Digitization

Digitization changes and intensifies the human orientation: its potentials and needs, and along with these both its certainty and uncertainty. New means of communication like e-mails and social media constantly generate new modes of abbreviated, accelerated, and more or less distanced interindividual communication. Your orientation in the world is concentrated within the smartphone in your hand. You surf the web partly with, partly without intentions, you do not find the things you were looking for, and you find things you were not looking for – orientation in its pure form.

The internet was created under the conditions of an increased uncertainty of communication during the Cold War as a new and decentralized communication system for the then not unlikely case of a nuclear war. Today, the internet strongly intervenes in our everyday orientation especially by transforming our orientation to other orientations. Along with big data and artificial intelligence, the internet entails not only new solutions, but also new problems, particularly regarding digital security. Individual and societal orientations are both more and less secure than ever before; and the need for both trust and mistrust in security systems has never been as high as today.

These developments and the continuous challenge of continually distinguishing between facts or fictions (including designed identities) and between reliable and helpful or holdless and misleading footholds magnify the now spectacular pressure of time. If intelligence is enhanced by digital technologies, as is currently the case, then this brings about an ongoing competition for more intelligent orientation abilities and actions, which in turn increasingly drives the evolution of the digitization of communication forward. The constantly looming uncertainty of the internet may, in the long run, enhance the intelligence of orientation (chap. 16.3).

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Glossary

Reinhard Mueller