Digital trinity - controllable evolution - everyday religion: characteristics of the socio-technical transformation of digitalization

Abstract

How can the ubiquitous digitalization in the early 21st century be grasped and characterized? A media-change perspective that focuses on innovation-driven, complex co-evolutionary processes points to the following characteristics: digitalization is an intertwined co-evolutionary bundle of socio-technological transformation processes that reveals itself as a trinity of datafication, algorithmization, and platformization. It is embedded in the nano-bio-info-cogno-convergence (NBIC), accordingly linked to a transhumanism standing for the belief in a controllable human evolution, and characterized by the convergence of technology and religion in the form of an implicit everyday religion of the digital. These hallmarks of digitalization are reflected in an altered social order, which is driven by the interplay of governance by and of digital technology.