1st Edition
Social Life and Political Life in the Era of Digital Media Higher Diversities
Prologue: Power Void
Introduction: That’s ‘Life’
Part I Conflations of Social Life and Political Life in the Digital Era
1. Deleuze: Societies of Control and the Ordering Effects of ‘Modulation’
2. Andrejevic: Infoglut and the Internalization of Desire for Control
3. Latour: The ‘Parliament of Things’
Part II Strategies of Critique of Conflationism
4. The Causal-Action Focus of Traditional Social Science
5. The Problem of Modernist Ontologies of Activity
6. Higher Diversities: A Tardian Critique of Emergent Relations
Part III The Consequences of Higher Diversities for Contemporary Social and Political Life
7. Simultaneity: The Impositions of Experience
8. Political Life in the Era of Social Life
9. Experiences of Closedness
Epilogue: Complexions of the Generalized Public
Biography
David Toews received his PhD in Philosophy from the University of Warwick. An award-winning teacher and major grant recipient from the Social Sciences and Humanities Council of Canada (SSHRC) in the area of Sociology, he has been a faculty member in several universities and has published articles in such journals as Theory, Culture and Society and the European Journal of Social Theory.
"A central achievement of this book is to insist that, instead of rushing to analyze the surface effects of digital media, it is crucial first to contemplate the relationship between social life and political life. Toews masterfully scrutinizes this relationship by reinvigorating classical sociological thinkers such as Bergson, Simmel, and Tarde, and bringing them into dialogue with present-day theory and concerns. The result is a significant contribution to social theory."
Christian Borch, Copenhagen Business School, Denmark.
"Employing an original relationalist interpretation of such thinkers as G. Deleuze and G. Tarde, David Toews discusses the effects of new social media on relations in a world characterized by social inequalities and new political phenomena like Trump’s presidency. Anybody interested by the metamorphoses of this world and social theories should read this text written by a skilled sociologist."
Francois Dépelteau, Laurentian University, Canada.
"Digital media have transformed social and political life. Everyone is aware of this, but few have tried to understand this transformation in such a profound way as David Toews in this book. Avoiding the common practices of facile praise or condemnation, Toews mobilizes resources from the sociological tradition to provide a nuanced analysis of our new time."
Peter Wagner, Catalan Institute for Research and Advanced Studies (ICREA) and University of Barcelona, Spain.
