Trends and Prospects in Growing Sociocultural Complexity

Abstract

Modern culture demonstrates increasing complexity. Today, complexity is beginning to be envisioned as a modernity's immanent quality, a source both of uncertainty and of hidden opportunities for cultural development. This article outlines the socio-cultural features of increasing complexity. Modern culture does not promote stability, but, on the contrary, multiplies differences and becomes a kind of differentiation flow. From being a system of sustainable, vitally important forms of human activity, culture is transformed into a kaleidoscope of individual experiences against the background of network structures and technosocial systems that exist according to their own logic. Permeating all cultural forms, complexity becomes sometimes a source for the emergent new cultural practices, sometimes a source of chronic anxiety caused by the inability to `master' socio-cultural transformation.