Social Issues or the Social as an Issue—Rethinking Sociality in a Post-Digital Era

In the post-digital era we are currently experiencing, digital technologies are becoming so ubiquitous that we have begun to take them for granted in our lives—at home as well as at work. The argument of this chapter is that this technological transformation is, in fact, a social revolution, and that this urges us to re-think what we mean with ‘the social’. The chapter starts by teasing out what makes the current technological transformation a social revolution. Then we unpack what the contemporary technological development does to the social. In so doing, we outline two existential concerns: the separation of humans and machines, and the proliferation of relationships to many others. Because of these reconfigurations, we argue, sociality needs to be reconceptualized in a way that also should be considered by those interested in communication. We end the chapter by elaborating on this.