Governing the Digital Society: Challenges for Agent-Based Modelling

Abstract

Modern societies of the twenty-first century are facing a fast-growing digitisation of almost every sphere of life and work. Smart devices are collecting large amounts of data that allow to identify persons and objects and to check their current status and position. Hence, the digital real-time society is in need of new governance approaches in order to cope with these challenges. Understanding – and maybe shaping – the digital society requires modelling the mechanisms that are guiding the dynamics of sociotechnical systems in general and of the digital society in particular. Hence, we propose a multilevel model of governance, rooted in a basic model of a sociotechnical system. This approach allows to study and to analyse complex, non-linear interactions of systems within systems and thus may provide insights how to govern the digital society and to avoid the risk of losing control. Investigating the governance of complex sociotechnical systems requires new, innovative methods. Agent-based modelling is a suitable means to implement artificial societies at the computer screen, to experiment with various governance scenarios and to predict, which scenario produces results that are societally acceptable or politically desirable. The simulation framework SimCo, developed at TU Dortmund University and rooted in analytical sociology, helps to better understand the functioning of complex systems and to provide means for governing the digital society.