Facultative Groups, Invisible Individuals: The Transformation of Social Relations in the New Technological Reality

Abstract

The article aims to propose an alternative approach to the analysis of the social effects of digitalization. It was, by and large, intended to solve two problems; first, to assess the epistemological potential and limitations of existing theories and approaches, and second, it was to do what Luhmann, following Spencer Brown, called re-entry, to discover the blind spots of these theories, those differences that lead to the unrecognizable, the background, and the reduced, and then to try to re-enter the main theoretical concepts. Re-entry is easiest to accomplish with the new empirical material offered in this article. The study include the following results: 1) proposing a reactualization of Gordon Pask’s concept of “aesthetically charged environments” as a powerful analytical tool for social and digital communications; 2) an empirical and theoretical justification for the irrelevance of using the concept of “communities” in the context of digital practices research and replacing it with the concept of “facultative groups”; and 3) the fixation and description, on the basis of field research, of new forms of digital behavior that are inevitable reactions to the coercive or manipulative nature of digital regimes, which are expressed in the zero activity of advanced users, in the emerging digital ethic of absence, and in the development of new forms of self-discipline.