HOMO VIRTUALICUS IN THE CONTEXT OF POST-DEMOCRACY AND INFORMATION SECURITY
Initially created for interaction between professionals, Internet became accessibleto billions of people in a matter of a few decades (by some criteria in less than 20years), and special structures with various functionality began to appear inside it.All of this represents just another cycle of the permanent information revolution,a complicated concept with all the positive and negative ramifications stemmingfrom it. It has to be noted that Internet, especially with its embedded social networksand blogosphere, is no longer a passive information/communication, sociopsychologicaland business service phenomenon. It gradually crosses the boundariesof our computer screens and becomes a real, crucially important societal, politicaland military factor.We believe the World Wide Web has become an integral part of the environmentaround us, and hence it would not be quite appropriate to pass unequivocaljudgments on this or that happening in the Internet. Researchers should widen theirunderstanding of this phenomenon and try to figure out its dynamic mechanisms. Tosome extent this would enable supporting the desirable trends and/or countering thedetrimental ones, from perspective of the public interests protection.In this paper we contemplate the Internet (along with social networking communityand blogosphere) as a new, virtual, but effective form of democracy, whichclashes in social sense with the realities of the modern democracy quite aptly definedby the term "post-democracy." We shall also examine the role of Internet and socialnetworks in terms of information security, since this system is a rather powerfulweapon in modern network-centric information warfare, as well as in geopoliticalconfrontation as a whole.