Media and the Social Construction of Reality

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nick Couldry ◽  
Andreas Hepp
Keyword(s):  
Digital Media ◽  
Social Theory ◽  
Data Extraction ◽  
Phenomenological Approach ◽  
Social World ◽  
Social Construction Of Reality ◽  
Media Technologies ◽  
Phenomenological Sociology ◽  
The Social ◽  
Forms Of Knowledge

In this chapter, the authors argue that a phenomenological approach to sociology only can be preserved if a version of sociology is developed that takes seriously the existence of media and the entanglement of digital media technologies and interfaces in every aspect of daily life. That means, in turn, taking seriously the roles that data extraction and data processing play in both the operations of digital media and the production of what counts as knowledge of the social world. If so, then some adjustments to other key assumptions must be made, for example about the social world’s transparency. But those adjustments are worth making in order to preserve the project of phenomenological sociology, which still has much to contribute to a sense of the tensions at work in the social world and its forms of knowledge. To outline this, the authors first discuss the consequences of a mediated life for social theory, then reflect on how digital media and data changed processes of the mediated construction reality, and finally introduce “deep mediatization” as a “sensitizing concept” for such an analysis.

“Tradition,” Vernacularism, and Learning to Be a Folk Musician With Social Media

2020 ◽  
pp. 442-466
Author(s):  
Simon Keegan-Phipps ◽  
Lucy Wright
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Digital Media ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Folk Music ◽  
Learning Mechanisms ◽  
Media Technologies ◽  
Arts And Humanities ◽  
The Arts ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Shaping

This chapter considers the role of social media (broadly conceived) in the learning experiences of folk musicians in the Anglophone West. The chapter draws on the findings of the Digital Folk project, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK), and begins by summarizing and problematizing the nature of learning as a concept in the folk music context. It briefly explicates the instructive, appropriative, and locative impacts of digital media for folk music learning before exploring in detail two case studies of folk-oriented social media: (1) the phenomenon of abc notation as a transmissive media and (2) the Mudcat Café website as an example of the folk-oriented discussion forum. These case studies are shown to exemplify and illuminate the constructs of traditional transmission and vernacularism as significant influences on the social shaping and deployment of folk-related media technologies. The chapter concludes by reflecting on the need to understand the musical learning process as a culturally performative act and to recognize online learning mechanisms as sites for the (re)negotiation of musical, cultural, local, and personal identities.

scholarly journals Recovering critique in an age of datafication

2020 ◽  
Vol 22 (7) ◽  
pp. 1135-1151
Author(s):  
Nick Couldry
Keyword(s):  
Social Science ◽  
Social Theory ◽  
Network Theory ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Science And Technology Studies ◽  
Final Section ◽  
Actor Network Theory ◽  
Social World ◽  
The Social ◽  
Key Questions

This article starts out from the need for critical work on processes of datafication and their consequences for the constitution of social knowledge and the social world. Current social science work on datafication has been greatly shaped by the theoretical approach of Bruno Latour, as reflected in the work of Actor Network Theory and Science and Technology Studies (ANT/STS). The article asks whether this approach, given its philosophical underpinnings, provides sufficient resources for the critical work that is required in relation to datafication. Drawing on Latour’s own reflections about the flatness of the social, it concludes that it does not, since key questions, in particular about the nature of social order cannot be asked or answered within ANT. In the article’s final section, three approaches from earlier social theory are considered as possible supplements to ANT/STS for a social science serious about addressing the challenges that datafication poses for society.

scholarly journals The Conference Reimagined. Postcards, Letters, and Camping Together in Undressed Places

Digithum ◽  
2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Soile Veijola ◽  
Emily Höckert ◽  
David Carlin ◽  
Ann Light ◽  
Janne Säynäjäkangas
Keyword(s):  
Social Theory ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
Social World ◽  
Meeting Point ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Moment

In this paper, five authors account for the rethinking of a conference as a series of postcards, letters, rules and silent moments so that traditional hierarchies of knowledge could be overturned or, at least, sidelined. We recount how the place we convened was enlisted as an actor and the dramas and devices we applied to encounter it. We use this accounting to problematize the conventional practices of goal-oriented meetings and co-authored papers as forms of academic meaning-making. In finding a meeting point where expertise was disorientated and status undressed, we were able to investigate the idea of co-being between human and nonhuman realities as the step social theory needs to take to become a point of connection with the social world, instead of an escape from it. We conclude that this involved silence and necessary fictions as a means to consider the future and past in the moment of meeting.

scholarly journals From sociology to social theory: Critical cosmopolitanism, modernity, and post-universalism

2020 ◽  
Vol 35 (6) ◽  
pp. 758-775
Author(s):  
Estevão Bosco ◽  
Neal Harris
Keyword(s):  
Social Theory ◽  
Social World ◽  
Alternative Programs ◽  
The Social ◽  
Epistemological Challenge

This article focuses on the critical cosmopolitan aim of transcending sociology’s provincial outlook, which mistakenly universalizes Western societies’ historical experiences and normative aspirations. The authors argue that a change in perspective, from sociology to social theory, is crucial in this regard. While a sociological inflection carries a primary investment in the analysis of changes cosmopolitanism brings to the social world, social theory addresses the ontological and epistemological features that these changes precipitate. To demonstrate this, the authors offer a condensed reconstruction of critical cosmopolitan sociology, presenting Beck’s foundational formulation, outlining three main criticisms it faces and alternative programs stemming from them, and demonstrating how Delanty’s immanent-transcendent approach overcomes these limitations. To conclude, the authors address a crucial onto-epistemological challenge facing contemporary cosmopolitan scholarship, namely, how to mediate between the particular and the universal.

scholarly journals Fiction and Social Theory: E-Special Introduction

2016 ◽  
Vol 33 (7-8) ◽  
pp. 409-419 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Beer
Keyword(s):  
Social Theory ◽  
Social World ◽  
Common Interest ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
General Terms ◽  
The Social

This E-Special issue brings together a range of articles from the Theory, Culture, & Society archive that directly explore the relations between fiction and social theory. Each article develops a different perspective on these relations, yet they all share a common interest in probing at the different ways in which fiction might enrich and provoke our conceptual imaginations. These articles ask how theory might be used to understand or illuminate fiction, whilst also considering how theory might be extended, challenged or informed by fictional resources. In general terms, the articles take three types of overlapping approach. First, there are those that use fiction to extend the imagination of social theory. Second are the articles that use fiction as a documentary resource and platform for theorizing. And, finally, there are those articles that use theory to reanimate and re-examine fictional forms. In exploring these three intersecting branches the pieces illustrate the different ways in which fiction and social theory might interweave in our thinking. The articles gathered here provide frameworks, ideas and resources through which the reader might continue to think imaginatively and creatively about the social world.

7. Social Constructivism

2021 ◽  
pp. 191-219
Author(s):  
Georg Sørensen ◽  
Jørgen Møller ◽  
Robert Jackson
Keyword(s):  
Social Theory ◽  
International Society ◽  
Social Constructivism ◽  
Social World ◽  
Constructivist Theory ◽  
Constructivist Approach ◽  
European Cooperation ◽  
The Social ◽  
Important Approach ◽  
Social Constructivist Theory

This chapter examines the social constructivist theory of IR. It first discusses the rise of social constructivism and why it has established itself as an important approach in IR. It then considers constructivism as social theory, and more specifically as both a meta-theory about the nature of the social world and as a set of substantial theories of IR. Several examples of constructivist IR theory are presented, followed by reflections on the strengths and weaknesses of the constructivist approach. The chapter proceeds by exploring constructivist theories of international relations, focusing on cultures of anarchy, norms of International Society, the power of international organizations, a constructivist approach to European cooperation, and domestic formation of identity and norms. The chapter concludes with an analysis of some of the major criticisms of constructivism and by emphasizing internal debates within constructivism.

scholarly journals What’s at Stake in Digital Social Research?

2019 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 35-40
Author(s):  
Nick Couldry
Keyword(s):  
Digital Media ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Social Research ◽  
Social World ◽  
Social Researcher ◽  
The Social ◽  
Multiple Actors

I am a social researcher who uses both theoretical and empirical enquiry not so much to describe the social as to understand the conflicts involved in constructing an order that appears to us as ‘social’. I seek to address the paradox of doing social research: for the social is not something concrete at which we can point, but a dimension of how whatever in our life is concrete holds together as a world. Media are crucial to what hangs together as a world – and in ways that much social research to this day still ignores. Media are in the contemporary era irrevocably ‘digital’: they take forms that automatically bring possibilities for recombination, retransmission, and reworking by multiple actors. As such, and unavoidably, digital media can be woven tight into the fabric of social life much more than previous media. But what does this mean for the social world, that is, for our possibilities to enhance or undermine how we live together today?

scholarly journals Phenomenological Social Theory in the Context of Post-non-classics

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 356-361
Author(s):  
A. Antipina
Keyword(s):  
Social Theory ◽  
Natural Science ◽  
Significant Contribution ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Theory Of Knowledge ◽  
Modern Theory ◽  
Human Actions ◽  
Phenomenological Sociology ◽  
The Social ◽  
New Type

The article uses the model of classical, non-classical and post-non-classical rationality. Post-non-classics is defined in the perspective of increasing the dependence of the object of Science on its method; the paper also analyzes the subjectivity of a new type in the modern theory of knowledge. On the basis of the undertaken analysis, the conclusion is made about the adequacy of phenomenological sociology of a new type of paradigmality — both its General worldview principles and transformations of the social theory itself. Thus, it is shown that phenomenological sociology makes a significant contribution to overcoming the extremes of mentalism and behaviorism in the explanation of human actions by social theory; from the point of view of the General ideological orientation, phenomenology outlines a new vector of relations between natural science and humanitarian knowledge.

scholarly journals Alfredas Schützas ir atviri fenomenologinės sociologijos horizontai: intersubjektyvumo konstitucija ir orientacija Tavęsp

2012 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 24-74
Author(s):  
Algimantas Valantiejus
Keyword(s):  
Social Theory ◽  
Social Action ◽  
Sociological Theory ◽  
Phenomenological Approach ◽  
Natural Attitude ◽  
Phenomenological Sociology ◽  
Sociological Inquiry ◽  
Alfred Schütz ◽  
Social Scientific ◽  
Subjective View

Santrauka. Šio straipsnio tikslas – eksplikuoti fenomenologinės sociologijos ir socialinių mokslų metodologijos tarpusavio ryšius, detalizuoti fenomenologo Alfredo Schutzo įnašą į sociologijos teoriją ir bendrąją socialinių mokslų metodologiją, identifikuoti konstitucinės natūraliosios nuostatos fenomenologijos skiriamuosius bruožus ir teminius analizės lygmenis, o kartu panagrinėti potencialias fenomenologinės sociologijos radimosi Lietuvos socialinių mokslų kultūroje sąlygas ir aplinkybes. Teigiama, kad svarstant šiuos klausimus svarbu atsižvelgti į trinarę analitinę perskyrą tarp filosofijos, sociologijos ir kultūros. Trinarė analitinė perskyra padeda suprasti Schutzo pastangas artikuliuoti gyvenimo-pasaulio tipizacijų, relevantiškumo ir prasmės adekvatumo kriterijus, leidžia griežčiau apibrėžti fenomenologinės socialinės teorijos radimosi, tiksliau, at-minimo sąlygas ir principus.Pagrindiniai žodžiai: konstitucinė natūraliosios nuostatos fenomenologija, Alfredas Schutzas, socialinė teorija, fenomenologija Lietuvoje, trys relevantiški socialinio veiksmo horizontai – filosofijos, sociologijos ir kultūros.Key words: a constitutive phenomenology of the natural attitude, Alfred Schutz, social theory, phenomenology in Lithuania, the three relevant horizons of social action: philosophy, sociology and culture. ABSTRACTALFRED SCHÜTZ AND THE OPEN HORIZONS OF PHENOMENOLOGICAL SOCIOLOGY: THE CONSTITUTION OF THE INTERSUBJECTIVE STRUCTURE, AND THE THOU-ORIENTATIONThe aim of this essay is to articulate and explicate the relations between sociological theory and the phenomenological approach. This is done in two parts: the first looks at Schutz’s attempts to articulate a constitutive phenomenology of the natural attitude; the second explicates the methodological postulates formulated by Schutz for the construction of social scientific constructs. It is suggested that the nature of the conventional sociological inquiry in Lithuania must be reconsidered if the subjective view of actor is to be retained as relevant to both philosophical and sociological inquiry.

8. Social Constructivism

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Jackson ◽  
Georg Sørensen
Keyword(s):  
Social Theory ◽  
Social Constructivism ◽  
International Political Economy ◽  
Research Programme ◽  
Social World ◽  
Constructivist Approach ◽  
European Cooperation ◽  
The Social ◽  
Important Approach ◽  
Social Constructivist Theory

This chapter examines the social constructivist theory of International Political Economy (IPE). It first discusses the rise of social constructivism and why it has established itself as an important approach in IR. It then considers constructivism as social theory, and more specifically as both a meta-theory about the nature of the social world and a substantial theory of IR. Several examples of constructivist IR theory are presented, followed by reflections on the strengths and weaknesses of the constructivist approach. The chapter proceeds by exploring constructivist theories of international relations, focusing on cultures of anarchy, norms of International Society, the power of international organizations, a constructivist approach to European cooperation, and domestic formation of identity and norms. The chapter concludes with an analysis of some of the major criticisms of constructivism and an overview of the constructivist research programme.

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