Section One: The Ontology of Agency 1. What does it mean to live in a digital age? 2. Personal Reflexivity and Social Change 3. The Realist Account of Reflexivity 4. Biography as an Ontological Category 5. Personal Morphogenesis Section Two: The Ontology of Platforms 6. Sociotechnical Transformation 7. Personal Reflexivity 8. Collective Reflexivity 9. Platformised Socialisation
Biography
Dr Mark Carrigan is Senior Lecturer in Education at the University of Manchester where he is co-lead of the Digital Education Manchester group. He jointly coordinates the Critical Realism Network and is council member of the International Association for Critical Realism and a trustee of the Centre for Critical Realism.
'With scholarly attention now focused on digital platforms, we find a reprise of the old structure-agency debate: To what extent are social effects due to the platforms and to what extent to what people do with them. From the beginning, Mark Carrigan has been a leading scholar helping us navigate our way through the digital age. Now with this important new book, he addresses a central question lurking in all the talk about platformization.'
Professor Douglas V. Porpora, Drexel University, USA.
'Social change, reshaping us and being reshaped by some of us, is even harder than usual to understand at the heart of a new "industrial revolution". This book offers a new sociological vantage point from within the eye of the storm. It starts from a reassessment of reflexivity, individual and collective, in human agency. It offers new insights into social processes, especially learning and socialization in a platform society, not just productivity and control. This sociotechnical perspective really helps understand the nature and scale of changes triggered today by the rise of pseudo-autonomous agents, generative AI algorithms included.'
Professor Emmanuel Lazega, Sciences Po, Paris.
