“Talking about digitalisation and environment, the first focus is obviously on the energy expenditure of the digital technologies – server farms and high-every-cost network technologies are all part of the global warming problem of our society, while keeping still in mind the resource intensive production of these technologies. But when we add together the idea of digitalisation and environment with the concept of people mattering, the focus for me becomes more on the socio-technical environment we live in. Using the ideas from classical sociology, I would like to discuss briefly the role of the structure and agency as our social environments when it comes to the discussion of digitalisation.

The idea of conceptual resources – culture, values and legal structures of the environment play an important role when it comes to understanding digitalisation as a macro-level process. At the same time social networks, the people in our immediate environment of friends, family, colleagues, plays also an important role when it comes to the digitalisation processes in general. This talk will highlight some of the ideas, how understanding people in the environment will also help better to understand the digitalisation process in general.”