The Social Digitalisation Concept to Assessing Digital Transformation

The social digitalisation concept (Hahn 2021) offers a new approach of how digital transformation has shaped the relationship between individuals and society. Rather than assuming an ongoing ‘digital revolution’, this concept shows that the apparent disruptions we are experiencing today are neither unprecedented nor entirely dependent on material digital technology. These findings suggest that the technological determinism inherent in dominant concepts of digitalisation has prevented us from gaining as fuller understanding of the far-reaching, and often unjust, consequences of digital processing. Thus, social digitalisation creates an analytical concept for analysing contemporary societies that addresses the highly entangled and typically opaque power structures of digital processing. With this concept, I demonstrate the necessity of analysing digital transformation within specific contexts and in relation to specific social groups in order to identify the different consequences of digital transformations. The study of these consequences sheds light on numerous social problems that have not yet been linked to the different experiences of digitalisation. I argue that this novel concept of digitalisation not only highlights the need for a persistent assessment of the various impacts of the social digital transformation, but also provides a concrete framework for such an assessment.