity in the context of mass society constitutes a necessary prerequisite for the formation of new humanistic orientations in contemporary social development.