On 11 May 2015 at 7.00 p.m., a lecture by a distinguished British sociologist, Professor Anthony Giddens, entitled Into the Digital Age: the World in the Twenty-First Century, was held in the Lecture Hall of the JU Auditorium Maximum. The guest lecture was open to the entire academic community of Kraków and organised on the occasion of the anniversary of the Jagiellonian University foundation and conferring the title of Doctor Honoris Causa upon Prof. Giddens for his outstanding contributions in the field of social sciences. The lecture was attended by representatives of Polish academic community as well as national and local government.
Prof. Giddens opened his lecture by emphasising that the latest technological advancements are currently influencing our everyday lives more rapidly and deeply than ever before. He compared the digital revolution to the invention of writing during the early stages of development of human civilisation, as both of these events have caused a sociological breakthrough. He enumerated three pillars of digital revolution: the Internet, supercomputers and robotics. In the modern world, supercomputers manage robots of varying degrees of complexity - from ticket machines to advanced production devices - using webs of connections, most notably the Internet. Both this and the fact that information is now highly accessible in the global scale has a tremendous impact on politics, economy, and society - and, therefore, everyday lives of an average human being.
Anthony Giddens is widely recognised as one of the most influential modern sociologists. His books have been translated into over 30 languages, and his papers are amongst the most frequently cited in the area of humanities. He specialises in globalisation, politics and the influence of modernity on society and life of individuals. He is the creator of the structuration theory. During his career, he has been a lecturer at many universities, including the University of Cambridge, University of Leicester, and the London School of Economics, where he was the director in the years 1996–2003. Since 2004, he has sat in the House of Lords as Baron Giddens.
The Jagiellonian University tradition of conferring honorary doctorates upon distinguished people dates back to the 1810s, and resulted from the influence of Austrian and German academic institutions. Referring to their practices, in 1815 the University asked the educational authorities in Warsaw to be granted the power to award doctoral degrees to the most distinguished men of letters. Some of the distinguished foreign scholars and scientists awarded with this title are Norman Davies, Dalai Lama and Robert Huber.
