Digital Media Sociology - Lecture 1

Flashcards based on the Digital Media Sociology Lecture 1 notes.

Sociology

Studies the social organization of society, including how people live together and the resulting opportunities and problems.

Media Sociology

How digital media affect the social organization of society.

Media Psychology

How media affect individual cognition, emotion, and behavior.

Social structure

The organized patterns of relationships and rules that govern how people interact and live together.

Culture

A shared set of beliefs, norms, behaviors, values, symbols, rituals, and attitudes.

Digital media sociology

Aims to reveal the often unnoticed impact of digital media on the social organization of society.

Giddens’ Structuration Theory

Structure and agency as mutually constitutive, where social structures enable and constrain human action, and individuals produce and reproduce social structure.

Social structures

Specify a way of 'doing things,' making it logical to organize things repeatedly and systematically in a certain manner.

There are

Also such ‘logics’ present in media technologies.

Apparatgeist

The 'spirit of the machine,' logics prescribed by technology that influence human behavior by providing a 'rationality of means' and 'constraint upon possibilities'.

Orlikowski’s (1992) Duality of Technology

Technology is the product of human action, while it also assumes structural properties.

Digital media

Technologies (devices, platforms, applications) that are connected to an underlying technological infrastructure that supports data transfer.

Technology variability

The extent to which they ‘afford’ something.

Technological affordances

Possibilities for action; they enable and constrain potential behavioral outcomes in a particular context.

Shape society at the micro-level by changing

Processes and routines in everyday life.

Macro level

By supporting social change that may alter or maintain the social/institutional order.