Digitisation in the perspective of cultural, social and technological philosophy is first and foremost addressed as an abundance of cultural processes, in order to avoid technocentric narrowing of the view from the outset. Although digital-cultural processes have specific digital-technological preconditions and foundations, they only attain their full reality in our practices of action and experience, i.e. where those technical preconditions and foundations are first filled with meaning and significance: in the entire breadth of all practices that make up our cultural lifeworld, change the agency of people and non-personal agents and shift the scope of possible ways of life. Digitisation-manifesting changes in processes of the social and cultural are by no means reduced to “networking” but appear in the practices concerned as a – still to be clarified – series of characteristic complex properties (such as: placelessness or decontextualisability, functional substitutability, actor-anonymisability, universal archivability, medial flatness, scalable granularity, universal emulability and simulability, unlimited reproducibility and reformatability, etc.). Interwoven with the new creeping into reality, but to be practically and analytically set apart, are the corresponding discourses and their shifts, i.e. the modes of understanding and also non-understanding, the terms for the incomprehensible, the change in vocabularies.
A start has already been made on this approach at the CAIS in July 2019 in the workshop “Philosophical Discourse on Digitisation”. The focus of the planned working group on philosophers is not understood as a closing off of other disciplines, but rather as a necessary concentration effort to increase the value of philosophical contributions in the interplay with all sciences that explore digital cultural change in different ways. This methodological consideration also justifies the programmatic title of the WG as “philosophical digitisation research”.