Product description

It is society that puts a stop to digitalization. But what does this stop mean? You can see it, but you can't read it. It points to the analog reality that runs alongside every digitalization, a reality that is both continuous and resistant. Society and consciousness, body and mind, operate according to their own rules. What happens when digital data is fed back into an analog reality? In his new book, Dirk Baecker explores a theory of digital media from a social science perspective. Learning data and predictive models are at the heart of his profound attempt to describe our communication with computers.

At the heart of Baecker's analysis lies a concept of stochastics that encompasses current artificial intelligence programs as well as society and its theory. According to this view, stochastics is not merely the study of probabilities, a kind of 'theory' of statistics, but also a study of how reality is derived from linking chance occurrences with one another. Baecker's original assessment of digitalization leads us directly into a process of societal understanding of itself—and with a new, 'alien intelligence' that we have barely begun to comprehend.

biography

Dirk Baecker was born in Karlsruhe in 1955. After studying sociology in Cologne and Paris, he earned his doctorate and habilitation in sociology at Bielefeld University between 1986 and 1992. He received a Heisenberg Fellowship from the German Research Foundation (DFG). Following research stays at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, and the London School of Economics and Political Science, Baecker was appointed to the Chair of Sociology at Witten/Herdecke University in 1996. Since 2007, Dirk Baecker has been Professor of Cultural Theory and Analysis at Zeppelin University in Friedrichshafen.