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- Title
Der kybernetische Blick und seine Grenzen. Zur systemtheoretischen Selbstbeschreibung der digitalen Gesellschaft.
- Authors
Dickel, Sascha
- Abstract
Due to its cybernetic figures of thought and conceptual heritage, systems theory positions itself prominently as a social and societal theory that is particularly well suited to interpret the current digitization of society. In light of this claim, this paper reflects on the conditions and limits of a systems-theoretical description of digital sociality. Assembling self-attributions and attributions by others of systems theory as a theory of digital sociality, it pursues a second-order observation of the cybernetic view that generally identifies sociality with information processing in a functional-formal way, allowing it to symmetrize humans and computers conceptually. Yet, while systems theory is indeed well suited to describe an already digitally constituted sociality due to its cybernetic-digital theoretical foundation, it tends to ignore the question of how the digital-analogous distinction is (re)produced to begin with. This manifests itself in a blind spot of systems theory with regard to processes of digitization. In order to address this gap, the article proposes a sociological focus on interfaces as socio-technical hinges that translate the analog into the digital. Only these interfaces permit for symmetrizing all entities within the digital register on the one hand, and render the analog fraction of reality not translatable or worthy of translation into digital code intelligible as a "remainder" on the other. A social theory of digitization is thus called upon to reconstruct how digital societies continuously mark, process, and ultimately forget their analog environments.
- Subjects
SYSTEMS theory; SOCIAL theory; CYBERNETICS; DIGITIZATION; INFORMATION processing; RECOLLECTION (Psychology); HUMAN information processing
- Publication
Berliner Journal für Soziologie, 2023, Vol 33, Issue 3, p197
- ISSN
0863-1808
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1007/s11609-022-00475-9