New article by Andreas Hepp in the Berliner Journal für Soziologie

How can we research the digital future? ZeMKI member Professor Dr Andreas Hepp addresses this question in a new article published in the Berliner Journal für Soziologie.

What exactly is the article about?

Andreas Hepp’s article aims to ensure that the digital future – or more precisely: various possible digital futures – are included more systematically than before in research on social transformation. His argument is that a social science examination of digital futures should be part of media and communication research on emergence.

In order to make this connection tangible, the article first examines the extent to which previous research on the global transformation of societies with digital media and their infrastructures has been dominated by a focus on consequence rather than emergence. However, as Andreas Hepp argues in a second step, if one broadens the view to emergence, one is inevitably confronted with questions of the future, as this is a fundamental aspect of human agency in general. In a third step, this argument leads to a closer examination of figurations of digital futures, which are understood in a twofold sense: on the one hand as social figurations in which digital futures are produced, and on the other hand as the imagined figurations of human coexistence in the digital future – and social imaginaries based on them. Finally, this conceptual clarification is condensed into an outline of media and communication research on emergence.

The article is part of a thematic focus of the Berliner Journal für Soziologie on refiguration or transformation as concepts in the study of social change, edited by Hubert Knoblauch and Martina Löw.

The article is based on Andreas Hepp’s diverse research and the Datafication and Mediatization Lab on pioneering communities and communicative AI, which he heads, most recently in the ComAI research group.

The article can be downloaded here.