The Hypercomplex Society

Should today’s society be termed an «information» or a «network» society? This book provides an alternative choice―the hypercomplex society, which is a critical, complex-theoretical understanding of society whose growing level of social complexity represents the basic challenge of our current society. This original understanding of society is presented through a historical analysis of the emergence of the current state of hypercomplexity and polycentrism. The functioning of communication, mass media, and the public sphere in the hypercomplex society is also analyzed and the Internet is characterized as a communication infrastructure particularly shaped by the hypercomplex society. The book concludes with a cultural self-observation of the hypercomplex society.

Lars Qvortrup is Professor of Interactive Media at the University of Southern Denmark, where he is Director of Knowledge Lab Denmark. In addition to numerous articles in international professional journals and fifteen monographs in Danish, he edited a four-volume series entitled Virtual Inhabited 3D Worlds. His current research project studies the logical structure, the sociology, and the aesthetics of knowledge.