Book Themes
We have organized the book around five themes or conversations. Each theme includes an introductory essay by us as well as original readings from classical and contemporary theorists. The essays include vignettes on topics ranging from covid-19 and social networking sites to the global financial crisis and the digital divide, as well as overviews of key concepts and ideas found in the readings.
Emergence Through Convergence
The covid-19 pandemic and your classroom can help us see how social order is both a product of our own making and something much more powerful than the sum of its parts. In this section, we move from the social facts of Durkheim to more contemporary takes on how people and societies maintain a sense of social order--and what happens when that order falls apart.
Networks of Capital
Video game company stock trading, Pokemon Go, and the emergence of an increasingly vibrant labor movement can help us understand how economies are all about the relationships that go into defining and producing what’s valuable. In this section, Marx sets the stage for a lively discussion on the role the economy plays in our global age. Wallerstein and Robinson then explain how global capitalism maintains power and wealth for some groups through the exploitation of others, while Bourdieu expands our understanding of capital and the maintenance of inequality beyond material wealth. Ray and Qayum and Zuboff then examine evolving contemporary in-person and online forms of exploitation.
Pathway to Meltdown
New technologies built around the internet promise progress, freedom, and the spreading of knowledge. But as invasive online advertising, social media misinformation, and digitally-spread hate reveal, there are downsides to new technologies. In this section, we’ll examine a concept that’s at the heart of technological development--instrumental rationality--and its consequences for society. From the pious Puritans of Weber, to the one-dimensional men of the Frankfurt school, to Bauman’s study of the Holocaust, to Graeber’s critique of capitalist bureaucratic triviality, we’ll explore the promises and pitfalls of a rationalized, modern society.
Shifting the Paradigm
As the internet was becoming widespread, popular wisdom--spurred on by some media theorists--suggested that it would provide a platform for egalitarian, democratic communication and knowledge production. But as the scholars in the previous section show, new technology isn’t in itself a solution to deep social problems; in fact, it can even reproduce them. In this section, we’ll read scholars who’re interested in understanding the world from the perspective of those whose views and experiences are often minimized, both on and offline. The section starts with classical readings from Du Bois on what it feels like to be black in the US and de Beauvoir on the patriarchy that’s built deeply into our society, culture, and even language. Then the section expands to examine post-colonial voices in Franon, Said, and Go and intersectional feminist voices in Smith, Hill Collins, and Benjamin. The big theme of this section is that to truly understand the social world, we must listen to the voices of those whom society often marginalizes and ignores.
Rise of the Avatar
Our social media profiles provide glimpses into the collective foundations of our individual selves; in fact, they highlight the inherently social nature of self. In this section, we’ll examine the socially shaped self, starting with Mead and Simmel, whose approaches provide a foundation for subsequent scholarship on the self. Then we’ll read Goffman and Butler’s theories on how people present their selves, and Hall’s, Giddens’, and Turkle’s writing on the construction and maintenance of selves in our modern world.