Social Life and Political Life in the Era of Digital Media

Social Life and Political Life in the Era of Digital Media PDF Author: David Toews
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1315278677
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 348

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Book Description
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 conflicts, and new ways to mediate older kinds of conflicts, 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 offered by social media, re-establishing the autonomy of social life over and against political life and re-articulating the relationship between the social and political. As such, it will appeal to scholars of social and political theory and cultural and media studies.

Social Life and Political Life in the Era of Digital Media

Social Life and Political Life in the Era of Digital Media PDF Author: David Toews
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1315278677
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 348

Get Book Here

Book Description
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 conflicts, and new ways to mediate older kinds of conflicts, 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 offered by social media, re-establishing the autonomy of social life over and against political life and re-articulating the relationship between the social and political. As such, it will appeal to scholars of social and political theory and cultural and media studies.

Social Theory after the Internet

Social Theory after the Internet PDF Author: Ralph Schroeder
Publisher: UCL Press
ISBN: 178735122X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 210

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Book Description
The internet has fundamentally transformed society in the past 25 years, yet existing theories of mass or interpersonal communication do not work well in understanding a digital world. Nor has this understanding been helped by disciplinary specialization and a continual focus on the latest innovations. Ralph Schroeder takes a longer-term view, synthesizing perspectives and findings from various social science disciplines in four countries: the United States, Sweden, India and China. His comparison highlights, among other observations, that smartphones are in many respects more important than PC-based internet uses. Social Theory after the Internet focuses on everyday uses and effects of the internet, including information seeking and big data, and explains how the internet has gone beyond traditional media in, for example, enabling Donald Trump and Narendra Modi to come to power. Schroeder puts forward a sophisticated theory of the role of the internet, and how both technological and social forces shape its significance. He provides a sweeping and penetrating study, theoretically ambitious and at the same time always empirically grounded.The book will be of great interest to students and scholars of digital media and society, the internet and politics, and the social implications of big data.

Retooling Politics

Retooling Politics PDF Author: Andreas Jungherr
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108419402
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
Provides academics, journalists, and general readers with bird's-eye view of data-driven practices and their impact in politics and media.

Media Life

Media Life PDF Author: Mark Deuze
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0745680534
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 413

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Book Description
Research consistently shows how through the years more of our time gets spent using media, how multitasking our media has become a regular feature of everyday life, and that consuming media for most people increasingly takes place alongside producing media. Media Life is a primer on how we may think of our lives as lived in rather than with media. The book uses the way media function today as a prism to understand key issues in contemporary society, where reality is open source, identities are - like websites - always under construction, and where private life is lived in public forever more. Ultimately, media are to us as water is to fish. The question is: how can we live a good life in media like fish in water? Media Life offers a compass for the way ahead.

Media Infrastructures and the Politics of Digital Time

Media Infrastructures and the Politics of Digital Time PDF Author: Stine VOLMAR
Publisher: Recursions
ISBN: 9789463727426
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 310

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Book Description
Digital media everyday inscribe new patterns of time, promising instant communication, synchronous collaboration, intricate time management, and profound new advantages in speed. The essays in this volume reconsider these outward interfaces of convenience by calling attention to their supporting infrastructures, the networks of digital time that exert pressures of conformity and standardization on the temporalities of lived experience and have important ramifications for social relations, stratifications of power, practices of cooperation, and ways of life. Interdisciplinary in method and international in scope, the volume draws together insights from media and communication studies, cultural studies, and science and technology studies while staging an important encounter between two distinct approaches to the temporal patterning of media infrastructures, a North American strain emphasizing the social and cultural experiences of lived time and a European tradition, prominent especially in Germany, focusing on technological time and time-critical processes.

Parenting for a Digital Future

Parenting for a Digital Future PDF Author: Sonia M. Livingstone
Publisher:
ISBN: 0190874694
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
In the decades it takes to bring up a child, parents face challenges that are both helped and hindered by the fact that they are living through a period of unprecedented digital innovation. In Parenting for a Digital Future, Sonia Livingstone and Alicia Blum-Ross draw on extensive and diverse qualitative and quantitative research with a range of parents in the UK to reveal how digital technologies characterize parenting in late modernity, as parents determine how to forge new territory with little precedent or support. They chart how parents often enact authority and values through digital technologies since "screen time," games, and social media have become both ways of being together and of setting boundaries. Parenting for a Digital Future moves beyond the panicky headlines to offer a deeply researched exploration of what it means to parent in a period of significant social and technological change.

How Digital Social Life Matters

How Digital Social Life Matters PDF Author: David Toews
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1040267645
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 262

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Book Description
Focusing on two concepts that were central to modernism and continue to be important, albeit in different ways, this book explores the nature of the simple and the complex, and the relationship that exists between them. With attention to trends in big data and digital media, society, politics, and culture, and the shift from groups towards networks in social life, it considers how the simple is transformed by the new realities of the internet-powered, global society, and what its role might be in helping us to understand them, both from the point of view of methods in the social sciences and humanities, and in life. Rejecting the positivist idea that the simple remains a static background against which the open-ended complexity of our world continues to expand, the author contends that the growth in complexity is mirrored in the 'relativization of simplicity', a phenomenon that is highlighted by gradual social changes that the era of digital media is now making apparent. Through a series of questions raised by our new digital lives, How Digital Social Life Matters argues for significant changes in how we see the world. Focussing on the relationship between theory and methods, it offers a critical phenomenology of experiences associated with the network society and networked individualism in an era of ‘big data’. It uses an examination of the concept and phenomenon of the simple, unpacking its new dynamics, its new meanings and its new depth, as a way of demonstrating the need for new conceptions of the complex in such contexts as reality, the universe, and the cosmos. As such, it will appeal to social theorists, communication scholars, and philosophers with interests in the fields of relational sociology, digital media, and object-oriented ontology. It also engages more broadly with scholars with a sociologically-informed interest in reimagining the social roles of politics, science, nature, media, globalization, the environment, and social interaction for our new digital era.

Digital Sociology

Digital Sociology PDF Author: Noortje Marres
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0745684823
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 203

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Book Description
This provocative new introduction to the field of digital sociology offers a critical overview of interdisciplinary debates about new ways of knowing society that are emerging today at the interface of computing, media, social research and social life. Digital Sociology introduces key concepts, methods and understandings that currently inform the development of specifically digital forms of social enquiry. Marres assesses the relevance and usefulness of digital methods, data and techniques for the study of sociological phenomena and evaluates the major claim that computation makes possible a new ‘science of society’. As Marres argues, the digital does much more than inspire innovation in social research: it forces us to engage anew with fundamental sociological questions. We must learn to appreciate that the digital has the capacity to throw into crisis existing knowledge frameworks and is likely to reconfigure wider relations. This timely engagement with a key transformation of our age will be indispensable reading for undergraduate and graduate students taking courses in digital sociology, digital media, computing and society.

Media and Society

Media and Society PDF Author: Nicholas Carah
Publisher: Sage Publications Limited
ISBN: 9781529707960
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 416

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Book Description
A critical introduction to meaning and power in an age of participatory culture, social media and digital platforms. Helps students to understand the central role media play in the social world, and how they can become informed media citizens themselves.

Superconnected: The Internet, Digital Media, and Techno-Social Life

Superconnected: The Internet, Digital Media, and Techno-Social Life PDF Author: Mary Chayko
Publisher: SAGE Publications
ISBN: 1071803514
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 268

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Book Description
What does it mean to live in a superconnected society? In this new revised, updated edition of Superconnected: The Internet, Digital Media, and Techno-Social Life, Mary Chayko continues to explore how social life is impacted when communication and information technology enters the picture. She provides timely analysis of such critical issues as privacy and surveillance, online harassment and abuse, and dependency and addiction, while examining new trends in social media use, global inequalities and divides, online relating and dating, and the internet of things. The new edition highlights such issues as technology and mental health, digital public policy and law, and the author’s own research on bias and stereotyping in digital environments. Throughout, she considers how individuals, families, communities, organizations, and whole societies are affected. The author’s clear, nontechnical discussions and interdisciplinary synthesis make the third edition of Superconnected an essential text for any course that explores how contemporary life is impacted by the internet, social media, mobile devices, and smart technologies. The text is accompanied by the author′s Superconnected Blog (superconnectedblog.com) which includes lecture slides, discussion questions and assignments, and short podcasts for each chapter that summarize key ideas.