| Summary: | Globalization and the Fourth Technological revolution as its driving force challenge the humanities. The growing unfitness between a highly complex, mobile and risky globalization process and current short-term and monodisciplinary approach to the study of it is still characteristic to the majority of humanities. The article is grounded on the review of works of leading world theorists in modernization (Z. Bauman, U. Beck, M. Castells, M. Fisher-Kowalski, A. Giddens, J. Urry), on the author’s personal experience in running a set of international and domestic research projects, including multilevel studies of urban structures, socio-ecological and disaster issues, and the study of social movements in Russia and abroad. Compilation chronic of socioecological conflicts, building graphs of disposition of forces involved, semi-structured in-depth interviews, and including observation have been used. The major research findings are the following. First,<strong> </strong>the humanities should follow the above global space-time changes. Second, a mass digital transformation of public life is going on and the study of facts is gradually replaced by the study of dramatized facts produced and spread by media. Third, a new object of study, the sociobiotechnical systems (the SBT-systems) have emerged in which social, biological and technical structures and processes are highly integrated by various metabolic processes. Fourth, an existing social order (on all levels) is critically lags behind and therefore is replacing by temporal agreements, road-maps, etc. Fifth, a global information network is potentially all-embracing and all-penetrating risk which destroys the very essence of a man’s privacy. Sixth, metabolic processes are a double-sided phenomenon, physical-chemical and social as such. Seventh, all above processes challenge the established forms of social researches. Their organizational structure should fit to multisided and nonlinear processes of the SBT-system evolution combining top-down and bottom-up approaches. Eight, the ‘technological innovation—social life—the humanities’ interactions should be studied at all levels of the SBT-system functioning and evolution.
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