Abstract:

Intelligent digital devices are deeply embedded in human society, providing convenient access to digital life through connectivity. Given the foundation and conditions of today’s world, social communication gradually expanded from interpersonal relationships to human-machine relationships. In a digital society, technology deepens the degree of self-alienation both explicitly and implicitly. From the dominant point of view, digital communication provides a technical path for self-objectification and makes the self quantifiable. Implicitly, the influence of digital communication on self-alienation is imperceptible, but it nonetheless permeates daily life. There are four ego types in digital communication: the incarnated ego, the quantified ego, the accessed ego, and the serviced ego. Their forms of alienation differ, but they all reflect the subjectivity of the human ego that is transferred to technical controllers through technology. This paper suggests a governance path for these four types of self-alienation. In our era of artificial intelligence, we should return to human subjectivity and move towards human-machine symbiosis through a combination of technical governance and human governance.

Key words: digital sociology, digital self, self-alienation, artificial intelligence social governance