Towards Informational Sustainability: Grasping the Co-Productionist Nature of Digitalization and Sustainability

Background

Shedding light on the socio-material infrastructures that sustain digital societies, the notion of informational sustainability will be outlined as a research agenda. The latter calls for attention to the long-term public value of automation technologies like AI by shifting the discussion from questions of intelligence to questions of usefulness.

The concept of informational sustainability problematizes existing digital information and knowledge infrastructures, advocates individual and collective informational self-determination, and interrogates the conditions that allow certain shapes of digital infrastructures to come into being and become stable, or fail to do so.

This rethinking of how we design, maintain, and repair information systems aims to encourage discussions in both academic and public spheres.

Objective

For academics, the goal is to better understand the complex relationship between digitalization and sustainability and to develop a research agenda that fosters interdisciplinary research at the Weizenbaum Institute and beyond. For the public, the aim is to start a broad and informed conversation about how society manages information now and in the future.

Research Questions

1. What do we mean when we talk about information (processing) in the context of sustainability?
2. How does existing literature at the intersection of social and computer sciences conceptualize the notion of “information”, for instance, in contrast to “data”?
3. How have conceptualizations of information changed over time? What role do informationing practices play in contemporary discourses around sustainability?
4. How does the concept of informational sustainability differ from and enrich existing conceptualizations of sustainability?