Abstract
This chapter examines the kind of society that has developed alongside digital and networked technologies, and it discusses the role of technology and of digital technology in that society. Digital and networked technology is a recent development in terms of human history and even in terms of modern and contemporary history. What kind of society is associated with these new technologies and is that society significantly different from previous societies? How does technology interact with society? The answers to these questions have a strong relationship to learning and the way learning is located in a wider social context.
The societies that emerged in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century relied on the education of vast new workforces and the reconfiguration of the existing workforces in already economically developed regions. Networked learning emerged as an idea in the context of these rapid changes, changes to social, economic and political structures and changes with regard to technologies. It is an unanswered question as to what the relationships are between one set of changes and the other. Technology arises from and is designed in society, for the existing society or its imagined future. However, once deployed in the world, technologies take on a life of their own changing the societies they emerged from, often in unexpected ways, and spreading to societies that did not design or envisage a future with that technology. In these ways, technologies can have a revolutionary role in social change but one that is highly contested. Do technologies drive change or are they outcomes of social processes of change? Perhaps they are both.
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Notes
- 1.
Figures obtained from the World health Organisation: http://www.who.int/gho/urban_health/situation_trends/urban_population_growth_text/en/
- 2.
Figures obtained from the International organisation for Migration: http://www.iom.int/cms/en/sites/iom/home/about-migration/facts--figures-1/global-estimates-and-trends.html
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Jones, C. (2015). The Age of Digital Networks. In: Networked Learning. Research in Networked Learning. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-01934-5_2
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