Conference: Rethinking Social Structures in the Digital Age
September 13-15, 2023 at ETH Zurich
Digital technologies have become the backbone of many things we do. Various online platforms are the common place where we communicate, shop or work, data is the way how we make sense of what is going on as well as how we exercise our control, algorithm constitutes our choices, rigid quantification and visualization guide how we reason. Digitalization has become an important, even indispensable, part of human lives. But this also invites well-known questions, such as echo chambers (Sunstein 2017), the digital gap (van Dijk 2020), trolling (Phillips 2015) or aloneness (Turkle 2012), just to name a few.
The conference «Rethinking Social Structures in the Digital Age» investigates the interdependence of digital technologies and social structures. It brings together philosophers of technology and social philosophers to discuss the structuring influence of digital technologies on social norms, social roles, and the quality of human relationships more broadly. The conferences aim is to understand the digital transformation as a social process. The conference aims to examine social structures as they arise through what has been commonly called the digital transformation. The particular focus on social structures intends to go beyond the view that treats digital technologies and networks as mere tools.
The conference focuses on two main topics, thereby bringing researchers in dialog that tend to work either on social structures or on technology respectively. However, it is essential to understand each other`s work if we are each to investigate digitalization as a social process.
A) Conceptualizing Social Structures
Framing digitalization as a social process requires asking foundational philosophical questions that can be explained on two ends of a continuous spectrum. On one end of the spectrum, we can understand digitalization in relation to existing social structures, social roles and our social situatedness. As other technologies like the printing press have once revolutionized social life, digital transformation can be understood in a similar sense as the digitalization of existing social life. On the other end of the spectrum, digitalization can be understood as the emergence of genuine digital social structures, like for example social media platforms. From this perspective, digital technologies have created wholly new social roles, possible actions, and human relationships. In this part of the conference, researchers will discuss the (dis-)similarities of digital and non-digital technologies on social structures and investigate whether digital technologies indeed constitute social structures and how digital mediation constraints or allows human (inter-)action.
B) Digitalized and Digital Social Structures
The second part of the conference deals more concretely with this spectrum of digital and digitalized social structures. Researchers contributing to this part of the workshop investigate digitalized or digital social structures such as the public, governance, and economic sphere. What effect does digital communication have on the structure of public discourse itself? How do emerging digital governance structures, e.g. around migration policies, affect the use of power and reflect the relation of citizen, non-citizen, and the state? What is the influence of digital technologies on economic interaction, collaboration, as well as exploitation?
Registration for the “Rethinking Social Structures in the Digital Age” conference, ETH Zürich, 13-15 September is now open for registration.
The conference will take place in a hybrid format. Registration is required for both participation in presence (with limited places) and online.
Please note that the registration deadline for in-person participation is September 3, 2023 and for online participation Septmber 10, 2023. Please specify how you want to participate.
Due to limited space we may not be able to accept all registrations for in-person participation. We will notify you whether a place is reserved for you or whether you are on the waiting list after the deadline for in-person participation is closed. If a place is reserved for you but you cannot make it, please let us know as soon as possible so that we can give your place to the next person on the waiting list.
Information for online participation will be sent to you on 12. September via e-mail.
The Conference takes palce at ETH Zurich in the RZ building (Clausiusstrasse 59, 8092 Zurich), floor F, room 21.
See how you get to RZ building on external pagethe map
The conference is organised by Niklas Kirchner and Bodi Wang from the Chair of Practical Philosophy, ETH Zürich and funded by the SNSF.
