Digital Ecosystems. Society in Digital Age

2014

This chapter explores the challenges of sustaining digital ecologies within the context of a postmodern era that has been characterized by limitlessness. Rejecting a simple model of growth that looks only to increase resources (more computers, more hardware, more personnel), I propose a development model that engages the real material, social, and psychological limits of a digital commons. This model of a digital commons intersects Garret Hardin’s ecological rivalrous commons with Lawrence Lessig’s construct of the innovations commons. Hardin’s work posits that shared physical spaces (like pastures) have material limits and that individuals will act in self-interest to maximize their use of such space, depleting resources until they disappear. Hardin advocates the imposition of limits (i.e., use laws) to protect the commons against destructive self-interest. Lessig contrasts this model with the “innovation commons ” of the Internet, which depends on use. Open-source code, for exampl...

There has been a considerable volume of work which has sought to understand the way in which users of digital systems make sense of them and how they may (or may not) meet their needs, in areas such as health (Nettleton et al. 2005; Koh, et al., 2013; Record et al., 2018), political agency and civic engagement (Vromen et al., 2016) the emergence of forms of ‘digital labour’ (Scholz, 2012), and the broader role of social media and other platforms (Beer, 2017). There has also been work that has examined the online social world as providing a new space through which socio-political and cultural identities can be refashioned, especially in response to relatively strong and explicit localised forms of control, as in China (Chen, 2013) where the virtual, performative national identity can be fashioned (see also Mikula, 2003). More generally, the offline/online relationship has been a common and core theme of social science analysis of the digital. This has led to calls for new approaches to and methodologies that enable better understanding of the engagement with and use of web-based platforms ( e.g. Allgaier and Svalastog 2015) and for a new ethical framework to oversee it (e.g. Aicardi et al., 2018). These issues have been explored through a recently established research network under the rubric of Navigating Knowledge Landscapes (see http://knowledge-landscapes.hiim.hr/ ) which has been especially focused on these issues as they apply to the domain of health and health-seeking behaviour via the web. This Special issue provides an opportunity to broaden and deepen the empirical and conceptual scope and in particular to interrogate this concept of ‘landscape’ and the dynamics and meanings of ‘knowledge’ and its access, creation, curation and use. Building on this range of work, this CfP invites papers that focus directly on the meaning and understanding of the digital landscape. In what way does this notion point up new forms of geographical space that carry distinct cultural, economic and political dimensions? The Journal invites papers that address the following issues: o Is there a specific digital geography and how can we understand this in terms of digital spaces and their production and co-production? o In what ways does the process of navigation create and reproduce specific landscapes and the routes that are taken within the digital space? o How does this geography vary by digital arena – e.g. health, finance, housing, political agency? o What forms of knowledge do we see emerge within this geography and what wider role does it play within contemporary digital cultures? o How do online and offline understandings and forms of knowledge relate to each other? 2 o What does it mean to travel within this geography, and how are its landscapes and their digital topographies formed and reformed? o Do digital geographies have specific forms of temporality and rhythms that reflect distinctive timescapes? o How does the life in the digital landscape work? How is agency acquired and expressed, and how is power established and activated? How are social relations and powers de-constructed and re-constructed? What are the risks? What is the relevance of critical theory? o Does the cultural plurality of the digital society represent a new cultural and economic geography o How is gender performed and mediated within digital landscapes? o How are classical theories of ‘cyberspace’ relevant to a contemporary mapping of the digital landscape? We welcome papers that address these or related themes, with the goal of publishing a high quality issue that interrogates and defines the boundaries and performativity of the digital landscape today. Paper abstracts (250 words max) should be submitted to the corresponding editor by December 14. The Editors will select a number of abstracts for full development as papers before Christmas 2018. Full papers should be submitted by the end of June 2019 for review. The Special Issue will be published in July 2020. Editorial team: Anna Lydia Svalastog Østfold University College Norway, Joachim Allgaier RWTH Aachen University Germany, Andrew Webster SATSU the University of York UK, Srecko Gajovic, University of Zagreb Croatia. Corresponding editor: Anna Lydia Svalastog als@hiof.no

www.amfiteatrueconomic.ro

Planet Earth, with its plethora of natural (im)balances, has a venerable age of 4.54 billion years; the (industrial) imprint placed by the human species on it, considered to be not negligible, counts of just little over two centuries; while the digital/IT&C/virtual existence of man, in what we call cyberspace, is reduced to just a few decades. An amorphous world, hastily assimilated to the Internet, the cyberspace is the sum or, better said, the synergy created by links between computers (and other compatible devices), servers, routers and various items of global IT and telecommunications infrastructures. A sort of fiefdom for tech computing power, but also a field of geo-political-economic power calculus, the cyberspace raises another dilemma: is it the salutary alternative to the bodice of a physical environment subject to depletion/plunder and degradation/pollution of its scarce resources? This article aims to capture, in an original way, how the translation of a great part of the world and social life into cyberspace, especially in the wake of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, relieves the natural environment/climate of Anthropocene pressures (e.g., via optimizations of production processes, favoured by artificial intelligence etc.), or, on the contrary, a less noticeable aspect, how it worsens certain components of it (e.g., via the amplified need for energy or for rare minerals, critical to new technologies etc.). Moreover, the above-mentioned ecological alleviations (labelled as of software nature) and (hardware) aggravations brought by digitalization are duly emphasized and evaluated in the light of the (un)intended consequences occurring at the highly sensitive intersection between markets (private practices) and states (public policies), pointing to the case of the European Union.

2021

This book connects political economy perspectives with scenario planning for mapping out future trajectories of digital ecosystems. The focus is purposefully on digital ecosystems as it encompasses economic, political and social contexts on a global, national and local level. The diversity of political economy approaches allows the author to explore alternative meanings of digital ecosystem development, which is particularly useful for envisioning alternative futures. Often visions about the future of digital ecosystems suffer from a lack of imagination and confirmation bias, which is favorable to the extrapolation of current trends. A wide range of political economy perspectives applied through positivist theorizing in this book shows different interpretations of developments in digital ecosystems. Scenario planning teams around the world have applied a collective imagination to show how future trajectories can be radically different from the current trends. The book outlines meta-scenarios for alternative futures of the political economy of digital ecosystems by reviewing and synthesizing the work of foresight teams. These meta-scenarios served as insights for developing four scenarios for European digital ecosystems through the workshops with high-level executives and experts. The scenarios identified the nature of EU cooperation and the development of digital infrastructure as key drivers. These four scenarios developed in the workshops are further operationalized in a specific context by exploring the implications for Estonia as well as for Chinese investment in European platforms. This exercise shows how scenarios of digital ecosystems can be used for stress-testing decisions and strategies. Decision-makers, students, scholars and other stakeholders in a wide range of industries ranging from academia to ride-sharing can use the scenarios for reframing different development trajectories and future-proofing their strategies. The scenarios can be further developed and modified for specific purposes and contexts as they are not written in stone.

A digital ecosystem usually refers to a collection of small and medium enterprise businesses that interacts closely as a system. In this paper, we present a different type of digital ecosystems. We introduce the idea of creating an ecosystem from a number of smart devices. This ecosystem is categorised as a micro ecosystem rather than macro ecosystem. The proposed model of this digital ecosystem is called Device Ecology.