A central achievement of this book is to insist that, instead of rushing to analyze the surface effects of digital media, it is crucial first to contemplate the relationship between social life and political life. Toews masterfully scrutinizes this relationship by reinvigorating classical sociological thinkers such as Bergson, Simmel, and Tarde, and bringing them into dialogue with present-day theory and concerns. The result is a significant contribution to social theory.
Christian Borch, Copenhagen Business School, Denmark
Employing an original relationalist interpretation of such thinkers as G. Deleuze and G. Tarde, David Toews discusses the effects of new social media on relations in a world characterized by social inequalities and new political phenomena like Trumps presidency. Anybody interested by the metamorphoses of this world and social theories should read this text written by a skilled sociologist.
Francois Dpelteau, Laurentian University, Canada
Social Life and Political Life in the Era of Digital Media
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.
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.
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.
Routledge Studies in Social and Political Thought
For a full list of titles in this series, please visit www.routledge.com/series/RSSPT
123 Weber, Schumpeter and Modern Capitalism
Towards a General Theory
John Love
124 The Cultural Contradictions of Anti-Capitalism
The Liberal Spirit and the Making of Western Radicalism
Daniel Fletcher
125 Peter Berger on Modernization and Modernity
An Unvarnished Overview
Robert Bickel
126 Imaginaries of Modernity
Politics, Cultures, Tensions
John Rundell
127 Complexity, Society and Social Transactions
Developing a Comprehensive Social Theory
Thomas Whalen
128 Critical Theories and the Budapest School
Politics, Culture, Modernity
Edited by John Rundell and Jonathan Pickle
129 Social and Political Life in the Era of Digital Media
Higher Diversities
David Toews
130 Towards a Hermeneutic Theory of Social Practices
Between Existential Analytic and Social Theory
Dimitri Ginev
131 Experiencing Multiple Realities
Alfred Schutzs Sociology of the Finite Provinces of Meaning
Marius I. Bena
Social Life and Political Life in the Era of Digital Media
Higher Diversities
David Toews
First published 2018
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2018 David Toews
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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Toews, David, author.
Title: Social life and political life in the era of digital media : higher diversities / David Toews.
Description: 1 Edition. | New York : Routledge, 2018. | Series: Routledge studies in social and political thought | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017042002 | ISBN 9781138242326 (hbk) | ISBN 9781315278698 (ebk)
Subjects: LCSH: Digital media--Social aspects. | Digital media--Political aspects.
Classification: LCC HM851 .T64 2018 | DDC 302.23/1--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017042002
ISBN: 978-1-138-24232-6 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-27869-8 (ebk)
For You
Thank you to Neil Jordan for suggesting the idea of this book. It can be traced back to Keith Ansell-Pearsons suggestion that I study the work of Gabriel Tarde, which was transformative, unexpectedly on multiple levels. Studying Tarde and his contemporaries made it possible for me to understand, in sensible and tangible ways, how social thought in the era of post-postmodern thought can have, and
