Patterns

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

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

"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