Patterns Theory of the Digital Society

We’re inclined to assume that digital technologies have suddenly revolutionized everything in just a few years, including our relationships, our forms of work and leisure and even our democracies. Armin Nassehi puts forward a new theory of digital society which turns this assumption on its head. Rather than treating digital technologies as an independent causal force that is transforming social life, he asks: for which problem is digitization a solution? 

When we pose the question in this way, we can see, argues Nassehi, that digitization helps societies deal with, and reduce, complexity by using coded numbers to process information about society.  We can also see that modern societies already had a digital structure long before modern 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 digital society that will be of value to everyone interested in the growing presence of digital technologies in our lives.

Armin Nassehi is Professor of Sociology at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich.

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