Chapters abstracts for my new book
I’m so excited this is finally going into production 🤗
Chapter 1: What does it mean to live in a digital age?
This chapter introduces the central dilemma of conceptualizing sociotechnical change without resorting to platitudinous claims about ‘living in a digital age’. It explores how everyday experiences with digital technology have altered social life, using illustrative real-world examples while still retaining a conceptual focus. The chapter argues that while digital technologies have transformed information access and social interaction, we need a more robust analytical framework than technological determinism or epochal generalization. It establishes the book’s aim to investigate the ontological status of personhood amid digital transformation, proposing a sociological recovery of agency as central to understanding contemporary sociotechnical change.
Chapter 2: Personal Reflexivity and Social Change
This chapter critically examines influential accounts of ‘late modernity’ from theorists like Giddens, Bauman, and Beck, particularly their claims about detraditionalization. It demonstrates how these approaches recognize the crucial relationship between personal reflexivity and social change but ultimately fail to develop adequate conceptual tools for analyzing this relationship empirically. The chapter reveals how Giddens’s structurationist approach, despite its sophistication, creates an oscillation between voluntarism and determinism that cannot properly account for the variable ways in which agents relate to their social environments. This critical analysis lays groundwork for a more robust account of reflexivity that can better grasp how digital mediation transforms everyday experience.
Chapter 3: The Realist Account of Reflexivity
This chapter introduces Margaret Archer’s realist theory of reflexivity as an alternative framework for understanding the relationship between personal and social change. It outlines Archer’s ‘three-stage model’ of structure and agency, contrasting it with ‘two-stage models’ that black-box reflexivity. The chapter explores how reflexivity operates through internal conversation, manifesting in four distinct modes (communicative, autonomous, meta-reflexive and fractured) that condition how individuals navigate social constraints and enablements. Focusing on the relational and cultural dimensions of reflexivity, it demonstrates how ideas and relationships shape our deliberative processes and life projects, creating a foundation for understanding how digital platforms might transform these fundamental aspects of agency.
Chapter 4: Biography as an Ontological Category
This chapter develops biography as a critical ontological category for social analysis, moving beyond the limitations of concepts like Giddens’s ‘fateful moments’. It draws on Archer’s morphogenetic approach to conceptualize biography not as a sequence of discrete turning points but as a temporally extended process through which persons become who they are. Through critical engagement with biographical research, the chapter demonstrates how treating biography as ontologically robust provides a more secure foundation for understanding social change. It concludes by proposing two essential concepts (psychobiography and personal morphogenesis) as tools for analyzing how individuals navigate social transformation through ongoing cycles of change and stability.
Chapter 5: Personal Morphogenesis
This chapter elaborates the concept of personal morphogenesis as a framework for understanding how people change over time through their engagements with the social world. It explores how personal morphogenesis unfolds through three temporal relations: past conditioning (‘Me’), present action (‘I’), and future orientation (‘You’). Drawing on Derek Layder’s concept of psychobiography, the chapter demonstrates how social contexts and reflexive responses accumulate over time to shape who we become. Rather than reducing the individual to an individualistic frame, this approach recovers the person as a stratified entity whose biographical emergence is central to understanding social change, establishing a conceptual foundation for analyzing how platforms shape this process.
Chapter 6: Sociotechnical Transformation
This chapter traces the historical development of digital technologies from early utopian visions to contemporary critical perspectives on platforms. It examines how the initial rhetoric of technological utopianism has given way to growing concerns about surveillance, manipulation, and digital power. The chapter offers a periodization of digital change from Web 1.0 to social platforms to generative AI, highlighting how technological shifts have transformed user experiences and infrastructural arrangements. It pays particular attention to the rise of “big data” as both technological development and ideological project, revealing how the epistemic claims of data science have contributed to an evisceration of human agency in platform contexts.
Chapter 7: Personal Reflexivity
This chapter analyzes how digital platforms transform personal reflexivity through three key mechanisms: the multiplication of communication channels, the digitalization of the archive, and the problem of cultural abundance. It demonstrates how these changes create conditions of distraction and cognitive triage, making sustained reflection increasingly difficult in platform environments. The chapter introduces an adverbial approach to understanding platform effects, focusing on how reflexivity becomes distracted rather than what people reflect upon. By examining the proliferation of digital interruptions and cultural options, it reveals how platforms shape the temporal structure of reflexive deliberation, with significant consequences for personal identity and life projects.
Chapter 8: Collective Reflexivity
This chapter investigates how platforms transform collective action and social movements through two key mechanisms: the ease of mobilization and the rise of computational politics. It develops the concept of ‘fragile movements’ to describe how platforms enable rapid assembly while undermining the organizational capacities needed for sustained collective action. Alongside ‘distracted people’ these ‘fragile movements’ create a problematic dynamic where democratic steering of sociotechnical change becomes increasingly difficult. The chapter examines how collective reflexivity, the capacity of groups to deliberate about shared concerns, is simultaneously enhanced and compromised by platform mediation, with profound implications for normative transformation in digital societies.
Chapter 9: Platformised Socialisation
This concluding chapter synthesizes the book’s arguments to address how socialization processes are transformed under platform conditions. It challenges simplistic notions like ‘digital natives’ while acknowledging the profound ways platforms reshape how people become who they are. The chapter examines how the cultural context for socialization changes through platform mediation, particularly in how potential and possible selves are encountered and constructed. It concludes by situating the analysis within broader questions of epochal change, arguing that while platforms fundamentally alter the parameters within which human agency unfolds, they do not create wholly new types of people. Instead, they reconfigure the temporal and relational dimensions of personal becoming in ways that demand new conceptual tools for social analysis.
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