Studying Norms and Social Change in a Digital Age

In English This chapter collects results from five different studies all conducted by scholars active within Cybernorms. Cybernorms is a research group founded by sociologists of law with a specific focus on exploring social and legal norm structures that appear in the wake of technological and social change. The emphasis within the group is on the gap and the distance that currently runs the risk of emerging between traditional society’s rules and the social norms that are generated in connection with young net cultures. Based on the underlying understanding that the digitalisation of society is producing a growing divide between legal and social norms, the Cybernorms research aims to identify and analyse norm-related conflicts between law and common online practices. The issue of file-sharing is clearly an ever present case to illustrate these conflicts. Therefore, the overall research question asks how a deepened and thorough understanding of the norm-related conflicts surrounding copyright and its enforcement, as well as of unauthorized file-sharing, may be used to provide a useful set of tools for dealing with the growing gap problem between legal and social norms in a digitised world.