The Digital “Splitting” of Everyday Life

The coexistence of traditional everyday practices and their transformed models brought about by digital technologies is a problem of paramount relevance. The aim of the research is to understand the shifts in everyday existence, indicating the opposition between “pre-digital” and digital everyday life. Three interrelated thematic lines are analyzed. The first involves considering the characteristics of the dynamically changing situation of digital existence and the trends of “fusion” between human cognitive potential and intelligent devices. The second line is associated with reliance on the semantics of such concepts as proxy culture, virtual rationality, multitasking, Big Data, and the metaverse, which blurs the boundaries between the virtual and the real. The third thematic line is aimed at the analysis of traditional everyday patterns that indicate a self-sufficient connection of stability, goal setting revolving around urgent needs, stereotypes, representations of the typical and weakly reflected patterns of thinking. The legacy of A. Schutz, G. Garfinkel, J. Hoffmann, E. Husserl, M. Heidegger is involved in the analysis of the characteristics of everyday life. The author uses comparative analysis, the assembly method and the dialectical method aimed at identifying contradictions. The study shows, firstly, that the “self-understanding” of everyday life practices aimed at maintaining the “self-sufficient connection of stability” is combined with everyday creativity; secondly, that digital interactions require a radical shift to new forms of skills. The author comes to conclusions about the technological “splitting” of everyday life and digital alienation. The narrowing of the area of “immediate authenticity of experience” and real interpersonal relationships displaces the mode of perceiving reality into a zone of non-reflexivity. Delegation of one’s powers to intelligent systems has become widespread in digital everyday life. Рroxy practices or “acting by proxy” demonstrates the process of replacing human subjectivity, when contact with a real person becomes optional and unnecessary.