Digitalization and Future of Digital Society

List of Contributors

Introduction

In today’s world, which is called digitalization or technological era, our life practices, habits, and ways of doing business continue to change skin every passing day. Perhaps we are witnessing a period in which the concepts of time and space become difficult and complicated as the subject of a world that is running away. Topics such as artificial intelligence, Internet of Things, innovation, augmented reality, cloud computing, and cybersecurity have become part of our daily lives. Moreover, more than half of the 7.5 billion world population uses the internet, and two out of every three adults have mobile phones. People shop digitally, watch movies or TV shows in their native language, plan a vacation, and play games. People live and move with artificial intelligence, big data, learning machines, and new robotics.

Our lives, which differed after the Industrial Revolution, are progressing mostly through technological addictions and phenomena in today’s world. In a way, a life connected to the digital has turned into a new social structure and culture. So to speak, humanity is shaped through social media trends, virtual agendas, and visuals, and virtual simulations determine our identity and personality. The Internet determines and transforms the individual, identity, and culture, especially through social media platforms. Today’s humans’ shuttle between the real and virtual lives and our definitions of social values, norms, privacy, communication, production, and consumption habits are radically changing.

In addition to the facilities provided by our digitalized social life in terms of access to data and access to information, it also carries concerns such as data pollution and insecurity. Concerns about robotization, Humanity 2.0, the surveillance society, and human enslavement are often voiced in future planning and lead to different debates about the nature of human–system interaction. Moreover, rather than where it is in the world, what is done and how it is made becomes important, and it is a reality to make the effects of digitalization, which has leaked into every area of our lives and become invisible by becoming ordinary, understandable on our social life.

From the way our digitalized social life processes information to our production processes, from socialization to our understanding of consumption, our diverse profiles stand in front of us in understanding the time we are in. Because the face-to-face relationships that exist in the traditional process are seeking their legitimacy in the virtual reality world, which is compared to reality and needs rational explanations. Concepts such as digital identity, culture, biotechnology, artificial intelligence, digital economy, and hypnotic society surround us and keep getting more and more evident.

This book in your hand deals with changes in the context of digitalization and the future of the digital society in the context of identity, culture, economy, surveillance, production, and consumption and includes examples of new life ←9 | 10→practices. In other words, the profiles of digital life are interpreted and discussed by different social scientists. I hope the study will contribute to the digital sociology literature and be useful, and I thank the academicians involved in the project.

A Period in Which Childhood Is Idled Away: Being a Child in the Digital World

1 Introduction

Technological developments changing at a striking speed, information-communication networks determining many parameters in all areas of human life have profoundly affected the meaning of world for children as well as adults. Today, the digital world has provided facilities that will save life, time and energy to make life easier in every segment of the society. In this way, individuals can easily access information wherever they are in the world, receive immediate news about the developments in the fields of economy and politics, and money flow becomes quick, thus providing a significant comfort area for individuals. But when we evaluate the comfort in question sociologically, it also deforms the life of the individual. While this subject is frequently mentioned in the field, psychologists, psychiatrists, and sociologists underline that the negative impacts of the digital world should not be ignored. According to experts, because social relations with the digital world have taken on a new quality, we are more often faced with alienation, withdrawal from real life and loneliness from time to time.

When we approach from this point, this study aims to make a sociological comment on the issue of the digital age and its implications creating important usefulness and opportunities as well as involving risk and threats in children’s lives. It is an important process for children, who constitute an important part of the future of the society, to develop their creativity; to acquire skills focused on solving problems and crisis; and to provide the capacity to speak, which is one of the most essential requirements of being an individual, empathize, understand, and interpret. However, since digital technologies provide unlimited access, children move away from socialization and meet their play, friendship, and communication needs in a virtual environment.

In the premodern era, children practiced traditional learning methods—by living, experiencing and developing new learning strategies—in the process of understanding and interpreting the social, cultural, and economic world. Therefore, in times when digital tools had not penetrate our lives, children mostly learned by interacting with social groups and experiencing the necessities of being an individual. Traditional games helped children develop their roles and responsibilities, discover methods of reaching the truth by making mistakes, socialize with peer groups, and develop practical skills in problem-solving. Whereas today, digital tools, which provide a wide range of use, gradually eliminate the way children learn through trial and error. The digital world provides services to children through ready-made package programs, thus enabling them to be involved in the ←11 | 12→social space virtually without getting tired, with multiple mechanisms capable of instantly changing and correcting mistakes. In this respect, it is a preliminary matter to look at the areas where it creates problem without ignoring that digital tools have become an important part of our life and that they provide comfort and convenience. In this framework, it is desirable for children to try to recognize and understand social reality in social life. For this, children must have an awareness that can distinguish between the virtual reality created by technology and the profiles that the fictional world presents to them and the pure forms of social reality. As such, analyzing the perceptual world created by digitalization in a sociological context will also be important for us to see how technological changes affect children’s different living spaces.

In order to answer these questions, it is useful to clarify the concept of childhood primarily on the historical axis. The concept of family is the basis of the concept of childhood and the views on childhood. How the family is structured and the family models change in the historical process are reflected in childhood, thus reshaping it. In the antiquity, when children served roles such as good citizens, safeguards in intergovernmental treaties, and being a part of kinship relations, childhood was a concept toward which enough attention was not paid (Uğur, 2018: 228). During this period, children were regarded as “small citizens,” who should be educated within the laws and culture of society. In the Middle Ages, the foundation of the institution of the family was based on the ideology of slavery, and family referred to the slaves of a father and a community consisting of wife and children. In this community, the father had all kinds of rights over the child and the children had no special status and rights to protect themselves. Being economically nonfunctional and not contributing to reproduction were the main dynamics behind the low status of children in the Middle Ages. In these times, when fatal diseases and difficult living conditions were common and lack of ←12 | 13→information about childcare caused high infant mortality rates, children were left indifferent to their existence and the concept of childhood as a separate stage of life did not develop. Until the sixteenth and seventh centuries, children were considered slightly more than miniature versions of adults. The view that childhood is a limited version of adult life has lost its effect due to various factors such as the formation of various currents of thought, change of production style, and the emergence of the bourgeoisie.

These developments also changed the establishment of the relations between the child and the family. In this new order, where all children had a universal childhood nature, it was the primary task of parents to raise children in accordance with their own nature, protecting them from religious dogma and immorality in society. The perception that children are innocent and naturally weak creatures led families to treat their children with care and compassion and to protect their children from the harsh realities of adult life. In addition to separating the worlds of children and adults, the new understanding of childhood also protected individual values by separating siblings. In this period, with the opinion that the child was not an entity under absolute control of the father, the father’s authority shifts to institutions such as medicine, pedagogy, and education, which indicates that childcare has gained a professional quality. The mother–child relationship gaining importance with the discovery of motherhood was the result of the steps taken in this period. In the modern period, a childhood phase different from the thoughts of adults was designed. The bourgeois class led the idea of childhood with individual value throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and by the twentieth century, the view of childhood as a separate individual began to spread among the middle classes and lower classes. In this context, it can be stated that a special childhood idea, which needed to be protected with the developments that transformed social, economic, political, cultural, and social conditions, began to occur, and this transformation, which primarily affected the values of the bourgeoisie about the child, spread to all classes of the society over time and formed the roots of today’s modern childhood image (Uğur, 2018: 228–229).

In today’s world, childhood is shaped around different variables. A wide range of internet and technological networks, social activities, cultural events, the world of games and entertainment, urban dynamics, and diversity in educational materials have encompassed the social and personal worlds of children. Children embraced by an intense digital world have gradually started to lose the distinction between the real and the virtual world. Especially the world of game on the internet is sometimes defined as an achievement and a tension point for children and puts any other perception of reality in their lives aside. İdris (2017: 599) evaluates the phenomenon of the child in digital age as follows: