Precarity within the Digital Age: Media Change and Social Insecurity

On one hand, precarity can be understood as an unstable employment relationship and analyzed as an effect of neoliberal roll-back processes. Precarity and other societal power structures manifest in the digital age and are re-produced by the way, digital media are used. On the other hand the media change effects a stable instability or precarity. Due to the media change social practices throughout the diverse societal fields are questioned: new social spaces emerge which require new social practices and effect a stable instabiilty of the media use. This approach of a double precarity enables a systematically meta-perspective on the societal transformation processes which are connected with digitalisation. In line with this heuristic approach the different societal aspects and dimensions of
the media change can be integratively thematized and discussed.
The aim of this book project is to provide cross-disciplinary perspectives on the phenomena of social inequality, insecurity and precarity which accompany media change in a dawning digital age. Within the increasingly growing field of precarity research, the empirical and theoretical analysis of the relation ‘digitalisation/precarity’ remains a challenge. The book project provides a contribution to this open research field.