Abstract
In 1974, Raymond Williams famously reinterpreted the claim that “television has altered our world” (2003: 1). Williams’ critique was that this maxim implied either that the technology of television was an accidental invention that was the sole cause of social and cultural change that followed its introduction – the technological determinist position – or that television emerged merely as a symptom of wider changes within the social fabric. Both positions, he argued, were too simplistic, ignoring both the politics of technological development and the role played by the specific affordances of material systems in shaping future social development. Instead of these positions, he advocated for a more complicated framework which would explore the entangled relationship between technologies – conceived as human developed but also agential actors – and the social structures that shape, result from, and/or are amplified by the uses and applications of these technologies.
Fifty years on, it is no longer television that is referenced in proclamations of technology-driven social change. Today, one is more likely to hear that it is digitalisation that has altered our world. Whether expressed in relation to the internet, data systems, mobile devices, social media, biotech, or any of the myriad ways “the digital” is understood, computational technologies are entangled in complex ways with contemporary society. They shape – and are shaped by – how we think; how we interrelate on personal, communal, and societal levels; how we create, experience, and archive our cultures. They influence how we learn, how we work, how we consume, how we are governed and policed, and how we act politically. Digital technologies have also impacted where and how we reside, changed the tempos of our lives, and are reshaping how we experience our own bodies and ecologies. Williams would be intrigued to know that digitalisation has even transformed television, reforming its world-altering capacity. Questioning of digitalisation's impact is thus vital for understanding the contemporary epoch.
Recognising the scale of digital transformation is not enough though. We must also see these technologies and the transformations associated with them as political, driven by ideological, social, and economic agendas that are materialised in form, structure, and application (Benjamin, 2019; Wajcman, 2010; Winner, 1980). Digital systems and technologies, and their implementation, are not essential but products of particular social and power relations. They are designed by humans, and increasingly transnational corporations, to serve (within) specific agendas. This means the design and governance structures of digital technologies may entrench inequality and exacerbate injustice just as readily as they may privilege and benefit their users. The politics manifested in technologies can produce outcomes – sometimes unintended or unexpected – that do great good but also may create harms for individuals and groups, and to an already fragile planetary ecosystem. However, the everyday worlds in which they are used are not simply landing sites for technological impact, but diverse places where the digital is given meaning and purpose. Everyday life, values, experiences, and actions can shift the consequences of the politics of digital technologies in unexpected directions. As Williams dictates, to understand a society transformed by digitalisation is to also examine how the politics of a given society are invested in its technological artefacts, systems, and their uses, how these agendas are challenged and transformed in everyday use, and to interrogate what that means for understanding – and intervening – in societal change.
Tracking, theorising, and critiquing the complex and politicised entanglement of digital technologies with all dimensions of society, culture, and economy is the work of Dialogues on Digital Society. The journal will showcase contributions that conceptualise (or reconceptualise) new and significant issues of our digitised world, working across disciplinary boundaries to examine the breadth of emerging thinking about the politics, pleasures, and pains of a world remade digitally. Drawing on diverse bodies of knowledge and developing and extending a range of approaches, contributions to the journal will explore questions about how best to make sense of digital technologies, what happens when our human societies become inflected by their operations and politics, and how everyday life often reshapes the outcomes assumed by the logics of digitalisation. Focused on significant and far-reaching issues, the journal will be an important resource for those working on any aspect of the digital society across the social sciences and humanities.
To reflect this ambition and scope, Dialogues on Digital Society is necessarily broad and interdisciplinary. The journal seeks to cross-fertilise knowledge across modes of inquiry in order to better address the complexity of a digitised world. Its attention is also focused on all kinds of digital technologies; platforms, devices, infrastructures, websites, biotechnology, data systems, and emerging computational tools. To support this breadth of engagement, the editorial board is composed of researchers from more than 10 disciplinary specialisms and 22 countries. The 5 journal editors are also from a range of disciplines: Media and Communications, Geography, Anthropology, and Criminology. We also have a diverse expertise in exploring the intersecting political, social, cultural, and experiential dimensions of digital societies, especially those of gender, race, sexuality, age, and migration status. By drawing on the wide range of knowledge from within our editorial team and the insights emerging from various disciplinary research communities, Dialogues on Digital Society, will offer a broad engagement with questions of digitalisation.
Dialogues in Digital Society is not, however, a static repository of knowledge about digital technologies and the societies in which they manifest. In keeping with the plasticity of digital artefacts, and in order to stimulate open and critical debate, the journal will apply the format of open peer commentary to engage the research community in a considered discussion of the published ideas. Each edition will publish expansive research articles exploring novel and field-defining conceptualisations of digital societies, along with responses and commentaries on each paper from a range of contributors. There will also be a response from the author to the criticisms in these commentaries.
Through this format, the journal will publish lively, dynamic research dialogues intended to unfix the theories and approaches through which we interrogate the digital. Research that is open to extension and ongoing discussion seems appropriate for the permanently beta world of high-tech systems, the fast pace of innovation and invention, and the constantly evolving transformations that are associated with emerging technologies. The frameworks that are necessary to study this ever-shifting terrain are also always in flux which makes it even more important to have a nimble and expansive conceptual toolkit for tackling its complexity. The liveliness of the dialogue form that will be adopted by the journal allows for this dynamism.
The format, though, also reflects the editors’ commitment to intellectual complexity. Through the article commentaries, we intend not only bringing old and new concepts under scrutiny but also fostering scholarly depth and rigour across allied fields of study. We all advance as scholars when we constructively engage with the insights and interventions of others and we see the journal's dialogues as a mechanism for this kind of intellectual development. By providing an avenue for emerging ideas and by fostering critical engagement with them, Dialogues on Digital Society will provide a focal point for development, discussion, and debate about the transformations of digital societies.
The journal accepts original research articles of up to 12,000 words, giving scope for contributors to develop a complex intervention into the field. These articles should address a topic or theme of significance in the study of digitalisation, digital technologies, and digital society, and be focused on developing a new agenda or framework. The emphasis is on theoretical or conceptual interventions that propose innovative directions or challenges for understanding the transformations of digitalisation. Empirical findings are valuable in developing the argument but the emphasis here is on broad-reaching conclusions rather than documenting particular case studies. After initial double blind peer-review and acceptance, the journal will commission 4–6 commentaries by an interdisciplinary and diverse selection of peers in order to interrogate, but also to expand upon, the original article. The author will then be given scope to respond to those critical commentaries. It is in these dialogues that we will achieve the journal aim of animating further research developments in the study of digital societies.
Similarly, the review forums within each edition will offer a series of open reviews of selected, impactful publications alongside a response by the author, once again generating a dialogue about emerging frameworks for exploring digital societies. But, in keeping with the scope of transformations associated with digitalisation, these review forums will not only explore academic books. They will also provide critical commentary on a variety of cultural artefacts, such as artworks, games, films, or performances that offer complex engagements with the nature of digital societies. The impacts of digitalisation have not been contained to one arena so neither should our sources for meaningful interrogation of its politics. This engagement beyond the printed academic codex is also part of the journal's commitment to a breadth of inquiry and interdisciplinary exploration. Each review forum will consist of 4–6 reviews of up to 1,000 words, accompanied by an author or creator response to these critiques. We are keen for suggestions of emerging publications or artworks that offer significant conceptual interventions.
Dialogues on Digital Society is first and foremost a “big ideas” journal – a hub for field-changing, emerging thinking from the leading edge of research into how digitalisation has “altered our world.” We welcome submissions from authors across the social sciences and humanities, from various geographic contexts, and at various career stages whose insights will advance our understanding of digitalisation and allow us to meaningfully interrogate the complexities of our digital societies.