The Emergence of a Digital Medium

FORTE, M.A., PIGNUOLI OCAMPO, S., CALISE, S., PALACIOS, M., ZITELLO, M.

Buenos Aires

Congreso; Second ISA Forum of Sociology; 2012

ISA

This work presents a theoretical discussion about Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) from perspective of general sociological theory and under the premises of the Luhmannian General Social Systems Theory (GSST), which accentuates the sociological centrality of communication and establishes a theory of modern/world society. This perspective considers the ICT beyond the reflections about the relationship between technology and society and it frames them inside the general problem of social order. Our paper proposes: 1) to determine three epistemological obstacles (technologicism, sociologicism and diachronical overload) that block the general theoretical work on the issue, 2) to conceptualize the structural transformations produced in the field of the dissemination of communication by the digitalisation of ICT, by Internet and by the technological convergence, and 3) to evaluate those transformations from a societal theory. Our main hypothesis afirms that from the strenghtening and globalisation of digitalisation, technological convergence and Internet have emerged a communicative media. This digital, interconnected and nodular media transformed the disseminating structures of society, and it makes already possible the communicative agency of informatic nodes, the global and simultaneous accesibility to applications and resources and the communicative synthetisation of remote utterances and understandings.