We are inclined to assume that digital technologies have suddenly revolutionized everything – including our relationships, our forms of work and leisure, and even our democracies – in just a few years. Armin Nassehi puts forward a new theory of digital society that turns this assumption on its head. Rather than treating digital technologies as an independent causal force that is transforming social life, he asks: what problem does digitalization solve?
When we pose the question in this way, we can see, argues Nassehi, that digitalization helps societies to deal with and reduce complexity by using coded numbers to process information. We can also see that modern societies had a digital structure long before computer technologies were developed – already in the nineteenth century, for example, statistical pattern recognition technologies were being used in functionally differentiated societies in order to recognize, monitor and control forms of human behaviour. Digital technologies were so successful in such a short period of time and were able to penetrate so many areas of society so quickly precisely because of a pre-existing sensitivity that prepared modern societies for digital development.
This highly original book lays the foundations for a theory of the digital society that will be of value to everyone interested in the growing presence of digital technologies in our lives.
By:
Armin Nassehi
Translated by:
Mirko Wittwar
Imprint: Polity Press
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions:
Height: 227mm,
Spine: 26mm
Weight: 425g
ISBN: 9781509558223
ISBN 10: 1509558225
Pages: 268
Publication Date: 10 May 2024
Audience:
Professional and scholarly
,
Undergraduate
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Forthcoming
Preface to the English Edition Preface Introduction How to think about digitalisation? A technological-sociological kind of intuition Early technology pushes Original and copy Productive wrong and predetermined breaking point 1 The Reference Problem of Digitalisation Functionalist questions Connecting data – offline What is the problem? The uneasiness with the digital culture The digital discovery of `society´ Empirical social research as the identification of patterns `Society´ as digitalisation material The cyborg as a means of overcoming society? 2 The Idiosyncracy of the Digital The inexact exactness of the world The particular idiosyncracy of data Cybernetics and the feedback of information The digitalisation of communication The dynamic of closure The self-referentiality of the world of data 3 Multiple Duplications of the World Data as observers Duplications Disturbances Transverse data-like duplications The trace of the trace and discrete duplications Traces, Patterns, Networks 4 Simplicity and Multiplicity Medium and form Coding and programming The digital simplicity of society Increased options Sapere aude as it is reflected in digitalisation Excursus: Digital Metabolism 5 Functioning Technology The function of the technological Digital technology Communicating technology The function of functioning Low-level technology Demonised technology Invisible technology and the Turing test The privilege of making mistakes 6 Learning Technology Decisions Abductive machines? Distributed intelligence? Anthropological and technological questions Experiencing and acting machines Incompleteness, temporariness, systemic paradoxes Artificial, bodily, incomplete intelligence 7 The Internet as a Mass Media Surplus of meaning deals Synchronisation function Synchronisation and socialisation Selectivity, mediality and voice in the Internet Watching the watching Complexity and overheating The Internet as an archive of all kinds of statements Intelligence in the mode of Future perfect 8 Endangered Privacy The improbability of informational self-determination A new structural change of the public? Hazards Privacy 10 Privacy 10 as a result of Big Data? Big Data and privacy 20 Rescuing privacy? 9 Debug: Sociology Reborn from the Spirit of Digitalisation Digital dynamic and social complexity An opportunity for sociology Notes Index
Armin Nassehi is Professor of Sociology at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich.
Reviews for Patterns: Theory of the Digital Society
"""Nassehi’s theory is neither dystopic nor utopic, but asks what digital technology is for. Here the ultimate simplicity of zeros and ones describes an infinite complexity, itself structured into patterns. These patterns are the data that pervade, indeed are constitutive of, the entire social life as we know it. A mind-numbingly simple thesis that indeed works. Read this book."" Scott Lash, Oxford University ""The pandemic showed how much we depend on digital technologies for our connections to others, and at the same time many areas of the world and disadvantaged social groups continue to experience digital social inequities. Armin Nassehi offers a fresh perspective on digital societies through the lens of European sociological theories that have, until now, been little adopted in this area of inquiry."" Deborah Lupton, UNSW Sydney"
