Soziologie 4.0 und ihre Vorläufer: Eine Skizze

Sociology is a child of the modern book printing society. With the transition to a society of electronic and digital media, institutional, structural and cultural self-evident facts of modern society are at issue, without sociology so far having sufficient granularity in its concepts to observe and describe the transition from modern to a "next" society. This article puts the transition from a modern society to a "next" one into perspective by placing it in the context of four media epochs of human society (oral, literal, printing press and "digital" society). And it is working on the determination of a basic sociological idea which, according to the thesis, focuses on problems of communication, i.e. the creation, maintenance and modification of dependencies between independent living beings, and in its own form has been conceived of long before the formulation of an explicit sociology. Each of these media epochs has its own "sociology", even if sociology only becomes explicit in modernity. It turns out that human societies have always been dealing with inscrutable communication partners, be they ghosts and gods, past and future times, "free" individuals or the "invisible machines" of the present. Sociology 4.0 is therefore the latest variant of knowledge to understand a communication oscillating between knowledge and ignorance and forming its own memory in this oscillation.