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Questions of power, domination, myth and exploitation:
- the transformation of knowledge through code and software;
- critical approaches to digital methods;
- creation of boundaries and gate-keeping functions;
- "screen essentialism" of computational interfaces;
- practice of making-invisible;
- race-, gender- and class-based exclusion.
(David M. Berry & Anders Fagerjord "Digital Humanitites", 2017)

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A critical approach to computational thought.
"A type of cognitive practice as related to a type of knowledge developed through a computational phronesis - that is, not merely a form of technical knowledge (techne) but the form of practical wisdom that emerges from action. It includes the ability to reflect on computation and computational practices as a whole" (Berry & Fagerjord, 2017).
A critical understanding of computing at its different levels is a prerequisite for a digital humanist according to Berry and Fagerjord, and this only can be built through "active involvement with actual computer systems, combined with theoretical insights provided by both material practices and philosophical reflections on the limits and implications of, and transformations made possible by, computation" (Berry & Fagerjord, 2017).

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As technology engulfs every aspect of our everyday life, including cities; this article offers a fresh perspective on the subject of smart cities. The argument is not an affront to digitalization, but rather an invitation to return to nature-based technologies.

The article, which is extremely read-worthy, presents several examples of old technologies from around the world that could be used instead of building new technological infrastructure for smart cities. The critique of smart cities is not so much about the technological aspect, but rather  about the data security, the upkeep cost, both in terms of personnel and materials as well as about mayors diving into a smart city concept to impress businesses without considering the aforementioned points.

Mentioned examples include:

- The "floating school" in the fisher slum Makoko, in Lagos, Nigeria --> https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/jun/02/makoko-floating-school-lagos-waterworld-history-cities-50-buildings

- A park infrastructure that can convert into lakes during floods, in Copenhagen. Not only  is there the added benefit of having a park for leisurely activities and ecosystem preservation but  it also converts into  a water collecting system during rain season.

- "Sponge Cities" in China that "passively absorb water using permeable pavements, green roofs and terraced wetland parks that flood during monsoon."

- A way to reduce the spread of air conditioning is to equip building rooftops and cities with dense vegetation: "A study in Madison, Wisconsin found that urban temperatures can be 5% cooler with 40% tree cover. Green roofs with high vegetation density can cool buildings by up to 60%"

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ver since smartphones hooked us with their limitless possibilities and dopamine hits, mayors and city bureaucrats can't get enough of the notion of smart-washing their cities. It makes them sound dynamic and attractive to business. What's not to love about whizzkids streamlining your responsibilities for running services, optimising efficiency and keeping citizens safe into a bunch of fun apps?

There's no concrete definition of a smart city, but high-tech versions promise to use cameras and sensors to monitor everyone and everything, from bins to bridges, and use the resulting data to help the city run smoothly. One high-profile proposal by Google's sister company, Sidewalk Labs, to give 12 acres of Toronto a smart makeover is facing a massive backlash. In September, an independent report called the plans "frustratingly abstract"; in turn US tech investor Roger McNamee warned Google can't be trusted with such data, calling the project "surveillance capitalism".

For many challenges, we don't need new technologies or new ideas

Shoshanna Saxe

There are practical considerations, too, as Shoshanna Saxe of the University of Toronto has highlighted. Smart cities, she wrote in the New York Times in July, "will be exceedingly complex to manage, with all sorts of unpredictable vulnerabilities". Tech products age fast: what happens when the sensors fail? And can cities afford expensive new teams of tech staff, as well as keeping the ground workers they'll still need? "If smart data identifies a road that needs paving," she writes, "it still needs people to show up with asphalt and a steamroller."

Saxe pithily calls for redirecting some of our energy toward building "excellent dumb cities." She's not anti-technology, it's just that she thinks smart cities may be unnecessary. "For many of our challenges, we don't need new technologies or new ideas; we need the will, foresight and courage to use the best of the old ideas," she says.

Saxe is right. In fact, she could go further. There's old, and then there's old - and for urban landscapes increasingly vulnerable to floods, adverse weather, carbon overload, choking pollution and an unhealthy disconnect between humans and nature, there's a strong case for looking beyond old technologies to ancient technologies.

It is eminently possible to weave ancient knowledge of how to live symbiotically with nature into how we shape the cities of the future, before this wisdom is lost forever. We can rewild our urban landscapes, and apply low-tech ecological solutions to drainage, wastewater processing, flood survival, local agriculture and pollution that have worked for indigenous peoples for thousands of years, with no need for electronic sensors, computer servers or extra IT support.

This month, Julia Watson, a lecturer in urban design at Harvard and Columbia Universities, launched her book Lo-Tek: Design by Radical Indigenism, with publisher Taschen. It's the result of more than 20 years of travelling to research the original smart settlements, through an architect's lens.

She visited the Ma'dan people in Iraq, who weave buildings and floating islands from reeds; the Zuni people in New Mexico, who create "waffle gardens" to capture, store and manipulate water for desert crop farming; and the subak rice terraces of Bali. Watson walked the living tree-root bridges that can withstand adverse weather better than any human-made structure, and that allow the Khasi hill tribe in Northern India to travel between villages during the monsoon floods.

Nature is smart, and our ancient wisdom tells us how to live with nature in a smart way

Prof Kongjian Yu

"There are so many different ways you can rewild cities," says Watson - and it's not just a case of plonking an ancient system in a city, but rather adapting complex ecosystems for different types of places with their own unique requirements. Take a current proposal she is working on for the high-rise city of Shenzhen on the Pearl River estuary by Hong Kong. It was once a fishing village, then a textile town, "and it just skyrocketed," says Watson. "All of the fishponds and polders and dykes and wetlands that absorb all the water in that delta landscape are being erased. So the city is developing in a way that's erasing the indigenous resilience in the landscape."

But you don't have to erase to go forwards, she says. "You can leapfrog and embed local intelligence, using a nature-based traditional Chinese technology that's climate resilient, ecologically resilient and culturally resilient. And we can make beautiful urban spaces with them as well."

View of Lowu border crossing and Shenzhen from Crest Hill, Hong Kong in 1964 and 2015. Credits: 1964 image courtesy of David McLeod and 2015 by Lucien Long for the Guardian

Kongjian Yu, a design professor at Peking University, agrees with this philosophy. Known as the "sponge cities" architect, Yu creates urban landscapes in China that passively absorb rainwater, using permeable pavements, green roofs and terraced wetland parks that flood during monsoon. If wetlands are situated upriver of the buildings, they will flood before the water reaches the city proper.

The parks have brought fish and birds back to cities, says Yu, "and people love it." The projects, he says, "are performing well, and many of them have been tested for over 10 years, and can certainly be replicable in other parts of the world." In fact, this month he has visited Bangladesh, ironically, "helping their 'smart city' project," where he has convinced "the minister in charge that nature is smart, and our ancient wisdom tells us how to live with nature in a smart way."

Copenhagen, too, has opted for a dumb - or, as local planners call it, "a green and blue" - solution to their increasing flood risks: namely, a series of parks that can become lakes during storms. The city estimated they would cost a third less than building levees and new sewers, and come with the added ecological benefits of rewilding. An abandoned military site was cleaned up in 2010 and rewilded into a nature reserve and common for grazing animals, the Amager Nature Centre - a vast park with not only happy people meandering and cycling around but insects, protected amphibians, rare birds and deer.

But dumb cities can be even smarter than that. Not only can functioning wetlands defend cities against floods and restore nature, they can clean wastewater. And they can do it more efficiently than sewage-treatment works - all while absorbing a whole lot of carbon, nitrogen, sulphur and methane, and creating a fishing industry and fertile farmland. No water, energy, treatment chemicals or fish feed required. The world's largest such system, in east Kolkata in India, involves the city's sewage feeding the fish. It saves the city approximately $22m (£17m) a year in running costs for a waste treatment plant. The water can be used for irrigation, saving a further £500,000 in water and fertiliser costs. And it enables much of the city's food to be grown locally.

Or, as waters rise globally, we can learn from Makoko, the incredible city-on-stilts in Lagos that is home to 80,000 residents. Its "floating school" - sustainable and solar-fuelled - has captured the world's imagination. Rotterdam has already introduced a floating forest and farm, and is developing plans for a sustainable floating city.

As for dumb transport, there can be no doubt that walking or cycling are superior to car travel over short urban distances: zero pollution, zero carbon emissions, free exercise.

And there's a dumb solution to the spread of air conditioning, one of the greatest urban energy guzzlers: more plants. A study in Madison, Wisconsin found that urban temperatures can be 5% cooler with 40% tree cover. Green roofs with high vegetation density can cool buildings by up to 60%. Or you could just think like a bug: architects are mimicking the natural cooling airflows of termite burrows. Mick Pearce's 350,000 sq ft Eastgate Centre in Zimbabwe's capital, Harare, completed in the 1990s, is still held up as a paragon of dumb air conditioning: all it needs are fans, and uses a tenth of the energy of the buildings next door.

A few token green walls and trees won't do it. Watson calls for a focus on permaculture: self-sustaining ecosystems. "If it's an urban forest," she says, "perhaps it's in the centre of the city, perhaps it's on the periphery, or it could be an interior environment - an atrium designed to have a complex ecosystem that's also agriculturally productive."

There are hundreds of nature-based technologies that have never been explored. For example, Watson envisions stunning urban uses for the living root bridges of the Khasi hill tribe: "They could be grown to reduce the urban heat island effect by increasing canopy cover along streets, with roots trained into trusses that integrate with the architecture of the street - in essence, removing the distinction between tree and building." They could even retain their original use during seasonal floods - living, physical bridges over the water. In April, Greta Thunberg and Guardian columnist George Monbiot made a rallying video calling for more trees and wetlands and plant cover to tackle the climate crisis. Cities can be part of this push. The idea of smart cities is born of what Watson describes as "the same human superiority-complex that thinks nature should be controlled". What's missing is symbiosis. "Life on Earth is based upon symbiosis," Watson says. She suggests we replace the saying "survival of the fittest" with "survival of the most symbiotic". Not as catchy, perhaps. But smarter.
Follow Guardian Cities on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram to join the discussion and catch up on our best stories

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The case for ... making low-tech 'dumb' cities instead of 'smart' ones

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ver since smartphones hooked us with their limitless possibilities and dopamine hits, mayors and city bureaucrats can't get enough of the notion of smart-washing their cities. It makes them sound dynamic and attractive to business. What's not to love about whizzkids streamlining your responsibilities for running services, optimising efficiency and keeping citizens safe into a bunch of fun apps?

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How do we study power imbalances in the digital era?

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How do we study power imbalances in the digital era?

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See Matthew Berry's Critical Theory and the Digital (2014).

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"Critical theory of technology combines insights from philosophy of technology and constructivist technology studies. A framework is proposed for
analyzing technologies and technological systems at several levels, a primary
level at which natural objects and people are decontextualized to identify
affordances, complemented by a secondary level of recontextualization in natural, technical, and social environments. Technologies have distinctive features
as such while also exhibiting biases derived from their place in society. The
technical code is the rule under which technologies are realized in a social
context with biases reflecting the unequal distribution of social power.
Subordinate groups may challenge the technical code with impacts on design
as technologies evolve"

Feenberg Andrew. "Critical Theory of Technology: An Overview". TAILORING BIOTECHNOLOGIES
Vol. 1, Issue 1, Winter 2005, pp: 47-64

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Thing theory is a branch of critical theory that focuses on human–object interactions in literature and culture. It borrows from Heidegger's distinction between objects and things, which posits that an object becomes a thing when it can no longer serve its common function. When an object breaks down or is misused, it sheds its socially encoded value and becomes present to us in new ways through the suspension of habit. The theory was largely created by Bill Brown, who edited a special issue of Critical Inquiry on it in 2001 and published a monograph on the subject entitled A Sense of Things.

Brown, B. (2004) A Sense of Things. University of Chicago Press
Heidegger, Martin (1971). "The Thing"  Poetry, Language, Thought: 163-184.

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Literary theory is the systematic study of the nature of literature and of the methods for literary analysis. Since the 19th century, literary scholarship includes literary theory and considerations of intellectual history, moral philosophy, social prophecy, and interdisciplinary themes relevant to how people interpret meaning. In the humanities in modern academia, the latter style of literary scholarship is an offshoot of post-structuralism. Consequently, the word theory became an umbrella term for scholarly approaches to reading texts, some of which are informed by strands of sociology and continental philosophy.

Searle, John. (1990), "The Storm Over the University", The New York Review of Books, December 6, 1990.

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Social theory by definition is used to make distinctions and generalizations among different types of societies, and to analyze modernity as it has emerged in the past few centuries: Social theory as it is recognized today emerged in the 20th century as a distinct discipline and was largely equated with an attitude of critical thinking and the desire for knowledge through a posteriori method of discovery, rather than a priori methods of tradition.
Social thought provides general theories to explain the actions and behavior of society as a whole, encompassing sociological, political, and philosophical ideas. Classical social theory has generally been presented from a perspective of Western philosophy and is often regarded as Eurocentric.

Callinicos, A. (1999). Social Theory: A Historical Introduction. New York University Press.

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“Is power always secondary to the economy?” Foucault and Adorno on Power and Exchange.

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“Is power always secondary to the economy?” Foucault and Adorno on Power and Exchange.

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Cook, Deborah (2015). University of Windsor.

"After questioning Foucault’s claim that neo-liberalism effectively abandons exchange, I conclude that, while Adorno may well be right about the primacy of exchange relations, his analysis must be supplemented with an analysis of power because he recognizes that power superseded exchange in Nazi Germany and believes that the West still faces a resurgence of that horror. In fact, it was this very threat that impelled Foucault to devote much of his work to an analysis of power."

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"Queer theory’s origin is hard to clearly define, since it came from multiple critical and cultural contexts, including feminism, post-structuralist theory, radical movements of people of color, the gay and lesbian movements, AIDS activism, many sexual subcultural practices such as sadomasochism, and postcolonialism.

Although queer theory had its beginnings in the educational sphere, the cultural events surrounding its origin also had a huge impact. Activist groups pushed back in the 1980's against the lack of government intervention after the outbreak of the AIDS epidemic. Gay activist groups like ACT-UP and Queer Nation took the lead to force attention to both the AIDS epidemic and the gay and lesbian community as a whole. These groups helped define the field with the work they did by highlighting a non-normative option to the more traditional identity politics and marginal group creations"

Illinois Library. Queer Theory: Background.
https://guides.library.illinois.edu/queertheory

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Pedagogia do Oprimido or Pedagogy of the Oppressed is widely regarded as the the foundational texts of Critical Pedagogy. The book examines the relationship between teacher, student, and society.

"These radical educational theorists managed to articulate a theory and practice of education that transcended the ideology of traditional educational theory and practice, and they provided a critique of traditional radical pedagogy whose adherents, they argued, remained trapped within the theoretical confines of domination that perceived schooling solely as a site for producing servile laborers and ideological apologists in the service of monopoly capitalism. For the "new school" of radical educators, this position offered only capitulation to despair and promised no pragmatic approaches to a positive restructuring schooling, curriculum, and classroom life." (Weil, 1998).

"In spite of its insightful theoretical and political analyses of schooling, radical educational theory suffered from some serious flaws, the most significant being its failure to move beyond the language of critique and domination." (Giroux 1989).

Giroux, H. A. (1989). Schooling for Democracy: Critical Pedagogy in the Modern Age. New York: Routledge.

Weil, Danny. K. (1998). Chapter 2: Critical Pedagogy. Counterpoints, Vol. 50, Towards a Critical Multicultural Literacy: Theory and Practice for Education for Liberation. pp. 25-45

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"Critical Race Theory (CRT) took start in the mid-1970s with the realisation that the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s had stalled and that many of its gains, in fact, were being rolled back. Many of us believed that new tactics and theories were needed to understand and come to grips with the complex interplay among race, racism, and American law." (Delgado & Stefancic, 1993).

"Race is multi-vocal and must be understood within the intersections of power relations of a multicultural and racially diverse culture" (Minda, 1995).

Delgado, Richard. Stefancic, Jean (1993). "Critical Race Theory: An Annotated Bibliography." Virginia Law Review, Vol. 79, No. 2. pp. 461-516.

Minda, Gary (1995). "Law and Jurisprudence At Century's End" in Postmodern Legal Movements. NYU Press.

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Disciplines arising from Critical Theory

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Disciplines arising from Critical Theory

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A general term for several sub-disciplines that challenge and assess power relations in society and culture.

Critical theory is increasingly used in social sciences and humanities and has proven effective in dismantling power structure reproduction in digital environments and practices such as search, metadata, big data, methodologies and cultural heritage digitisation.

The term ‘critical’ in this context, a political side to it, but also analytical. Both inform each other and the development of methodologies.

In the end, use of critical perspectives concerns the very legitimacy of Digital Humanities as a scholarly field, and of humanities also in a wider sense.

The term roots itself in older philosophical theories.

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Spotify removes Shuffle Button per Adele's Request

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Spotify removes Shuffle Button per Adele's Request

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Since this was in the news in the last couple of days, I could not help, but make an association with DH, critical theory and human influence on algorithms.

What happened: essentially, Adele rrequested that Spotify remove the shuffle button when listening to albums as this disrupt the artistry that has gone into creating the album since oftentimes the order of the song is well thought through and tells a story. Adele was succesful and Spotify removed the button on individual albums.

I believe that this can be an example of algorithmic revision for the sake of art and the human experience that is associated with it. It is remarkable how Spotify agreed to this and actually welcomed the suggestion, but what would happen if companies like Meta (formerly Facebook), Google, Microsoft and countless others would revisit their programs on the base of countless critics and requests for transparency?

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Adele gets Spotify to take shuffle button off all album pages

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"Our art tells a story and our stories should be listened to as we intended," the singer says.

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"Essentially it is the same, age-old tradition of storytelling we’ve always known, but brought to life using computer-based tools and potentially delivered via a huge variety of online or multimedia formats. It distinguishes itself from classic storytelling in that it represents the democratisation of the modern world, where anyone with a computer or mobile device can tell their story, using any number of social media, podcast or other online platforms. We’re living in an unprecedented age of cultural participation and digital storytelling has become an important part of that" (https://pro.europeana.eu/post/what-is-digital-storytelling-and-what-has-it-got-to-do-with-cultural-heritage)

Example:

"Mortonia – Minecraft as a creative and educational tool for storytelling in cultural heritage, digital history and archaeology (a webinar at the Swedish Board of Cultural Heritage" with Alex Harvey as a guest)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=48pg0lHtciQ

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"Re-visiting digitization" within cultural heritage institutions - new approach?

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"Re-visiting digitization" within cultural heritage institutions - new approach?

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"Digital Transformation and GLAMs" (2019) and "agents of change": https://pro.europeana.eu/post/the-digital-transformation-agenda-and-glams-culture24-findings-and-outcomes

New approaches to digitalization of cultural heritage are based on:
- cross-sectoral collaborations;
- cultural heritage expertize;
- establish new purposes for digital transformation within cultural heritage institutions.

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One of the critical practices within digital transformation and critical theory. Critical approaches to:
- choice of objects to study/digitize;
- provenance of metadata;
- transparency in use of paradata;
- authenticity and value of digital reproduction;
- expected results - research and access. Is it enough?
- the process of digitalization of cultural heritage as a political tool? Representing national heritage. Marginalizing certain cultures, communities? Who decides what is accessible and who has the access?
-value of physical collections and the role and the future of cultural heritage institutions;
- mass- and critical digitalization.

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Code is as unconsciously biased as the person who wrote it. Consequently the programs and technologies that are based on said code tend to also have an intrinsic bias written into them. From facial recognition technologies that only work accurately on white faces to algorithmic decision-making in the context of HR recruiting and development and way beyond.

Living in a highly digitised world, societies, people and companies increasingly rely on these technologies.

The Netflix documentary Coded Bias gives an ample overview of such technologies and of a missing social justice and equality framework around them.

Joy Buolamwini, Cathy O'Neil and Safiya Umoja Noble are three prominent researchers in the field who contributed and were interviewed in the documentary.

https://www.netflix.com/watch/81328723?trackId=13752289&tctx=0%2C0%2Ce1a5b531c6629cabf315fcbcf0e866d6bc5bac53%3A98c922824ae1f219c22f7a8fd6a8c6bca7182e03%2Ce1a5b531c6629cabf315fcbcf0e866d6bc5bac53%3A98c922824ae1f219c22f7a8fd6a8c6bca7182e03%2C%2C

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This documentary investigates the bias in algorithms after M.I.T. Media Lab researcher Joy Buolamwini uncovered flaws in facial recognition technology. Watch trailers & learn more.

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"Moore's Law refers to Gordon Moore's perception that the number of transistors on a microchip doubles every two years, though the cost of computers is halved. Moore's Law states that we can expect the speed and capability of our computers to increase every couple of years, and we will pay less for them. Another tenet of Moore's Law asserts that this growth is exponential." (Tardi, 2021).

Do we agree on the tenet of Moore's Law which asserts that the growth of microprocessors is exponential? Or shall it plateau?

Tardi, Carla (2021). Moore's Law. Accessed 27 November 2021. https://www.investopedia.com/terms/m/mooreslaw.asp

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What Is Moore’s Law and Is It Still True?

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Moore’s Law refers to Gordon Moore’s observation that the number of transistors on a single chip would double every two years at minimal costs.

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The problem of representations

Contingency as meaning

Standpoint Epistemologies

Judith Butler

Feminism/Queer Theory

Richard Rorty

Pragmatism - Practical application - local theory

Michel Foucault

Power - institution - discourse

Chantal Mouffe

Discourse Analysis - Democracy theory

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From enlightenment to a new kind of alienation

Jurgen Habermas

Bourgeois Public sphere - knowledge interests

The role of Hermeneutics

The scientification of interpretation

The hermeneutics of historical consciousness - Paul Ricoeur

Axel Honneth

Social conflicts: Power, Recognition, Respect

Hartmut Rosa

Speed/Acceleration in (post)modernity

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Frankfurt school (1923 - 1935)

The early Marx

Humanism, reunification, alienation

Theodor Adorno (Max Horkheimer, Grete Adorno) - “The the distortion of nature, illusion of progress that technology provided”

Man’s distortion of nature, the illusion of progress through technology

Erich Fromm

Social psychology “to be or to own."

Walter Benjamin

Critique of Modernity (art - mass media)

Herbert Marcuse

Revolutionary philosophy, inspiration to the radical spirit of 1968.

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This version of "critical" theory derives from the use of the term critique by Immanuel Kant in his Critique of Pure Reason and from Marx, on the premise that Das Kapital is a "critique of political economy".

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Critics  contend that these technologies are one dimension of a vast network of  systems  of  monitoring,  measuring  and  regulating  the  population  and  subgroups  within  the  population  that  direct  attention  at  individual  behaviours  rather  than  social  processes.  Social  media,  for example, are often represented as promoting individual creativity and

freedom via the opportunities they offer for prosumption. But there remain  well defined  limits  to  how  this  creativity  and freedom  of  expression  are  allowed  to  operate.

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Forests reconfiguration: towards a new morphology

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Forests reconfiguration: towards a new morphology

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Tree distribution patterns in rainforests have evolved over thousands of years through cycles of growth and decline, competition and adaptation. From this dynamic process that can maintain equilibrium,  a complex global form with differentiated microclimates generated from fine-tuned adjustments of the flow of various information and energy networks has appeared. This spatial logic can be extracted and developed as a new model of urban systems. The distribution of morphological changes at the ground level and differences in cross-sectional height create a productive microclimate that allows for environmental negotiations and dynamic spatial and cultural effects.
By studying the evolution of tree populations, we can relate the mathematical and functional patterns of forests to the design of cities and their networks. By understanding the early genetic rulesets of individual trees and the relationships between the hierarchies that exist in the forest, the intelligence of the buildings and their placement within the city can be designed to generate a performative city organisation.

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As technology has become pervasive of every aspect of human lives, reality became virtual but locative technology has challenged the notion of cyberspace as "placeless". The new Space, also called code/space is a mesh of devices, embedded into digital infrastructures.

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As the infrastructure of the city shifts from something static and functional (as New York's elevated rail track in the 1930s) to something dynamic and multi-purposeful, new patterns of space use and real-time connections are rediscovered. The 3-phase project to preserve the 21 km path has involved a multi-faceted team of professionals and has become a central node (or an edge?) which connected several neighbourhoods and integrated a spontaneous landscape made of growing vegetation. All factors that greatly increased air quality, biodiversity, people's movement, commercial and cultural projects.

As this case study shows, many biological networks and artificial networks work similarly in their embedding, self-organisation and optimisation. The streets and buildings around the High Line are organised into networks where actions and actors flow, and they are embedded into bigger networks. Critical issues with any node would affect only a particular area of the city.  Likewise, velocity and quantity of flows such as energy, information or material develop better in particularly powerful areas first.  As these mechanisms affect the pace of people's lives, the cycles between urban reconfiguration have shortened.

The High Line; http://www.thehighline.org; 2011

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New Society is made up of networks, like global financial markets are built of digital networks or the internet which is based off a network of computer and servers.

Networks are indeed far older than we think, it is an old form of organization nothing new or groundbreaking. Their advantage was always adaptability and flexibility. Their disadvantage however are the management of complexity beyond a critical size.

A Network is also a set of interconnected nodes, it can expand  indefinitely and incorporate or assimilate any new node by reconfiguring them.

The prevalence of networks in the organization of social practice redefines social structure (organizational arrangments of humans in relation to production/consumption, experience, and power, as expressed in meaningful interaction framed by culture) in our societies. >> The creation of a prosumer

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new types of internet connection like satellite (starlink)

new server technology

more and faster capacity

new data centers

AR, MAR, VR, MVR, AI

immense proccesing power through GPU

programming languages

new software

work 2.0, 3.0, 4.0, home office, etc.

new social media platforms

more on demand services (netflix, shadow, GeForce NOW)

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The Framework of this new society is based on 4 dimensions:

First dimension:
A technological paradigm based of new information technologies

Second dimension:
Globalization in terms of a technological organizational capacity of the core components of a given systwem

Third dimension:
Enclosing of dominant culture manifestations in an interactive hypertext as a common frame of reference

Fourth dimension
Largely a qonsequence of the global networks of the economy, communication, knowledghe and information, is the demise of the sovereign nation-state.

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Space of flows a concept ideated by sociologist M. Castells, to define a space that allows distant, synchronous and real-time interaction. It is made of technological infrastructure of information systems, telecommunications and transportation lines. It is the "material organization of time-sharing social practices that work through flows".

Castells, Manuel. "An Introduction to the Information Age" in The Information Society Reader, Frank Webster, Raimo Blom, Erkki Karvonen, Harri Melin, Kaarle Nordenstreng, and Ensio Puoskari, editors. London and New York: Routledge, 2004. pp 138–49.

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Transformed cities: patterns and structure

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Transformed cities: patterns and structure

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The space of flows is strongly layered, creating a new geography of distance. Distances are increasingly defined functionally rather than geographically.
At the same time, it's not just the relationships between locations that are changing due to the very special integration and collapse patterns. The structure within the location changes depending on the connection of the flow to the space. Most importantly, the faster and more regular the changes, the more important the flexibility and adaptation to the changes. As organizational structures change, so do the spatial needs of these organizations. While the main mode of industrial organization was centralization, information organizations are more network-oriented because they are flexible and  easily adaptable to so-called ecological changes in flows.

Stalder, F. (2001) The Space of Flows: notes on emergence, characteristics and possible impact on physical space.

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Digital transformation is "the change associated with the application of digital technologies in all aspects of human society.
Digital transformation can be seen as the third stage or third phase of the adoption of digital technologies (digital competence → digital use → digital transformation), along with the enhanced usability and application skills achieved through digital literacy. The transformation stage implies that digital uses inherently enable new types of innovation and creativity in a particular domain, rather than simply and solely enhancing and supporting traditional methods".
This process affects both individual companies and entire segments of society, such as government, global communications, art, medicine, and science; we can speak of digital transformation as a move towards continuous improvement of a particular process through the use of technology. Social theorists have begun to adopt a scientific sociomaterial approach when defining digital data.

Digital Transformation. (2021, 17 October). Wikipedia. https://es.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Transformaci%C3%B3n_digital&oldid=139107220.
«Digital transformation and disruption: On big data, blockchain, artificial intelligence, and other things, Andreas Kaplan and Michael Haelein» (en inglés).