The central question of the PhD programme is directed at the manifold forms of a digital future’s power to shape and thus to make reality already in the here and now of a historically contingent present (cf., e.g., Staab 2016; Klauß/Mierke 2017). In doing so, it takes the fact into account that ‘digitalisation’ is currently one of the most controversial, evocative, and influential triggers, catalysts, and focal points of collective imaginations and affects, not only regionally but also globally. Digitalisation is, in this sense, not only a technical process, but also a social one. It concerns the so-called social “basic processes” (Dipper 2012; our translation) – the system and practices of material reproduction by economy, technology, professional system, etc. – as well as the collective perception or that “self-spun web of meaning” (Geertz 1983, p. 9; our translation), which is referred to as ‘culture'’ in recent cultural studies and social sciences. In case possible real consequences of digitalisation shall be disclosed and assessed, it is therefore not sufficient to use only the instrument of a ‘hard’ technology assessment established in the philosophy and sociology of technology (cf., e.g., Häußling 2014, pp. 361-372; Grunwald 2010). It usually comes too late, because its object constantly escapes. In other words, it neglects the temporal order of the technical, economic, political, and social dynamics of modernity, inasmuch as it attaches too little importance to the expectations of various social actors and interest groups that fuel these dynamics. Expectations are inevitably fictional, “since they are based on imaginations of the future [...], and not on knowledge of the future [...] as an empirical object” (Beckert 2018, p. 113; our translation).

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To make the dynamics of modern society comprehensible, it is necessary to deal with fictional expectations – in our case with fictional expectations of digitalisation. These are articulated, inter alia, in scientific, economic, artistic, popular-cultural, and political imaginations, narratives, and blueprints of what the future will bring: They are included in political and academic programmes, in the curricula of schools and universities, in educational initiatives, and legal texts; they often take on a particularly haunting form in science fiction novels, films, and television series (such as, already classically, in “The Matrix” [1999], or in Spielberg's “Ready Player One” [2018]), in the form of cyborg characters in computer games (such as, for example, “Deus Ex: Human Revolution” [2011]; cf., inter alia, Horn 2014), enter fitness apps, condition employment relationships or materialise in technical innovations and infrastructures. Thereby, the PhD programme, with regard to partial aspects, certainly ties in with technical sociology’s research on models in the late 1980s (Dierkes/Hoffmann/Marz 1992; Degele 2002), but also seeks to overcome their limitations. To this end, it firstly takes seriously the specific temporal order of a shaping of the present that is based on fictional drafts of the future, and secondly, in terms of genealogy and historiography, it traces the provenance of the blueprints of the future linked to ‘digitalisation’ from disparate origins (academics, economy, popular culture, science fiction, etc.). Thirdly, it deciphers the synthesis of disparate ‘elements’ into meaningful figures (“Gestalten”) and, fourthly, it takes a sociological look at the tangible social and political effects of these figures of the future in current social constellations (cf. Elder-Vass 2018; Zuboff 2018; Betancourt 2015).

The core of this research programme is based on cultural theory. Although ‘culture’ has only been categorically institutionalised in modern society, the cultural is omnipresent as a dimension of human life practice. By this we understand, in the brevity required, that dimension of living together in which people interpret, construe, and make sense of their actions. The cultural dimension can only be separated analytically from the social or socio-structural dimension in so far as both dimensions are empirically co-constitutive: Just as there are no material structures of social coexistence, of the human-nature and human-machine relationship without meaning, there is no meaning without material institutions, apparatuses and physical-sensual practices (cf. Alkemeyer 2003, pp. 2777-2780).

In order to capture the specific materiality of imaginations, blueprints, meanings, and forms of a digital future, we continue to shape this fundamental cultural-theoretical approach with practical theory. As Althusser, among others, has already pointed out, the materiality of (imaginary or ideological) meanings cannot be captured in the same way as the materiality of “a cobblestone or a gun”, but it is still a materiality in that socially relevant ideas and meanings are always inscribed in institutions or in an “apparatus and its practice or its practices” (Althusser 1977, p. 136f., quoted by Djoufack 2010, p. 43; our translation). From a practical-theoretical perspective, which some of the PhD programme’s applicants have already successfully tested in various research contexts (cf. Alkemeyer/Budde/Freist 2013; Alkemeyer/Schürmann/Volbers 2015; Alkemeyer/Buschmann 2017; Reckwitz 2003; Schmidt 2012), the self-interpretations of a society are thus not an idealistic ingredient or mere superstructure to the material “basic processes” (Dipper 2012; our translation), but rather a material force of its own that affects, guides, and forms the perception and thus has a reality-constituting effect. This concerns people’s relation to the world and the self, their relationships to the environment, as well as to themselves.

Social self-interpretations materialise and are fixed in language and images, in buildings and artefacts, in habits and institutions, in linguistic and non-linguistic practices, e.g., of working and playing, teaching and learning. By examining the discourses and practices in which drafts of a digital future and the attitudes and presumptions, fears and desires, concerns and hopes associated with them are expressed, the historical and social constellations shall be taken into account, in which the imaginations of a digital networking of people and things take shape, i.e., are brought together and condensed in special forms. At the same time, the social and political effects which are induced by the establishment of certain forms of a digital future shall be inquired already in the present. Of interest are, in this respect,  for example, the ideas of digital spaces as cyberspace or virtual reality, which are oriented towards scenarios of a networked future, as well as the related techno-liberal pioneering rhetoric and border mythologies, which guide the development of this space and at the same time create it (cf. Willim 2017).

In order to be able to differentiate between pure ‘fantasies’ and potentially powerful fictional futures, the ‘realism’ of these drafts will also be examined, because without anchor points in empirical reality, there will be no power to influence reality. The novels of Marc Elsberg may be a concise example of a ‘realistic’ future narrative in this sense, for instance “Black Out” from 2012, which depicts the catastrophic effects of a Europe-wide power failure in a digitally networked world. Simultaneously, this example shows a form of power which is relying on amplifying effects, and which can originate from the resonances between various drafts of the future and their authors in a specific historical and social constellation: Elsberg’s apparently carefully researched fiction interacted with a large-scale scientific study on the “Endangerment and vulnerability of modern societies – with the example of a large-scale and long-lasting power supply failure” (our translation), which was developed in the Office of Technology Assessment at the German Bundestag.

The overarching guiding question of the PhD programme can now be concretised, specified and distinguished in various dimensions:

Firstly, the PhD projects should explore the diversity of the blueprints and forms of a digital future in various social fields – business, gainful employment, politics, education, literature, art, popular culture, sport, etc. With Bourdieu (cf. inter alia Bourdieu 1996), we assume the relative autonomy of the various social fields: their own logic and temporality, their rules and conventions, their efforts, interests, and illusions. In this way, the field-specific peculiarities, formatting, and conditionalities of the images of a digital future come into focus, for example, through established narrative structures and codes, and with them the question to what extent and how a general social imaginary of a digital future appears field-specifically fractured. In order to appropriately address the aim of ‘mapping’ the diversity of drafts of the future, some PhD projects will look at different regional or national contexts in addition to different social fields.

Secondly, the PhD projects investigate the positionality and thus the interest-based and relational nature of the blueprints of a digital future. The concrete form of such a draft and the (technological, political, economic) programmes and measures derived from it always depend on the position that a social actor articulating this draft takes in the social space of society or in a social field. From a sociological point of view, social positions determine objective interests pursued by those who take up these positions (cf. inter alia Bourdieu 1985). These interests, in turn, are linked to the respective evaluations and moods: While some people hope to make a profit (by reducing personnel costs in digitalised production, creating user profiles using Big Data, etc.), others have their jobs or their private lives at stake, etc. Correspondingly, the meanings and assessments, the affects and feelings associated with the digital transformation in the various positions differ. Thus, the way in which different (field-specific) blueprints relate to each other must also be examined: Are they antagonistic to each other or do they resonate with each other? To what extent does this change the social structure of positions and create new constellations of interests? Which speaker positions does the remeasurement of the discourse on society, which is taking place under the sign of digitalisation, produce?

Thirdly, this leads to the question as to which drafts of a digital future will prevail in the social debates about power, influence, and public attention and gain persuasive power, condense into concise, evidence-generating figures, and which factors are responsible for this (in addition to the social position of the drafting actors, for example, the mediality of the blueprint, the cultural genre in which the draft is articulated, its legitimation through academic expertise, etc.). This question is relevant not least because it can have very different, in some cases serious consequences not only for the development of technology but also for political and economic action and, as a consequence, for social structure and social cohesion, which future form will prevail at a historical point in time and guide the actions of relevant actors in digitalisation.

Fourthly, the (potential) power of an imagined figure (“Gestalt”) of the future can only be deduced if the question of which (meaningful) elements of different origin, materiality, and mediality it is made up of and how these elements are condensed into an evident figure is investigated genealogically. In contrast to thinking in terms of continuities and discontinuities, the genealogical method focuses the research interest on the contingent, eventful encounter of various material and symbolic elements and forces from which the meaning of every reality emerges in the first place (cf. Foucault 1971/2002; Althusser 2010): Which older and new forms of knowledge and narratives are condensed in currently circulating drafts of a digital future? And which migratory movements, adaptations, and re-articulations of cultural patterns and leitmotifs can be observed from a genealogical perspective, for example, from a novel to a scientific study and vice versa, as indicated above by the example of Elsberg’s “Black Out”? In genealogical terms, attention is thus always paid to the intertextual and intermedial entanglements of the analysed drafts and figures of the future as well as the resulting effects on reality. Against this background, the dissertations will use case studies to illustrate, among other things, on which ways of reception and travel paths and how certain imagined futures of digitalisation are incorporated into, for example, practical politics related to the education sector, into legal texts, case law ,or the demands of ‘users’ to legally establish their claims for a self-determined use of the digital data siphoned off from them by global tech companies. In concrete terms, in such case studies, it would be possible to trace the travel paths of single fictional expectations and reconstruct when, how, and under which circumstances which social actor resorts to a particular draft of the future in order to make their position-related interest heard and plausible in public space.

One of the overarching academic objectives of the individual studies in the PhD programme, which corresponds to the training of excellent young researchers for academia and other professional fields, is to develop a typology of the fictional expectations associated with ‘digitalisation’ in various fields and cultural genres, to uncover their (field- and genre-specific) origins and functions, and to reconstruct their scope and impact. In an interdisciplinary dialogue of the various perspectives on these processes and phenomena, the programme’s overarching socio-political concern to enable the digital transformation to be shaped in line with the guiding values of social cohesion, social participation, and collective self-determination shall be assisted. The socio-political aspirations of the PhD programme are thus oriented towards the model of critical digital literacy, the development of a sensitivity for the forces that determine the process of digital transformation and for the effects of imagined forms of the future in the here and now. The programme is therefore not primarily concerned with the acquisition of skills that enable a person to use and understand digital tools and media skilfully in order to be able to move in digital environments, but rather with the ability to maintain a critical distance, especially with regard to one’s own involvement in digital practices – with the prospect of understanding one’s own digital actions as a form of self- and social change and thus of political commitment (Pangrazio 2016, p. 172). For without such a critical-reflexive sensitisation based on the exploration, rational mediation, and control of the disparate perspectives and interests that are articulated and condensed in different drafts, scenarios, and forms of the digital future, the social cohesion of modern societies threatens to erode.

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By training excellent young researchers whose work contributes to this sensitisation, and who are prepared for careers in various professional fields through professional and interdisciplinary qualification, the PhD programme simultaneously assumes its responsibility in and for the (co)creation of social transformation processes. It positions itself offensively in the context of a public debate on how democratic control and the shaping of the digital transformation can succeed in view of the forces and conflict dynamics sparked by technical possibilities and disparate interests, as well as taking into account the relatively autonomous structural logics of the various social fields. The PhD programme thus addresses one of the world's most urgent reference problems of contemporary social and political action.

In addition to providing insight into drafts of the future’s practical power to influence reality, which only makes a rational democratic (co)creation of the digital transformation possible, the research programme of the PhD programme can also achieve social-theoretical added value with its approach by focusing on imagined futures as a transformative force without which the current decisions and processes of shaping cannot be understood. Of particular relevance to the PhD programme is thus also the innovative question about the meaning and function not only of traditions or “dream ruins” (Walter Benjamin; our translation) that originate from a real or invented past, but also of fictional expectations for the shaping of contemporary social reality that are anticipated by diagnostics of the present.

The results of the programme are not only secured and communicated in the dissertations that are being developed, but also via regular documentation on the WiZeGG blog (see below) and one or two interdisciplinary book publications. These could be published by the theoretically and thematically relevant transcript publishing house, with which a large number of collaborations already exist.

The dissertations deal with the programme’s central question of the drafts of a digital future’s power to shape the present, taking into account the aforementioned dimensions of its diversity, emergence, relationality and positionality, competition and current effects. From these dimensions, different foci can be derived. These cannot be clearly separated empirically, but they offer the possibility of guiding the research interests of possible PhD projects.

Focus “Narrativity & Mediality”: The projects located here focus on the narrative and medial production of drafts of a digital future. They ask how and in which media futures are drafted and shaped; and they examine the forms, patterns, metaphors and topoi, the narrative procedures and stylistic devices of these drafts. They are thus interested in the media- and genre-specific aesthetic processes of drafting, shaping, and making plausible a digital future, the techniques that give them evidence and persuasive power, and the technological conditions of their production and dissemination. In doing so, they assume that the blueprints of a digital future have a perception-directing function, by this means, influence the view of the present and thus contribute, for example, to the legitimation of interventions deemed necessary to prevent or favour certain future developments.

Focus “Constellations”: Projects in this area focus on the processes of the emergence of drafts of a digital future in various social and cultural fields. Based on the assumption that such drafts are produced in the (reactive) interplay of various actors (journalists, authors, scholars, research institutions, etc.) and that they (can) become effective under certain – media, technological, economic, political – conditions, the projects primarily pursue the question who is involved in the production of certain drafts of the future, which (field-specific) positions are articulated in these drafts, how these drafts make themselves heard and assert themselves (in comparison to other drafts) as future figures, and which alternative drafts remain unheard or are dethematised. In the discussion of the constellations of the production and positioning of drafts of the future, the question who is actually assigned the competence and authority to articulate drafts of the future and whom these drafts (should) address with which objectives is also asked.

Focus “Effects”: Projects in this area examine the effects of the blueprints of a digital future on the here and now. They ask about the conditions under which drafts of the future develop impulses that guide action, what kind of impulses these are, and what direction they give to (intervening, planning, etc.) action. They thus focus on the effects of drafts and figures of the future in various fields such as education, economy, politics, or academia, in which ideas of a digital future give rise to influence on the status quo through measures, policies, and programmes that often appear to have no alternative. In addition, in this area the reformulations and reinterpretations of notions of the social, of copyright, democratic participation, etc., brought about by shaping the future.

In a dialogue between doctoral candidates and applicants, the investigations of different forms of a digital future, the conditions of its production, and its (potential) effects will be related to each other with the aforementioned aim of typologisation.

The possible PhD topics listed below are intended to indicate the range of questions and problems that can be addressed within the PhD programme.

Focus “Narrativity & Mediality”:

• The future is tidy. Minimalist Instagram chic around the smart home
• The ones who shape the future – nerds, computer freaks and Internet entrepreneurs in German-language literature
• Digital high-tech analysis of the body: blueprints of a ‘different’ future in self-tracking cultures
• The “labour market of the future” and the current discourse on digitalisation in the school subjects music and art
• Threatened stubbornness? Practices of digitalisation and practices of subject formation in literary dystopias
• Drafts of the digital future in US-American science fiction films and television series
• Back to the analogue: Obsession with the past as a blueprint for the future in popular music

Focus “Constellations”:

• Everyday ideas, knowledge and emotions of young people and/or students (of teaching) regarding digital transformation
• Is AI from Mars or Venus? Digital transformation as a designer of the interplay between gender relations and economy
• Switchboards: The utopia of total controllability of modern societies. A genealogy of algorithmic governance in modernity
• “The Future Me Will Be Way Better Anyway”: Artistic self-concepts in the age of artificial intelligence
• “The Song Machine.” Hit-writing manuals and the promise of commercial success through artificial intelligence
• Future drafts, strategies and measures of “Education in the digital world”. On the genealogy of digital education
• The management of the deindustrialised communication society. On the medial commercialisation of the social

Focus “Effects”:

• Humanoid robots as materialised digitalisation of the human being
• Digitally lead (/seduced)? Corporate management as a designer of digital transformation
• Access instead of ownership? Sense and limits of the imagination of societies without property
• Technological paternalism and the fear of loss of control: Relevance for the development of future products taking into account the cultural context
• Freedom from matter. Flexibilisation strategies of digital nomads on the global labour market
• The social shape of the Smart City. On the urban reorganisation of the private, the social and the political
• Digital excellence: Utopias and realities of subjectivation under the sign of big-data-based potential and talent analyses