Social Life and Political Life in the Era of Digital Media

This book explores the ways in which social media has given new political importance to social life. In seizing certain economic and political functions and turning them into social practices through the various devices and technologies of digital copying and sharing, social media has enabled new forms of political participation, thus reinvigora

Digital technology has vastly broadened and complexified social life, levelling opportunities for communication and producing a new awareness of the importance of diversity of social relations, as well as of life on the planet. This book explores the ways in which social media, by encouraging human curiosity and sociability in relation to these developments, has highlighted for users their own nature as social beings who have discovered new ways to get along with each other, as well as new challenges. The complexity of networks on social media has created new kinds of con icts, and new ways to mediate older kinds of con icts, that have resulted in a demand for new forms of political participation, thus reinvigorating political activity, without extending the practice of 'politics as usual'. However, with concerns for the planet in the back- ground, a tendency for elites and ordinary people alike to want to see a political solution to every problem in social life has become an unsustainable and troubling trend. This book argues that enthusiasms for social media can be tempered in a helpful manner through an engagement with studies of social media in relation to understandings of the history of modern social life provided by sources in classical and contemporary sociology and political theory. Social media makes possible new sociable opportunities and multiple publics, but at the same time represents important continuities with modern social life of earlier times, such as the respect in which it works to limit political action within the boundaries of a generalized public, thus constraining demagoguery and challenging the arrogance of elites who seek to impose certain forms of political life.

Engaging with the work of Deleuze, Tarde, Simmel, Lazzarato, Latour, Harman, Heidegger, Arendt, Archer, Wellman, Bergson and others, Social Life and Political Life in the Era of Digital Media advances a new understanding of modernity o ered by social media

Autorentext

David Toews received his PhD in Philosophy from the University of Warwick. An award-winning teacher and major grant recipient from the Social Sciences and Humanities Council of Canada (SSHRC) in the area of Sociology, he has been a faculty member in several universities and has published articles in such journals as Theory, Culture and Society and the European Journal of Social Theory.

Klappentext

Digital technology has vastly broadened and complexi ed social life, levelling opportunities for communication and producing a new awareness of the importance of diversity of social relations, as well as of life on the planet. This book explores the ways in which social media, by encouraging human curiosity and sociability in relation to these developments, has highlighted for users their own nature as social beings who have discovered new ways to get along with each other, as well as new challenges. The complexity of networks on social media has created new kinds of con icts, and new ways to mediate older kinds of con icts, that have resulted in a demand for new forms of political participation, thus reinvigorating political activity, without extending the practice of 'politics as usual'. However, with concerns for the planet in the back- ground, a tendency for elites and ordinary people alike to want to see a political solution to every problem in social life has become an unsustainable and troubling trend. This book argues that enthusiasms for social media can be tempered in a helpful manner through an engagement with studies of social media in relation to understandings of the history of modern social life provided by sources in classical and contemporary sociology and political theory. Social media makes possible new sociable opportunities and multiple publics, but at the same time represents important continuities with modern social life of earlier times, such as the respect in which it works to limit political action within the boundaries of a generalized public, thus constraining demagoguery and challenging the arrogance of elites who seek to impose certain forms of political life. Engaging with the work of Deleuze, Tarde, Simmel, Lazzarato, Latour, Harman, Heidegger, Arendt, Archer, Wellman, Bergson and others, Social Life and Political Life in the Era of Digital Media advances a new understanding of modernity öered by social media

Inhalt

Prologue: Power Void

Introduction: That's 'Life'

Part I Conflations of Social Life and Political Life in the Digital Era

1. Deleuze: Societies of Control and the Ordering Effects of 'Modulation'

2. Andrejevic: Infoglut and the Internalization of Desire for Control

3. Latour: The 'Parliament of Things'

Part II Strategies of Critique of Conflationism

4. The Causal-Action Focus of Traditional Social Science

5. The Problem of Modernist Ontologies of Activity

6. Higher Diversities: A Tardian Critique of Emergent Relations

Part III The Consequences of Higher Diversities for Contemporary Social and Political Life

7. Simultaneity: The Impositions of Experience

8. Political Life in the Era of Social Life

9. Experiences of Closedness

Epilogue: Complexions of the Generalized Public