This year I will once again be participating in Congress, an event in Canada where on a different Canadian University campus each year the annual conferences of various societies in the humanities and social sciences take place.  I have always attended a number of conferences during Congress, though over the years my main commitment has been to the Canadian Sociological Association (CSA).  In the past I have given many papers and frequently organized a Session entitled Digital Media and Society.  This year the conference is in Toronto, where I lived for almost a decade, one of my favorite cities.  I will be travelling from Europe where I have been living for a number of years and presenting in (ITD3) Social Theory, Novelty, and Digital Society.  I will also be co-organizing a session.

My proposed abstract for this year is as follows.

Session:  (ITD3) Social Theory, Novelty, and Digital Society

Nature in the Digital Era

Imagining nature as a nebulous sphere of everything that is untouched by human beings, we ought to realize today, is actually a backhanded way of congratulating ourselves for all the actions we’ve taken in transforming the world to suit our image of ourselves as ‘actors’. Such an image also served to cause anxiety about human creations such as digital media as artificial. The ideology that the purpose of human beings is to be ‘actors’, as active as possible, over against all other things that are relatively passive, is past its sell-by date. We can move beyond this to an idea of nature, not as all those objects that are still untouched by our action, but simply as objects that are still unknown. Once we remove the romantic idea that nature represents everything that is non-artificial, while preserving the idea that there are vast areas of reality that are unknown to us, categories such as ‘big data’ can be conceived as repositories of objects representing potential information. The universe can be conceived in this way too, as a realm of objects most of which are unknown to us, including all those refined objects we used to call artificial, that we should now reconceive as representing things that are only partially known to us on the side of the object that is useful to us. This can enable us to reconceive ourselves as beings that value passivity as much as activity. This more balanced image of ourselves is overdue in the era of climate change, where we need to be more intelligent about our interventions in the world, sometimes withholding action and learning to sometimes accept a greater role for more passive qualities such as contemplation, qualities that will aid us to become more ascetic in the era of climate change.