Digital Pornography and Everyday Life

No longer is the pornographic landscape restrictive, hidden, and controllable by conventional moral and regulatory frameworks. Instead, digital pornography is both hyperaccessible and hypersexualized, occupying an estimated 4%–20% of all digital media. The digital data generated through online interactions with this massive amount of content has opened new windows into an industry that has radically reshaped sexual practices and sexual health yet itself operates in the shadows of algorithms and bots. Sociology, as a critical social science, has little to say about the material realities of this ubiquitous sexual script, ceding important intellectual ground to medical/psychological sciences and cultural studies. Understanding the techno-economic structure of the digital pornography industry and its impact on sexuality requires a rethinking of conventional theoretical and empirical approaches, which I argue should be led by digital sociology. Digital sociology is a critical approach to studying the digital environment that focuses on ways in which digital media (re)produce institutions, structures, and systems of inequality as well as (re)shape human relationships and personal identities. Focusing on the production, distribution, and consumption of digital pornography using new forms of digital data would represent a paradigm adjustment to typical approaches the who, what, when, and where of pornography as well as the impact of types of content across particularized groups. Given that digital pornography is now the dominant normative framework for sexuality for adolescents and adults alike, it is essential that sociology re-engage with the material and structural realities of this powerful form of sexual education.

Digital War

Digital war is an elusive concept that invokes imaginaries of bloodless and fully virtual battles happening somewhere on a computer screen. Yet, the suffering and devastation brought about by armed conflicts around the world remains a harrowing constant. Digital technologies do not simply offer new capabilities in conducting military operations: extending the battlefronts into the realms of communication and perception, they reconstitute the social conditions shaping people’s relationship to wars. Blurring the boundaries between military and civilian actors, physical and mediated battlefronts, weapons and witnesses, digital media afford unprecedented opportunities for remote participation in wars. Sociologists are uniquely positioned to foreground the emerging participatory patterns in military conflicts, attending to the higher-order social transformations that challenge and transform present-day wars. This chapter begins by putting sociological traditions of studying wars in a dialogue with media studies literature, demonstrating how an understanding of digital media can inform social theory around contemporary conflicts. Next, I conceptualize digital war as a field of inquiry, mapping its emerging themes, objects of analysis, and interdisciplinary connections. The chapter concludes with an epistemological framework for making sense of emerging participatory patterns and their significance for the participants, as well as for the larger institutions on behalf of which wars are fought.

The Digital Production Gap in the Algorithmic Era

As the volume of digital content continues to grow exponentially, whose voices dominate online becomes more salient. Democracy is at stake in the competition for an audience in the online commons. Digital technology was supposed to overcome the media dominance of the elite with a broader array of voices, but social class is one of the most reliable predictors of digital content production, interacting with both racialized and gendered inequalities. Yet analyzing this form of digital inequality requires a theoretical framework of who controls the digital means of production, not simply a linear model of bridging the gap with more access or skills. This chapter examines digital power relations by tracing the history of online content production inequalities over time, showing how the increasing grip by the ruling class, corporations, and governments – in the wake of algorithms and artificial intelligence – makes it increasingly difficult for everyday people to be heard online. While most marginalized communities never got a fair shot because of constraints over resources in the early and more open web, in the algorithmic era this is even more of an uphill battle. The grip that platforms and their owners have over content creation—and especially distribution—makes it vital to theorize this broader concept of the digital means of production.

Detect, Document, and Debunk

The study of disinformation and media manipulation has expanded greatly since 2016, leading to thousands of news stories and academic studies. As an interdisciplinary field, it has attracted a wide variety of scholars using multiple methods and theories to understand how communication technologies shape politics and society, including how hoaxes, lies, scams, and strategic misinformation reach millions in an instant. However, because of the diversity of approaches and lines of inquiry, it is not an easy area of study to grasp at first glance. What’s more, the concerns, be they medical misinformation or foreign influence operations, are sociotechnical in nature—meaning they are the product of both sociocultural and technological conditions that cannot be separated from one another. The stakes could not be higher, as the world witnessed how disinformation was a core mobilizing factor in the genocide in Myanmar and the siege on the US Capitol. Yet strategies to counter the harms of media manipulation and disinformation require rigorous and nuanced research drawing from ethnography to data science. This chapter therefore aims to make sense of misinformation research as an expanding subdomain of critical internet studies, offering an overview of the methods and theories of inquiry, current research and findings, and paths forward for future research.

Fans and Fan Activism

Fan communities have been actively celebrating popular culture like the Harry Potter books and films, the music and fashion of Beyoncé, Korean pop sensation BTS, and the Star Wars media empire, as well as nearly every professional sports team for decades; and research on fans and fan communities has grown alongside them. The proliferation of internet and social media access has made fandom even more prominent. This chapter summarizes and synthesizes existing fandom research while highlighting how digital media have influenced fandom. First, it argues that fandom is best conceptualized as an ideal type organized around consumption, knowledge, engagement, community, identity, and emotional connection and that the internet has made each element more accessible. It then describes how fandom research has demonstrated that—as subcultures—fan communities can replicate and enact many of the same class, gender, and race inequities seen in broader society, although not identically. These inequities are evident in how society responds to different fandoms as well as fans’ experiences within their communities. Finally, it summarizes the growing literature on how fan communities have been mobilized for pro-social and activist behavior. These fan activists are adept at such behavior because they have tapped into the skills and knowledge they developed through their fandom, their proximity to mass cultural events like book and movie releases, and their communities’ potential as a source of bloc recruitment. In sum, fan communities are an important site of community and identity and an important subject of analysis in an increasingly digitized world.

Video Games and Identity Formation in Contemporary Society

The irruption and broad adoption of digital technologies such as video games are reshaping individuals and affecting fundamental aspects of their symbolic and material configuration such as their identity, gaze, body, and agency. This chapter focuses on what video gamers’ identities tell us about the contemporary processes of identity formation. Drawing on social theorists who have approached the crisis of identity in contemporary society, the chapter sets out a theoretical framework that describes the shift in the identity construction models from those based on solid and permanent identities to those centered around fluid and fragmented ones. The text then explores the most relevant empirical research on gaming and identity, linking it to the main debates on the subject. Not only do video games express the fluid, contingent, and volatile nature of identity in today’s world; they also anticipate social settings in which the very notion of identity is under scrutiny.

Technology, Labor, and the Gig Economy

This chapter examines the interconnections between technology, labor, and the gig economy. It starts by analyzing the changing context of work, connecting contemporary changes to a historical context. This draws out the ongoing undermining of the employment relationship alongside neoliberal reforms and policies. The chapter then examines the organizational form of platforms, the specific preconditions that shape their implementation, and the overlaps this has with the gig economy. In particular, it focuses on the emergence of two new models of platform work: geographically tethered work like transport and online forms of cloudwork. The chapter concludes by reflecting on the implications of platforms for understanding the changes to work, as well as charting potential new areas for research.

Folding and Friction

The internet of things (IoT)—the embedding of networked computing into the material world around us—seeks to reshape our everyday lives. To address the IoT is to address the material interface between the global digital networks of the twenty-first-century economy and the mundane doings, affects, and experiences which occupy the great majority of our existence. Taking domestic IoT, the so-called smart home, as a focus, the author argues that the IoT is more than simply an intensification of existing trends, the ongoing extension of computing connectivity which has already jumped from desktop to laptop to smartphone. In breaking out of the constraints of any single personal device, no matter how mobile, the IoT not only further dissolves the spatial and temporal distance between different social domains but also profoundly implicates social life within those domains, between the members of the setting. The IoT is constitutionally social in a way in which no type of social media is. The chapter provides a consideration of the political economy at play in the smart home, before addressing everyday life and the IoT in terms of information management, control, domestic labor, and resistance. In concluding, two key features of the IoT are highlighted: world folding, whereby incommensurate social domains are layered through one another with often problematic—even absurd—results and its misconceived efforts to erase the social frictions of everyday life, which fails to recognize that it is in these frictions that so much of what is socially valuable resides.

Electronic Waste and Environmental Justice

This chapter offers a review of the interdisciplinary literatures on electronic waste (e-waste) from an environmental justice perspective. Specifically, the author explores how e-waste reflects dynamic changes in the ways that the materiality of digital media intersects with ecological concerns and social inequalities. The author draws on several examples of e-waste production, reuse, recycling, and export around the globe as illustrations of these tensions. The author also discusses the ways that grassroots social movements and policy makers have responded to this crisis. Finally, the chapter considers a number of debates about the changing character of environmental justice struggles in the e-waste industry and workplaces.

Facework on Social Media in China

With more social interactions shifting to online venues, the different attributes of major social media sites in China influence how interpersonal interactions are carried out. Despite the lack of physical co-presence online, face culture is extended to online spaces. On social media, Chinese users tend to protect their own face, give face to others, and avoid discrediting the face of others, especially when their online and offline networks overlap. This chapter also discusses the different methods used to study facework online and offline and how facework is studied in different parts of the world. It concludes with a brief discussion of how sociological research has contributed to the study of social media in China and directions for future research.