Hyperconnectivity and Digital Reality

This book addresses the topic of hyperconnectivity by building on, expanding, and critically examining issues that have to do with information communication technology (ICT) and networked societies. The book explores questions relating to attention and consciousness, techno-capitalism and communicative action taking. Adopting different philosophical angles to assess the challenges we face due to our entanglement with hyperconnected technologies, the book studies performance and performativity in a digitised world by considering the unfolding of our onlife and by looking at what this means to educated future scientists and engineers in a hyperconnected world. The book further discusses digital activities as the new constructs of ourselves and poses questions about how much literacy is needed for us not to be enslaved by those constructs. The book also explores the challenges of hyperconnectivity and the health sector to showcase the vulnerabilities we are increasingly exposed to. It makes clear that - since the boundaries between on- and offline are becoming increasingly blurred - we will require new, flexible frameworks that reconsider what it means to be human in a hyperconnected world.

Kathrin Otrel-Cass, Ph.D., is Professor mso in science and technology education and practice and visual ethnography in the Department of Learning and Philosophy at Aalborg University. Her research interests are often of inter-disciplinary nature with focus on digital visual anthropology and variety of qualitative, ethnographic methodologies appropriate to the study of digital culture and data-related practices. She may be working with various practitioners and experts in environments where people are working with science/technology/engineering practices or their knowledge products. Her research interest in visual ethnography has led to the establishment of a video research laboratory (VILA.aau.dk), with a focus on the organized analysis of video recorded data. Kathrin is a member of the techno-anthropology research group, the ICT and Learning research group and the Digital Disruption Consortium at Aalborg University.