300090 Social Theory for the Digital Age (S) (WiSe 2022/2023)

Society rearranges itself, though we don’t always know where it is heading. When the postmodern moment had arrived in the 1980s it perplexed social theorists, hence its characterization as simply a “post”stage of modernity. One answer to the question of direction that we can now give is Digitization, an umbrella term that refers not only the Internet and its expansive economic, social and cultural possibilities, but also to the vastly increased availability of big data from online footprints along with computational tools, and to the penetration of everyday life by drastically enhanced AI capacities that include algorithms, machine learning and sensors.

In this class, we take the ongoing transformations that we attribute to digital media as a starting point to ask what challenges they provide to social theory that may force us to reconsider some of our most basic concepts and premises. For example, how do we have to reimagine social interaction when one party is not a flesh-and-blood biological entity but an algorithm? What becomes of the face-to-face situation when we confront not other faces but screens? Is the notion of a „social class” still relevant, and if it needs to be adapted or supplemented, by what? We will explore such questions by beginning, in each class, with a core concept or theory that’s widely prominent and then focus on the shifts in complexity and outright changes in practice digital media bring about when they begin to penetrate areas of social life. In passing, we will also briefly shine the analytic light on previous „in kind“ interrogations before or besides digital media entered the stage to see how these may ease or prevent digital „overhauls“ and overrides of theoretical patterns.