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Verse Where do you want to go today?

When Microsoft used this question in its image campaign in the mid-1990s, the technical possibilities of the emerging age of digitalisation were already looming on the horizon. The PC had become an established feature at desks all over the world and the internet was showing rapid growth rates. It could be utilised for the advertising promise of technological empowerment in a convincing way. Wherever users want to go, the software giant’s promise went, its user-friendly technology provided the means.

A quarter of a century later, the big tech companies are no less ambitious. The telecommunications provider Cisco is picking up on the empowerment narrative with the slogan “The Bridge to possible”, while Samsung, the world’s largest producer of smartphones, is drawing attention to new options for action that are open to networked users in its “Do what you can’t” campaign.

Together, they are pointing to a future full of possibilities that is already becoming evident in many ways. Smart cities dispose of automated ways to provide for their consumers, artificial intelligence liberates workers from more arduous types of labour and “omniscient” digital assistants follow our orders on demand. At the same time, driverless transport is becoming more and more normal, and with the help of our smartphones we can control and monitor networked objects. In light of these developments, individual opportunities seem to be multiplying: The promise of unrestricted mobility no longer refers only to the internet or the use of office applications, but it even affects the actions we perform offline. Smart services offer us the promise of taking over unpleasant activities, giving us more comfort, time and freedom.

Digital business models from online shopping and holiday bookings to telemedicine demonstrate the enormous potential of the digital economy’s new service providers. Here, technological empowerment reveals itself in the ability to relocate entire value chains with the help of digital services. Even in traditional industries, efficiency and cost benefits from digitalisation are now so obvious that any clinging to familiar operating procedures proves problematic as soon as competitors are taking advantage of the new opportunities. More than ever, the ability to adapt quickly to innovations is a question of economic survival.

In light of these developments, policymakers are called upon to pave the way for digitalisation through successful funding policies, infrastructure and education measures, which is reflected in national and EU-wide initiatives as well as in the rhetoric of politicians. During the COVID-19 pandemic, digital service gained even more in importance in the public and private sectors alike. There are other major challenges that the digital transformation offers solutions for. Planners envision resource-efficient cities as an answer to the environmental crisis and offer intelligent control in the face of overburdened transport systems.

Another challenge is presented by the increasing social divide in numerous countries. Even in the more advanced economies whose populations enjoy a high level of prosperity on average, growing differences within societies cannot be denied. Numerous studies have identified a sharp rise in income polarisation and increasing wealth concentration caused by massive dislocation processes. They reveal inequality between rich and poor not only in terms of quality of life, opportunities of participation and realisation, but also in the limited options of disadvantaged segments of the population to modify social stratification, as resources to improve one’s social position are also unequally distributed. Consequently, the different contexts of education and socialisation contribute to a perpetuation of inequality and polarisation in society thus turns into a structural problem.

Against the backdrop of entrenched inequality, digitalisation appears as an obvious solution. The promise of technological empowerment mentioned above should have an effect on society as a whole, offering new options to the disadvantaged segments of the population. If the reason business leaders and politicians demand a greater investment in digitalisation lies in the potential of the new technologies for society as a whole, this should also mean that it includes new opportunities for the disadvantaged segments of the population as well. The general promise of mobility behind slogans such as “Where do you want to go today?” or “Do what you can’t” needs to be put to the test.

Today, smartphones are ubiquitous in all parts of society, and free apps and many other easily accessible services seem to offer new options for action. Potentially, they could spread resources relevant for advancement such as education, social contacts, ideas and life paths, counteracting structural inequality in a sustainable way. Based on these premises, the possible impact of the digital revolution on the social question needs to be explored.

Several studies from the fields of media pedagogy and education research are tying the acquisition of competencies and knowledge to the new offers from digital media. While they show that the empowerment hypothesis needs to be qualified to the extent that conditions for media acquisition and usage are not equal across society (digital divides), the opportunities created by digitalisation are also acknowledged (Glăveanu et al. 2020; Rienties et al. 2022). From the perspective of social theory, the widespread euphoria about the technical possibilities is countered with the unequal control over the technical infrastructure, which is always tied to the question of power. Moreover, sociologists of technology are pointing out that the digital technologies are increasingly acting autonomously, influencing the world around them (Airoldi 2022; Rohlinger and Sobieraj 2022). Only certain actors can program them, a fact which brings social hierarchies back into the picture (i.e., Kitchin & Dodge 2011). The widespread discourse on surveillance also argues against the potential that digital technologies offer to users, viewing them as forms of control and discipline instead. With frequent reference to Michel Foucault’s “Discipline and Punish” (1979), new technologies have been understood as a means of maintaining the existing order by subjecting every individual to a sense of permanent visibility (Klauser et al. 2014; Gabrys 2014).

Finally, the empowerment hypothesis can also be countered with the current discourse on privacy (Beyvers et al. 2017). The use of new technologies is here associated with the loss of the private sphere through the surrender of personal data. This leads to a transparency of each individual which has a far-reaching effect on the social regime by influencing power structures and inequalities that were tied to the practices of privacy.

Those who are more optimistic about the consequences of digitalisation could reply that many of these arguments tend to point out general challenges that disadvantaged segments of the population are not necessarily affected by. While it may be true that societies are changing because of digitalisation and that surveillance, control and loss of privacy are real issues, the opportunity for individual social mobility is also real (Ferger 2018; Daniela 2022).

The present study wants to contribute to this this contradictory debate about the social effects of digitalisation. However, it does so with a clear focus on individual socialisation conditions and opportunities for advancement as well as a related analysis of the conditions of technical empowerment in the context of a growing social divide.

Throughout, the question of digital empowerment will be explored from a spatial perspective. The central argument is that social disadvantage corresponds to spatial structures and that the entrenchment of social inequality can only be understood in a spatial context. Only by countering the unequal social conditions in physical real space with other conditions that claim to be more favourable for social advancement can the alleged possibilities of digitalisation be put to the test.

Based on current findings about the growing social divide in numerous societies, we will first look at its causes (Chapter 2.1–2.2). A broad concept of social inequality, going beyond wealth and income, reveals a fundamental inequality of opportunity between different segments of the population. Germany is used as an example to demonstrate how inequality results from different socialisation conditions and how these unequal conditions for obtaining education and work are in turn reproduced. Pierre Bourdieu’s classic studies will be used for a more in-depth analysis of the mechanisms of social perpetuation.

In a spatial context, the unequal distribution of opportunities turns out to be even more restrictive (Chapter 2.3). The opportunity structure of each individual in the urban space is greatly determined by the neighbourhood. Resources for upward mobility, as differentiated in Bourdieu’s various types of capital, are unequally divided in space and because of mechanisms of distinction and differentiation, they are also unequally accessible. If we assume that spaces and spatial conditions are created on a daily basis, as done by Martina Löw in her relational concept of space, a further kind of resource-dependent inequality becomes evident: Socialisation and opportunities for advancement are regimented on a spatial level as capital-strong actors can obtain more favourable conditions than capital-poor ones.

Based on these social and spatial mechanisms of perpetuation, Chapter 3 will ask how digitalisation can be used to help disadvantaged segments of the population. The parallel world created by cyberspace calls for a reflection on how its structures and opportunities for action differ from real space and under what conditions an acquisition of capital can facilitate social advancement. Chapter 4 will enhance the debate over social empowerment through digital technologies with a look at the costs. Users of digital technologies pay for them with personal data. These are then tied to products, information and services and sent back to the users. While many other studies focus on (governmental) surveillance or the loss of privacy, the leitmotif of the present investigation is the importance of self-mirroring through the data economy. What are the social implications of user targeting when this means an economic translation of the user’s own dispositions?

Further exploring the possibilities of a recursive acquisition, Chapter 5 takes us back to the neighbourhood. Based on commercially traded data, individual German cities will be used as examples to ask in what way a data-based exploitation logic reaches the neighbourhoods and their residents and what this implies for socialisation and the social question in general. Finally, Chapter 6 will summarise the findings and connect them again to the hypothesis of digital empowerment. What is apparent for the digital age is an economically defined opportunity structure which transmits social opportunities in a highly unequal way, thereby shedding a new light on the social question. In the interpenetration of the physical and virtual space, the new networking technologies have a structuring power that remains hidden behind the technological promise of slogans like “Do what you can’t”.

Step by step, this study will reveal that in our digitalised present, the social stratification processes in fact have to be looked at in a different way, albeit not in the sense of technological empowerment. What a spatial perspective actually reveals is that the socially disadvantaged segments of the population are confronted with new reproductive mechanisms that solidify the status quo and cement social differences. Surprisingly, the more the digital offers are used, the likelier this is.