I am a very glad to share the publication of a new article I wrote, titled The Quantum Ecology as an Onto-Epistemological Framework: Toward an Ecological Theory of Sensing, which appeared in the journal Digital Society (while a first draft was co-authored with Derrick de Kerckhove – my co-author also of the open-access book Quantum Ecology: Why and How New Information Technologies Will Reshape Societies – the subsequent final version of the article is substantially different from the first draft as it contains quite a few new ideas I have been working on).

The article is not open access, but you can find a preprint here and a browser-reading-only version here.

This article is very close to my hearth not only for its long publication path (it finally found in Digital Society a bold-enough-journal to review, improve and finally host such a dense article), but because it expands and radicalises some of the tenets contained in our book Quantum Ecology. The article does so by building on some preliminary works I published recently on an ecosystemic understanding of information, data, and knowledge (open access here) and on a non-normative, non-axiomatic approach to data ethics (open access here).

Overall, the article contains the seed of an idea I have been developing over the last year, which proposes a widened conceptualisation of sensing, regards being as technics throughout, and supports an emergentist standpoint concerning the agent-world (and human-technology) co-development. Rooted in information theory, such a co-development is autopoietic (or self-organising), open-ended (or non-predetermined and unprestatable), and from within, where this latter stands for the embodiment of breaking (Informational) symmetry at the core of being as dispositif/dispositio complementarity.

Implications to be explored – impacting, among other areas, tech education, digital sovereignty, economy and sustainability – point to the opening of a space of investigation that could be labelled philosophy of technology, challenging the (positivist) philosophical assumptions and values at the core of technology governance, especially its aims and regulatory effects (cf also here and here).