THE FOUNDATION OF THE DIGITAL MIND
The article aims to interpret the phenomenon of media rationality as a rationality of the modern era. On doing this, the author pursues the objectives to elucidate the origins, vectors of development, and the principles of those forms of sensuality, categories of thinking, and ethical imperatives that are set by the digital environment. Methodologically, these objectives are ensured by the implicit hermeneutics of the phenomenon, i.e. its consideration from the inside, from the media rationality’s intrinsic conceptual, expressive, performative resource. The word “rationality” belongs to the Latin language and is etymologically ramified; however, due to the philosophical orientation of the Modern period, its field of values was added with “account” as “calculation” and “forecast”, while the pre-Latin tradition deemed the “account” in another way. Particularly, Plato distinguished between “market calculation” and “initial count” understanding the latter as fundamental modes of openness to the world. Myths, rituals, sacrifices, and plays as ancient anthropotechnics were linked to the count that arranged the order of sensuality, the order of desire, and the order of knowledge. With the evolution of the industrial culture, the former ritual practices were transformed into rational forecast programs (legal, credit, methodological, etc.), and anthropotechnics got replaced by mechanisms, machinery, and apparatus. Through machines, the requirements for efficiency rapidly increase; however, the increasing efficiency everts itself through itself and acquires the opposite meaning. Pragmatic-oriented technologies are applied for non-pragmatic purposes, reviving the repressed - myths, rituals, and games - on a new, digital, basis. Computer games give us back the rationality as an understanding from within, an openness to the digital environment. Media rationality emerges as a dialogue with the opportunities that media give us for clarifying the experience of the world and ourselves in it.