Conclusion: Life in the Digital Prism

Summary

This book started from a puzzle. If transparency is not just a simple recipe for the improvement of social life through the sharing of timely and accurate information, then what is it? And how do we make sense of what happens when ideals about transparency, clarity and openness – facilitated by digital transformations – spread through business, politics and societies at large? Our times are marked by a widespread trust in transparency as a panacea and an infatuation with the idea that humans, organizations and societies can be optimized if we can see what they are and how they behave. Through explorations of theories and illustrations, the different chapters have suggested that something more intricate may be at play: that transparency works not like a window being opened on reality, but more like a prism that refracts and produces selective and surprising visibilities. The illustrations also suggests that transparency ideals travel widely, and shape the lives of individuals, organizations and societies in extensive ways. Transparency, as I have put it, is a form of social ordering and a force in the reconfiguration of human realities, organizational processes and politics and society.