Communicating Change

Digital technologies from the Internet and social media to artificial intelligence and robotics are reshaping the world. They offer joy, participation, and higher productivity, but they have also brought disruption, alienation, control, oppression, and exacerbated inequalities. This volume explores this ongoing transformation and its social implications between domination and participation. Outcomes at any given time are not taken as predetermined but as results of the decisions by a range of diverse social actors who compete, cooperate, or conflict with one another and can draw on differential access to resources within shifting political-legal frameworks and structural contexts. Scholars of communication, media studies, sociology, political ecology, employment and labor relations, science and technology come together to examine the social shaping of digital futures across different world regions and domains.

Contributing to these fields, the volume highlights the merits of interdisciplinary research and transnational perspectives to illuminate the intricate complexity in which digital technologies are shaped by and are shaping social relations of power between domination and participation. The authors present critical case studies that make timely progress toward a deeper understanding of these new dynamics and toward broadening the horizon for imagining preferable democratic future alternatives.

This volume is sponsored by the International Sociological Association Research Committees on Futures Research (ISARC07), ProFutur, Denkwerk für Antizipative Demokratie, and Initiative for Transnational Futures (ITF).

Markus S. Schulz is a Researcher at the Max Weber Center for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies, University of Erfurt, Germany, and the New School for Social Research, USA.