Key points are not available for this paper at this time.
As we continue our reflections about and for the digital society, it is important to be reminded that the 'elements' of said society include more than just humans using digital devices.A digital society is also composed of technical artefacts with varying degrees of agency, institutions, and nature, as the scope and range of discussions appearing in this journal testify.That society's composition goes beyond human beings, and their individual and group dynamics, is no news and is well documented and theorized in sociology.Bruno Latour's Actor Network Theory (ANT) (Latour, 2005) is an eloquent example of how to enlarge the basket of what legitimately belongs to a society.Simply put, in his view, society is a network composed of actants, from humans to natural elements, and does not presuppose a privileged position of humans within the network.Notwithstanding the influence of Latour's thinking and his legacy in the social studies of science, it is fair to say that other domains still conceptualize any enlarged societal network as having a clearly identified center: us, human beings.This view, moreover, is possibly still dominant in the public understanding of society, actively shaping our relations with other human beings, nature, and artefacts.But scholarship in the humanities and social sciences has long challenged our centrality.We may recall again Latour, who in Facing Gaia (Latour, 2017) expressed the consequences of this for climate change matters.And it is worth recalling the work of 'multispecies anthropologists' (Descolas, 2013;Kohn, 2013;Tsing, 2015;Viveiros de Castro, 2014) too, who have contributed to redesigning the contours of the discourse on 'man', which is not pivoted on the human in isolation, but rather on the human in its relations and interactions with nature and with artefacts.We thus come to the very concept of a digital society, which should not be a reproduction of our old anthropocentric concept of society, simply updated and applied to the digital era.Rather, the digital revolution, as discussed by
Federica Russo (Fri,) studied this question.