Proceedings of TMCE 2014, May 19-23, 2014, Budapest, Hungary, Edited by I. Horváth, Z. Rusák  Organizing Committee of TMCE 2014, ISBN 978-94-6186-177-1 13 CULTURAL TRENDS IN A DIGITAL SOCIETY Ilya Levin School of Education Tel Aviv University Israel ilia1@post.tau.ac.il ABSTRACT The paper deals with features of the emerging Digital society, which is considered a new form of culture. A number of symptoms of the Digital society are presented and discussed, for example such as: blurring of distinctions between reality and virtuality; between people, machines and nature; reversal from scarcity to abundance of information; shifting from primacy of entities to primacy of interactions. Today such symptoms define a specific character of the culture of Digital society and allow predicting the main tendencies of the Digital culture. It is demonstrated that the above symptoms belong to three different cultural spheres: spiritual, social and technological. The tendencies corresponding to the mentioned cultural spheres seem to be: a) Social Media as a new way of forming social consciousness; b) Personal Identity Online as a new way of forming personality, and c) Data Intensive Science as a new methodological paradigm of science. The presented theoretical research is one of the first works that study Digital society as a cultural phenomenon. KEYWORDS Digital society, culture, digital technology, web presence, personal identity online, social media, data intensive science 1. INTRODUCTION Culture is a creation of human beings, and that fact (of course, among many others) principally distinguishes it from nature. Initially, humans explored nature, and dynamically adjusted themselves to it and developed their skills, which enabled them not only to preserve the resources invested in simply surviving, but also to accumulate, and expand their resources. Nature consists of the environment where people developed their experience in communicating and interrelations, and such experiences were gradually transformed into a social environment. The more people advanced in exploring nature, the more complex their cultural space became, and the faster their activities grew. At one specific stage, people began perceiving the culture being created by them as a field of increasingly more efficient activity where impressive results were achieved in people's self-development. Maintaining a livelihood stopped being considered as the main task, since people broadened their framework of interests and began looking for ways of satisfying their more complex, spiritual needs and demands. People discovered that they may make fewer mistakes and may invest fewer resources to achieve objectives that were previously set. Any interaction of people with the surrounding world was always full of unexpected events and difficulties, and people were forced to overcome such difficulties creatively. At a specific stage of their development, creativity became the most important factor, which opened up new ways of communication; consequently, such technologies helped people discover new resources. This stage can be considered as the stage when people learned how to plan for their future, and began seeking prospective ways of development. When man analyzes the future by referring to it himself, he establishes his presence. Actually, a person's presence is a state that exists while the person emotionally anticipates the approaching future. Such a presence, created by man's relation to the future, is established each time any specific human being thinks about it [1]. One of important features of the Enlightenment epoch lies in its emphasis on the future. The Digital society also focuses on the future, but these two focuses have different directions. In the Enlightenment epoch, the future was perceived as a habitat where the ideal existed, and the belief in a bright future was tightly connected with the idea of progress and the belief in human reasoning. In the new Digital society, life dynamics per se lies in