Every­thing about digitization

Dig­i­ti­za­tion […] affects our every­day life and thus us as indi­vid­u­als, as part of dif­fer­ent groups and as mem­bers of soci­ety. There­fore, the under­stand­ing of dig­i­ti­za­tion must be expand­ed to include the dimen­sion of social process­es that it ini­ti­ates and in which it becomes effec­tive. Thus the authors Jaana Müller-Brehm, Michael Puntschuh and Philipp Otto clar­i­fy right at the begin­ning of the book­let the sig­nif­i­cant con­nec­tion between tech­nolo­gies and the peo­ple who devel­op and use them.

In eight chap­ters, the pub­li­ca­tion explains basic terms and process­es of dig­i­ti­za­tion. The author — col­lec­tive explains how dig­i­tal change is chang­ing cen­tral areas of our every­day lives such as work­ing, learn­ing, com­mu­ni­ca­tion, pol­i­tics and health­care. Enriched by info­graph­ics, pic­tures, in-depth news­pa­per arti­cles and a glos­sary, the book also includes cur­rent top­ics such as hate speech, dis­in­for­ma­tion, dig­i­tal lit­er­a­cy, plat­form econ­o­my and copy­right reforms. 

Deal­ing with these top­ics is of cen­tral impor­tance for all of us, because: “Tech­nolo­gies such as algo­rith­mic sys­tems are part of our every­day life — even when we are not using a smart­phone or sit­ting in front of a lap­top. So far, how­ev­er, there are hard­ly any com­pre­hen­si­ble, self-con­tained mate­ri­als on com­pre­hen­sive tech­no­log­i­cal change avail­able that explain dig­i­ti­za­tion in a con­densed and well-found­ed man­ner. This is chang­ing with the new issue of the same name in the mag­a­zine series. In order to cre­ate such a pub­li­ca­tion, many iRights.Lab staff worked togeth­er to bring in knowl­edge from var­i­ous sci­en­tif­ic dis­ci­plines as well as expe­ri­ence from edi­to­r­i­al work, for­mat con­cep­tion and pedagogy. 

The quar­ter­ly “Infor­ma­tion on Polit­i­cal Edu­ca­tion” is a cen­tral resource of the bpb for polit­i­cal edu­ca­tion. The lat­est issue is aimed in par­tic­u­lar at teach­ers, pupils, extracur­ric­u­lar edu­ca­tors and all those who wish to gain an equal­ly acces­si­ble and well-found­ed overview of tech­no­log­i­cal change. 

The authors are avail­able for ques­tions and com­ments at kontakt@irights-lab.de.

The “Dig­i­ti­za­tion” issue of the series is avail­able here as a PDF file and can be ordered as a print ver­sion free of charge.