Digital Society

Digital Society publishes articles on topics related to governance, transformations, environments, and developments of digital technology and their implications for society.

The journal encourages rigorous investigations, evaluations, and recommendations respectful of good scholarship from any disciplinary tradition and particularly welcomes submissions that fall within the journal’s four Thematic Areas.

Digitalization and Sustainability – Area Editor: Suzana Alpsancar (Paderborn University)

The digital transformation is known to have a dual impact on sustainability goals. On the one hand, digital tools, services, and infrastructures can promote sustainability goals by increasing efficiency, for example. However, they contribute to issues such as increased energy demand, e.g., via the ever growing internet traffic (more connected devices, streaming, blockchain, AI), political and societal disruption, and reshaping economic practices and institutions. In this thematic area, we welcome papers that examine this tension, particularly those that circumvent more than one sustainability pillar (ecological, social, economic). Topics may address the entire life cycle of digital technologies (extraction, development, construction, operation, maintenance, and disposal) in their societal interdependence. While we welcome conceptual work, empirically informed analyses, and empirical studies from various disciplines, such as philosophy, science and technology studies, media studies, organizational studies, and policy analysis, we are particularly interested in papers that touch upon epistemic, societal, cultural, and normative challenges from a historical perspective, in regard to shaping the current transformation, or that engage with future narratives of sustainable digitalization and digital sustainability. 

 Digital Environments – Area Editor: Andrew Iliadis (Temple University)

This Thematic Area explores how digital technologies are transforming the conditions of contemporary life and reshaping our understanding of socio-economic, natural, and virtual environments. We invite papers that examine the ways individuals and collectives inhabit, construct, and are conditioned by digital environments, as well as those that critically assess the socio-economic dynamics emerging from “onlife” worlds—hybrid spaces where online and offline experiences converge (e.g., networked communities, platform labor, the gig economy). Submissions may also address the environmental implications of digital technologies, such as the ecological costs of data infrastructures or the potential of green techno-scientific innovations to foster sustainability. Finally, we welcome contributions that reconceptualize notions of “environment” and “ecology” in light of digitally mediated existence, including studies of virtual, augmented, or mixed realities and their broader cultural, political, and material effects.

Digital Politics, Policy and Sovereignty - Area Editor: Federico Pierucci (Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies)

In this thematic section, we welcome papers investigating political, policy, and sovereignty-related aspects of digital society. We are open to contributions that explore the theoretical and empirical sides of political science and politological studies related to the changing landscape of the politics of technology (e.g., new power dynamics emerging from geopolitical rifts within the multi-stakeholder institutions that govern the internet, or the impacts that regulations on AI, data, and other frontier technologies have on the global order) or technology standardisation (the political impacts of standard-setting in national, supranational, and international fora).
Moreover, we are also keen to receive more policy-oriented contributions regarding, for instance, qualitative and quantitative studies of national hard and soft policies on technology. Further to this, we welcome contributions on Digital Sovereignty, which investigate how states and political entities are reshaping their power in order to achieve regulatory capture over the internet in the face of global political and technological challenges.
We are particularly open to receiving contributions which investigate under-researched aspects of digital politics: indigenous, grassroots, feminist, decolonial perspectives are looked for in order to provide a broader investigation of digital politics and sovereignty beyond a state-centric perspective.

Digital society between ethics and epistemology - Area editor: Giorgia Pozzi (Delft University of Technology)

In this thematic area, we invite submissions that examine how the value-laden nature of digital technologies shapes the ethical and epistemological dimensions of their use in socially consequential domains, such as medicine and healthcare, education, and the workplace, among others. We are especially interested in work that addresses questions arising at the intersection of these dimensions, including but not limited to: issues of epistemic (in)justice associated with digital technologies such as AI systems; the epistemic requirements for the ethical development and deployment of these technologies; their influence on users’ epistemic and moral agency; questions related to the attribution of epistemic and moral responsibility in technologically mediated contexts. We welcome contributions approaching these and related questions from the perspectives of social epistemology, political philosophy, moral philosophy, philosophy of science, feminist epistemology, (bio)ethics, and adjacent fields.

Digital Ethics and Governance – Area Editor: Juri Viehoff (Utrecht University)

In this thematic area, we welcome papers that address how digital technologies transform society in ethically and politically significant ways. We are open to different methods and forms of ethical/philosophical analysis. Both theoretical submissions and contributions that primarily applied ethical issues will be considered. Potential topics that fall into this area include, but are not limited to: work that improves our understanding of philosophical concepts for digital society (e.g.  agency, privacy, digital rights); work that develops normative arguments and principles for digital society (e.g. algorithmic fairness, value alignment); work in political theory that grounds policy and governance proposals for digital society in normative arguments (e.g. how to regulate BigTech firms, whether to democratise AI). While we welcome exclusively theoretical articles that discuss the impact of digital technologies on any ethical issue, articles should provide arguments that are of potential interest to a wider, interdisciplinary audience.

Law and Regulation for the Digital Society – Area Editor: Ludovica Paseri (University of Turin)

This thematic area explores the legal and regulatory dimensions of digital society, focusing on how law structures, responds to, and is transformed by data-driven technologies and artificial intelligence. We welcome submissions that position legal analysis as a central lens for understanding digital transformation, while remaining fully engaged with broader interdisciplinary debates. DISO is interested in the European legislative and regulatory frameworks, including key instruments such as the AI Act, GDPR, and related policy initiatives. At the same time, the area actively welcomes comparative contributions that examine non-European jurisdictions, enabling cross-contextual insights into diverse regulatory models and their global interactions. Distinctively, this area aims to foreground the juridical perspective while remaining open to interdisciplinary engagement. Contributions are invited to combine doctrinal legal analysis with insights from legal theory and philosophy of law, as well as to address normative questions concerning legitimacy, the rule of law, and the transformation of legal concepts under the pressures of automation, algorithmic governance, accountability and data-driven decision-making. By situating law and regulation at the core of Digital Society, this section provides a space for scholarship that connects legal analysis with broader ethical, political, and epistemological debates.

The journal also hosts temporary Topical Collections that gather papers on a specific issue, for instance: the analysis of a particular new/emerging digital technology from a governance, ethical, or legal perspective; debates on interventions to proposed legislation/governance approaches; re-orienting/establishing contemporary debates in an existing body of literature; analyses of the implications of a digital technology being applied to specific industries; (refereed) proceedings of workshops, conferences, or sessions in relevant venues.

For a full list of topical collections, see here https://www.springer.com/journal/44206

The journal publishes research articles of different types, review papers that critically engage with best practices and policies relevant to its scope, white papers and policy reports, commentaries to published pieces, and brief communications. It supports theoretical analyses and any intellectual approach, disciplinary tradition, school of thought, and cultural perspective that are respectful of good scholarship standards, sharable empirical evidence, and cogent arguments. We welcome empirical research, drawing on qualitative, quantitative, or mixed methods, as long as it also reflects on the implications of these results for understanding or shaping digital societies.

All research we publish is peer-reviewed; please see our Peer Review Taxonomy for details.

Please submit your research online or contact us to discuss your ideas for a Topical Collection. All research papers are double-blind, peer-reviewed. We strongly encourage the author(s) to indicate a Thematic Area or Topical Collection of their choice, and the editors may, at their discretion, assign the submission to a relevant category. Please consult Springer’s Policy on AI before submitting.