Digital oddities: technological change and cultural elaboration

Abstract

While observing the digital society, complexity appears as key dominant, most of all if compared to the analogic one. Complexity is intrinsic to the digital society, which enables a faithful description of reality: any heterogeneity is included thus highlighting the Reductionism limits in depicting the reality by simplifying it. The digital perspective allows for a new dimension in our daily life, especially in fields such as work, among the most engaged by the change. Data role is changing, too: from a means to represent the reality to a constituent of reality itself. Such a process is ongoing, for instance, in data protection and security: basically, a technical issue but ever more relevant in key aspects of life until touching individual rights. To handle the complexity, to govern technological change and ecosocial transition, to make the best of the Big Data and AI, we need an adequate cultural elaboration allowing the social contract to upgrade to the digital dimension.