Ian Angus, Professor of Humanities, Simon Fraser U

"Digitization as Knowledge and as Being”

Abstract: My essay will investigate digitalization as a form of knowledge and as a manifestation of Being. It will begin from the idea of a medium of communication containing a message with knowledge about the world (representation) and also as a formation of the world in the image of this form of knowledge (ontology). Digitalization, as the word suggests, is an action upon a previously existing form. It works by translating the plurality of existing forms to a meta-form that can be re-embedded back into specific forms. The emergence of this generic level of communication is the condition for a general theory of communication as such. To this extent, general translatability and re-embedding, as well as "information" as a content-less claim to knowledge, characterize the specificity of our time.