The Decolonization of the Digital World and Practical Theology

Abstract

Digital processes developed an enormous power to shape social and individual live because they are able to convert all aspects of reality into digital formats, to connect them, to collect an immense amount of data worldwide and to create complex instruments of technical control and have the potential to transform the world in a new way. This can be interpreted from the point of view of coloniality and de-coloniality. Digitalization opens access to nearly all human knowledge. Social players, governments and economic companies use the potential of cyberspace for their own interest. Artificial intelligence, self-learning systems in medicine, care, autonomous locomotion up to autonomous weapon systems can decide independent from direct human control. Practical theology is challenged to research the influence of digitalization in social and individual life, to identify their colonizing effects, to face the ethical problems, to defend ethical standards and basic human rights. The contribution will describe de colonizing effects of digitalization and identify strategies of de-colonization from the ethical point of view of practical theology.