Digital Society

Digital Society publishes articles on topics related to governance, transformations, environments, and developments of digital technology and their implications for society.

The journal encourages rigorous investigations, evaluations, and recommendations respectful of good scholarship from any disciplinary tradition and particularly welcomes submissions that fall within the journal’s four Thematic Areas.

Digital Transformations – Area Editor: TBC
In this Thematic Area, we welcome papers dealing with digital technologies and their transformative implications on digital society. We welcome submissions that consider transformations about:

• concepts (e.g., how to (re)think ‘agency’ or ‘border’);
• behaviour in society (e.g., the functioning and impact of content recommendation algorithms);
• organization of society (e.g., changes brought about by the use of smart devices in homes or in health care);
• relations within society (e.g., how digital cultures form new social groups and new ways of relating to the self).

Digital Governance – Area Editor: Dennis Redeker (University of Bremen)
In this Thematic Area, we collect papers dealing with questions related to the governance of  digital technologies that may take a range of approaches, including but not limited to:

• conceptual discussions related to digital governance concepts such as digital sovereignty, digital colonialism, digital constitutionalism;
• actor-centric approaches that examine the roles of those involved in (global) digital governance e.g., digital technology firms and sectors, state regulators, technical experts, transnational and inter-state institutions, and civil society/activits groups;
• norms-focused approaches that examine ethical and legal standards, normative change and public attitudes toward governance, including the role of human rights;
• studies of culture(s) and power in digital governance, including postcolonial analyses;
• investigations of specific technologies or constructs and their governance, including Internet governance, AI governance, platform governance, quantum computing governance and the governance of extended reality.

While we welcome articles that discuss governance/policies in specific countries, articles should provide either a theoretical framing from a political/legal/governance perspective or some contextualisation of discussed local policies in a broader regional or global context.

Digital Environments – Area Editor: Andrew Iliadis (Temple University)
In this Thematic Area, we consider papers dealing with the new forms of living within, or our role in shaping, socio-economic environments that arise in the digital society and the relationship between digital technologies and natural or virtual environments. We welcome submissions that reflect on:

• the socio-economic consequences of onlife environments (e.g., alt-right communities, the gig economy);
• the implications of digital technology on the natural environment (e.g., the prospects of green techno-scientific innovations);
• identifying and (re)thinking “environment” and “ecology” in response to the emergence of a new onlife environment (e.g., augmented reality).

Developing the Digital Society – Area Editor: Fiorella Battaglia (Unisalento and LMU)
In this Thematic Area we encourage papers that address questions about the future of the digital society. We welcome submissions that develop contributions to debates in contemporary social philosophy and political theory, such as:

• the role of digital technologies in education and lifelong learning;
• democratisation, globalisation and digitalisation;
• the digital divide and the promotion of intergenerational and intersectional relations;
• the future of work in the digital age;
• how to balance the environmental and financial costs of the digital society.

The journal also hosts temporary Topical Collections that gather papers on a specific issue, for instance: the analysis of a particular new/emerging digital technology from a governance, ethical, or legal perspective; debates on interventions to proposed legislation/governance approaches; re-orienting/establishing contemporary debates in an existing body of literature; analyses of the implications of a digital technology being applied to specific industries; (refereed) proceedings of workshops, conferences, or sessions in relevant venues.

For a full list of topical collections, see here https://www.springer.com/journal/44206.

The journal publishes research articles of different types, review papers that critically engage with best practices and policies relevant to its scope, white papers and policy reports, commentaries to published pieces, and brief communications. It supports theoretical analyses and any intellectual approach, disciplinary tradition, school of thought, and cultural perspective that are respectful of good scholarship standards, sharable empirical evidence, and cogent arguments. We welcome empirical research, drawing on qualitative, quantitative, or mixed methods, as long as it also reflects on the implications of these results for understanding or shaping digital societies.

All research we publish is peer-reviewed; please see our Peer Review Taxonomy for details.

Please submit your research online or contact us to discuss your ideas for a Topical Collection. All research papers are double-blind, peer-reviewed. We strongly encourage the author(s) to indicate a Thematic Area or Topical Collection of their choice, and the editors may, at their discretion, assign the submission to a relevant category.