مقاله انگلیسی رایگان در مورد تحول دیجیتال و تجدید نظریه اجتماعی – الزویر 2019

In this article, it is argued that social theory must be renewed to comprehend the new power constellations and new challenges to aesthetic and intellectual ways of life that are being shaped by digital transformation. However, while social theory has to renew its tools in order to grasp previously unknown realities, it also runs the risk of being assimilated into the very process that it seeks to understand, or to assimilate so much of the dominant belief system that it loses its critical and creative potential. The aim of this article is to propose a particular, renewed social theory that consists in a recasting some social theoretic insights to be able to preserve aesthetic and intellectual potentials of critique and negation. Through the lens of this renewed social theory, digital transformation is understood as a form of economic domination, which, as this article shows, is sustained by un-enlightenment, that is, by fraudulent myths and misplaced metaphors.

Introduction

Digital transformation is generally theorized as a process by which social existence is increasingly affected by digital processes, digital tools, and abundance of information (Lindgren, 2017). As a result, a new hybrid world arises, in which experience is constituted by the merging of the physical world with the digital world. In the digital age, digital processes are so deeply embedded in the daily life of information capitalism that people barely realize they interact with devices and operate machines (Van de Boomen, 2014; Lupton, 2015; Turkle, 2015; Hess and Davisson, 2018). It is evident that hermeneutic social theory needs to take digital transformation into account (Ossewaarde, 2018; Schroeder, 2018). A renewed hermeneutic social theory is necessary to understand the new age initiated by digital technologies and algorithmic modernization. “Classical” social theory arose in a context of industrialization, where the pervasive effects of automatization were known but those of digitalization were as yet unknown. Given the transformation of the industrial context, hermeneutic social theory has to renew its tools in order to grasp previously unknown realities (cf. Fuchs, 2017a). However, in this process of renewing, hermeneutic social theory runs the risk of being assimilated into the very process that it seeks to understand, or to assimilate so much of the digital age’s dominant language and belief system that it loses its poetic sensibility and its critical, interpretative, and creative potential. In order to understand the “digital transformation of social theory”, it is argued in this article, that digital transformation is, to a high extent, a Silicon Valley-driven process that impacts on hermeneutic social theory’s intellectual potentials. It must be emphasized that the type of social theory that is discussed, and renewed, in this article is a particular social theory that has emerged from the Weberian and hermeneutic traditions. In what follows, the argument of this paper is constructed in seven steps.