Book contents
- The Digital Prism
- The Digital Prism
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: The Transparency Formula
- 1 Digital and Datafied Spaces
- 2 Transparency and Managed Visibilities
- 3 People under Scrutiny
- 4 Organizations Gone Transparent
- 5 Seeing the World
- Conclusion: Life in the Digital Prism
- Bibliography
- Index
Conclusion: Life in the Digital Prism
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 September 2019
- The Digital Prism
- The Digital Prism
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: The Transparency Formula
- 1 Digital and Datafied Spaces
- 2 Transparency and Managed Visibilities
- 3 People under Scrutiny
- 4 Organizations Gone Transparent
- 5 Seeing the World
- Conclusion: Life in the Digital Prism
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
This book started from a puzzle. If transparency is not just a simple recipe for the improvement of social life through the sharing of timely and accurate information, then what is it? And how do we make sense of what happens when ideals about transparency, clarity and openness – facilitated by digital transformations – spread through business, politics and societies at large? Our times are marked by a widespread trust in transparency as a panacea and an infatuation with the idea that humans, organizations and societies can be optimized if we can see what they are and how they behave. Through explorations of theories and illustrations, the different chapters have suggested that something more intricate may be at play: that transparency works not like a window being opened on reality, but more like a prism that refracts and produces selective and surprising visibilities. The illustrations also suggests that transparency ideals travel widely, and shape the lives of individuals, organizations and societies in extensive ways. Transparency, as I have put it, is a form of social ordering and a force in the reconfiguration of human realities, organizational processes and politics and society.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Digital PrismTransparency and Managed Visibilities in a Datafied World, pp. 145 - 154Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2019