Social life and political life in the era of digital media : higher diversities /

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Bibliographic Details
Author / Creator:	Toews, David, author.
Imprint:	Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, 2018.
Description:	xii, 177 pages ; 24 cm.
Language:	English
Series:	Routledge studies in social and political thought Routledge studies in social and political thought.
Subject:	Digital media -- Social aspects. Digital media -- Political aspects. Digital media -- Political aspects. Digital media -- Social aspects.
Format:	Print Book
URL for this record:	http://pi.lib.uchicago.edu/1001/cat/bib/11552215

Hidden Bibliographic Details
ISBN:	9781138242326 1138242322 9781315278698
Notes:	Includes bibliographical references and index.
Summary:	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 background, 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.

Table of Contents:

Conflations of social life and political life in the digital era
Deleuze: societies of control and the ordering effects of "modulation"
Andrejevic : infoglut and immersion culture
Latour: science, the representation of diversity, and the "parliament of things"
Strategies of critique of conflationism
The causal-action bias of traditional social science
The problem of modernist ontologies of activity
Higher diversities : tarde's critique of emergent relations
The consequences of higher diversities for contemporary social and political life
Simultaneity : the impositions of experience
Political life in the era of social life
Epilogue: complexions of the generalized public
Works cited
Index.

Social life and political life in the era of digital media : higher diversities /

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