SAMENVATTING DIGITAL MEDIA SOCIOLOGY 2024-2025
LECTURE 1: INTRODUCTION
- What did you do the past hour: check socials, show pictures, check location of lecture,…
➔ This course: this was not always the case
- Picture ‘the matrix’ → popular movie → the way
they visualized fights etc. AND movie fitted good in
frame of the millennials about what the internet
would do to us → ‘is life on the internet real?’
→ Now also with AI and its generated
video’s/pictures/… → ‘is this real?’
Picture of the professor when she was in her 20s → didn’t have a phone, new technologies entered the
world → all questions that we won’t have to ask ourselves
➔ Now reality has changed: it has changed every aspect of our daily lives (how we work, how we
meet, how relationships go,…)
TAKEN-FOR-GRANTEDNESS – RICH LING 2012
= this is what it means when we believe some there are things we ca always count on such as always
contacting family and friends, always checking our socials,…
SOCIOLOGY
Sociology studies the social organization of society
- How do people live together?
- What opportunities and problems arise from this?
Questions revolve mainly around:
1) Social order (and social cohesion) = the rules that govern how we do things vb.: particular
ways of education, being on time,…
2) Leads to social Inequality, in a material and symbolic sense = POWER → privileges that
come with a certain social order
3) Identity, as a group and as individual = how do we give meaning to life
→ Psychology: Individual cognition, emotion, behavior
,A DIGITAL MEDIA SOCIETY
How do digital media…
… are implicated in ‘the way we do things’ (social order)?
… disrupt or reproduce power? (social inequality)?
… shape the meaning of things (identity)?
- Micro-level: Changes in our everyday practices
- Macro-level: Changes to our societal institutions
MEDIA SOCIOLOGY VS. MEDIA PSYCHOLOGY
- media sociology studies how media affect the social organization of society
- media psychology how media affect individual cognition, emotion and behavior
- media studies study the media industry and how it delivers messages to audiences
Example: what are reasons that explain how tv viewing lead to child obesity epidemic?
- Sociology: woman entered the working floor → kinds home alone → they eat more sweets and
watch more tv
- Media Psychology: tv makes children addictive because of the design of tv programs
Communication Science is inherently inter-disciplinary
Example micro-level: food ordering on digital platforms → what could sociological question be?
- We could look at the group of people who do delivery and how their everyday live looks like
- Ask how family dynamics changes when they order take-out → does it decrease family
communication?
- Questions about how people cook less that they did before
Example macro-level: food ordering on digital platforms → what could sociological question be?
- Workers have work circumstances that are not always great → look at two pictures: one is an
advertisement and the other just a picture
➔ First picture looks very positive but in reality not the same
SOCIAL STRUCTURE & SOCIAL POSITIONS AND SOCIAL ROLES
Social structure = the organized patterns of relationships rules and ‘rule arrangements’ that govern how
people interact and live together
➔ ! Organized ≠ ‘formal’
, - Arrangements of rules into established systems → social institutions
- Arrangements of relationships/interactions → social positions
Example food delivery culture:
- This economy works by its own rules → some of those rules are explicit, not all implicit
Example: food-drivers who are ‘self-employed’ → in reality not so well protected and only few
rights
- Platform Economy as an emerging social institution:
o Social Position: self-employed or employee?
o Social identity: Brand ambassadors or algorithmic slaves?
People have specific social positions (parent-child-teacher) In different social institutions (example:
school) → bound together by rule arrangement (rules different for parent than child)
SOCIAL STRUCTURE & CULTURE
Culture = a shared set of beliefs, norms, behaviors, values, symbols, rituals, attitudes, …
Culture and social structure are linked:
➔ values and beliefs are forces that shape social order
➔ norms are expectations of how one should behave
➔ patterns of behavior normatively expected for certain social positions are social roles
➔ rituals are habitualized behaviors and objects that are symbolic/carry meaning (and thus value)
COURSE INFORMATION → ZIE POWERPOINT
SOCIAL STRUCTURE: WHY DO WE DO THE THINGS WE DO?
DOING THINGS A CERTAIN WAY: SOCIAL STRUCTURE AS A SET OF ‘LOGICS’
= Our everyday practices, i.e., the ways in which we typically ‘do things’, reflect the relationship between
individuals and the social order.
Example: traffic lights (red-orange-green) → we follow these rules
- Social order concerns the ‘rules’ that order society
- individuals, through their practices, obey or disobey these rules, thus reproducing the
social order or challenging it
- practices are thus inherently relational (= social), persistent/durable (= historical), and
cultural (= contextual)
,Practices that we all engage in are the practices that remain us to the social order
Example: every time we stop in front of red light → we acknowledge this social structure
➔ Not something bad: we need rules → without rules the world would be total chaos
- Social structures are often taken-for-granted → we need to look what impact these have on our
daily live
- Social change occurs when individuals
successfully and collectively produce a
new social order
! We can actually change the social structure if
enough people consistently for a long duration of
time start following new rules
Example: olifantenpaadje: although the social
structure is very clear you see that people don’t
follow the rules → they take the shortcut → and so
a new path forms ‘the elephant trail’
GIDDENS’ STRUCTURATION THEORY (1984)
Duality of structure: structure and agency as mutually constitutive
Social structures: enable and constrain human action (provides rules and resources for meaningful
action)
Agency: Individuals produce and reproduce social structure.
They are knowledgeable, rational actors with:
1) the capacity for ‘reflexivity’: a capacity to reflect on the social structure and their role as
reproducing agent in it, and
2) the capacity to act ‘intentionally rational’ : to modify their behavior in line with certain goals that
they can reasonably justify as being worthy of pursuit.
Social structure doesn’t exist without agency and the other way around!
- Solved the conundrum
- Some theories where very deterministic and other theories were very voluntary
- Giddens = realist (measurable)
- Giddenses = people who keep social structure alive, who make this social structure
→people have the capacity to reflect (are knowledgeable and rational) on the world and make
actions to steer their behavior to do things that are rationally worth it
,Example: mr. Harry Styles who wears a dress in Vogue → easier to do when your Harry than a normal boy
in West-Vlaanderen
➔ Has to do with more privilege and power
Example: Hollywood director who became known because he sexually abused a lot of woman → had
been going on for so long and many people knew → still he could commit to this behavior
➔ Has to do with power
Example: Me-too movement that started especially online → gave the thoughts that social structure
started to change → but now with Trump-situation, powerful man who SA woman etc we don’t know any
more → it takes a long time before something big like this changes
The ‘duality’ between structure and agency is an interplay that oftentimes reveals how power is
distributed and negotiated in society
WHY IS THIS ALL RELEVANT FOR THIS COURSE?
- Social structures are prescriptive: they specify a way of ‘doing things’ (Giddens, 1984) – in other
words: they make it logical to organize things repeatedly and systematically in a certain manner
➔ Structure describes how to do things
- There are also such ‘logics’ present in media technologies:
- ‘Apparatgeist: the “spirit of the machine” (Katz & Aakhus, 2002, p. 305):
- There are logics prescribed by the technology that directs human behavior – not in a
deterministic way, but rather by providing humans with both a rationality of means and constraint
upon possibilities
➔ We can say the same about technology → maybe there is something the same in here that
makes them do things they do → they also have social structures: ‘spirit of
technology/machine’ → principles that are inherited
DUALITY OF TECHNOLOGY
ORLIKOWSKI’S (1992) DUALITY OF TECHNOLOGY
, - She builds duality of technology framework that integrated technology as medium of human
action
- Two arrows between human agents and technology are also in interaction with institutional
properties
EXAMPLE: THE HISTORY OF SMS
Arrow A: insignificant byproduct of mobile telephony
humans make technology: sms invented on the brickphone (came after the pager) → the idea was that
telecom providers could send really instrumental texts to the customers/owners
Arrow B: ‘free’ communication
teenagers found out that you could send text messages to each other for free → this was free because the
developers never thought about this communication channel (they only thought calling would be the shit
not texting)
Arrow D: massive success leads to development tariff plans
Arrow C: 140 chars limit + paid-for contribute to particular practices of communication, sms-language, …
Arrow A: keyboard phone facilitates typing
Arrow B: people start sending multimedia
…
,THE STRUCTURES OF DIGITAL MEDIA: TECHNOLOGICAL AFFORDANCES
WHAT STRUCTURES ARE THERE IN TECHNOLOGY THAT MAKE IT LOGIC-AL TO DO THINGS IN A
PARTICULAR WAY?
digital media
Technologies (devices, platforms, applications) that
are connected (wired or wireless) to an underlying
technological infrastructure that supports data
transfer, and can be used to access, consume, create
and exchange information and/or communication.
Focus on the everyday life (smartphones, computers,
mobile and social media, …), and how digitization has
made it logical to do things a certain way.
HOUSTON, WE HAVE A PROBLEM (OR RATHER, THREE)
DIGITAL MEDIA LANDSCAPE CONSTANTLY WELCOMES NEW TECHNOLOGIES…
MOVING TARGET PROBLEM: TECHNOLOGIES THAT PERSIST ARE CONSTANTLY UPDATED
A TECHNOLOGY IS MORE THAN THE SUM OF ITS SEPARATE FEATURES…
Example: snapchat and Instagram: Almost the same features, but VERY different ‘Apparatgeist’
A FUNCTIONAL VIEW: TECHNOLOGICAL AFFORDANCES
Affordances are “possibilities for action”
Affordances structure: They enable and constrain potential behavioral outcomes in a particular context
! dominant affordance = apparatgeist
Example:
Snapchat: one-to-one, short-term, uglier/sillier pictures
Instagram: one-to-many, long-term, prettier pictures
➔ One affordance can have a lot of implications
, TECHNOLOGICAL AFFORDANCES
Technology structures (through its affordances)… and is structured through human agency
Affordances are:
- Relational (perceived depending on abilities/attributes of users)
- Contextual (contexts of use)
- Designed (to be readily perceived)
- Important: often misused, used as synonym of features
- !!! know the difference between a feature and an affordance
THE AFFORDANCES CHECKLIST
Criteria #1: neither the object nor a feature of the object
“the relationship between person and object means that “affordances neither belong to the environment
nor the individual, but rather to the relationship between individuals and their perceptions of
environments” (Parchoma, 2014, p. 361).
Criteria #2: not the outcome
Criteria #3: has variability: A feature is present or absent, but an affordance is gradual (technologies can
vary in the extent to which they ‘afford’ something)
Sooo: To be an affordance:
1) Affordance can’t be the feature (camera of phone is a feature, because of this feature you have
affordances such as recordability)
2) Affordance is not the outcome (affordances remain recordable: outcome = video so not the
affordance)
3) Affordance has variability (a lot of variation of recordability)
Example: scrollability
1) it’s not a feature: but there are features needed
2) it’s not the outcome: many different outcomes
3) variability:
➔ scrollability = affordance
! Affordances remains a fuzzy concept, that is often misused… you may notice this when processing
literature on digital culture (perhaps also the literature for this course)…
LECTURE 1: INTRODUCTION
- What did you do the past hour: check socials, show pictures, check location of lecture,…
➔ This course: this was not always the case
- Picture ‘the matrix’ → popular movie → the way
they visualized fights etc. AND movie fitted good in
frame of the millennials about what the internet
would do to us → ‘is life on the internet real?’
→ Now also with AI and its generated
video’s/pictures/… → ‘is this real?’
Picture of the professor when she was in her 20s → didn’t have a phone, new technologies entered the
world → all questions that we won’t have to ask ourselves
➔ Now reality has changed: it has changed every aspect of our daily lives (how we work, how we
meet, how relationships go,…)
TAKEN-FOR-GRANTEDNESS – RICH LING 2012
= this is what it means when we believe some there are things we ca always count on such as always
contacting family and friends, always checking our socials,…
SOCIOLOGY
Sociology studies the social organization of society
- How do people live together?
- What opportunities and problems arise from this?
Questions revolve mainly around:
1) Social order (and social cohesion) = the rules that govern how we do things vb.: particular
ways of education, being on time,…
2) Leads to social Inequality, in a material and symbolic sense = POWER → privileges that
come with a certain social order
3) Identity, as a group and as individual = how do we give meaning to life
→ Psychology: Individual cognition, emotion, behavior
,A DIGITAL MEDIA SOCIETY
How do digital media…
… are implicated in ‘the way we do things’ (social order)?
… disrupt or reproduce power? (social inequality)?
… shape the meaning of things (identity)?
- Micro-level: Changes in our everyday practices
- Macro-level: Changes to our societal institutions
MEDIA SOCIOLOGY VS. MEDIA PSYCHOLOGY
- media sociology studies how media affect the social organization of society
- media psychology how media affect individual cognition, emotion and behavior
- media studies study the media industry and how it delivers messages to audiences
Example: what are reasons that explain how tv viewing lead to child obesity epidemic?
- Sociology: woman entered the working floor → kinds home alone → they eat more sweets and
watch more tv
- Media Psychology: tv makes children addictive because of the design of tv programs
Communication Science is inherently inter-disciplinary
Example micro-level: food ordering on digital platforms → what could sociological question be?
- We could look at the group of people who do delivery and how their everyday live looks like
- Ask how family dynamics changes when they order take-out → does it decrease family
communication?
- Questions about how people cook less that they did before
Example macro-level: food ordering on digital platforms → what could sociological question be?
- Workers have work circumstances that are not always great → look at two pictures: one is an
advertisement and the other just a picture
➔ First picture looks very positive but in reality not the same
SOCIAL STRUCTURE & SOCIAL POSITIONS AND SOCIAL ROLES
Social structure = the organized patterns of relationships rules and ‘rule arrangements’ that govern how
people interact and live together
➔ ! Organized ≠ ‘formal’
, - Arrangements of rules into established systems → social institutions
- Arrangements of relationships/interactions → social positions
Example food delivery culture:
- This economy works by its own rules → some of those rules are explicit, not all implicit
Example: food-drivers who are ‘self-employed’ → in reality not so well protected and only few
rights
- Platform Economy as an emerging social institution:
o Social Position: self-employed or employee?
o Social identity: Brand ambassadors or algorithmic slaves?
People have specific social positions (parent-child-teacher) In different social institutions (example:
school) → bound together by rule arrangement (rules different for parent than child)
SOCIAL STRUCTURE & CULTURE
Culture = a shared set of beliefs, norms, behaviors, values, symbols, rituals, attitudes, …
Culture and social structure are linked:
➔ values and beliefs are forces that shape social order
➔ norms are expectations of how one should behave
➔ patterns of behavior normatively expected for certain social positions are social roles
➔ rituals are habitualized behaviors and objects that are symbolic/carry meaning (and thus value)
COURSE INFORMATION → ZIE POWERPOINT
SOCIAL STRUCTURE: WHY DO WE DO THE THINGS WE DO?
DOING THINGS A CERTAIN WAY: SOCIAL STRUCTURE AS A SET OF ‘LOGICS’
= Our everyday practices, i.e., the ways in which we typically ‘do things’, reflect the relationship between
individuals and the social order.
Example: traffic lights (red-orange-green) → we follow these rules
- Social order concerns the ‘rules’ that order society
- individuals, through their practices, obey or disobey these rules, thus reproducing the
social order or challenging it
- practices are thus inherently relational (= social), persistent/durable (= historical), and
cultural (= contextual)
,Practices that we all engage in are the practices that remain us to the social order
Example: every time we stop in front of red light → we acknowledge this social structure
➔ Not something bad: we need rules → without rules the world would be total chaos
- Social structures are often taken-for-granted → we need to look what impact these have on our
daily live
- Social change occurs when individuals
successfully and collectively produce a
new social order
! We can actually change the social structure if
enough people consistently for a long duration of
time start following new rules
Example: olifantenpaadje: although the social
structure is very clear you see that people don’t
follow the rules → they take the shortcut → and so
a new path forms ‘the elephant trail’
GIDDENS’ STRUCTURATION THEORY (1984)
Duality of structure: structure and agency as mutually constitutive
Social structures: enable and constrain human action (provides rules and resources for meaningful
action)
Agency: Individuals produce and reproduce social structure.
They are knowledgeable, rational actors with:
1) the capacity for ‘reflexivity’: a capacity to reflect on the social structure and their role as
reproducing agent in it, and
2) the capacity to act ‘intentionally rational’ : to modify their behavior in line with certain goals that
they can reasonably justify as being worthy of pursuit.
Social structure doesn’t exist without agency and the other way around!
- Solved the conundrum
- Some theories where very deterministic and other theories were very voluntary
- Giddens = realist (measurable)
- Giddenses = people who keep social structure alive, who make this social structure
→people have the capacity to reflect (are knowledgeable and rational) on the world and make
actions to steer their behavior to do things that are rationally worth it
,Example: mr. Harry Styles who wears a dress in Vogue → easier to do when your Harry than a normal boy
in West-Vlaanderen
➔ Has to do with more privilege and power
Example: Hollywood director who became known because he sexually abused a lot of woman → had
been going on for so long and many people knew → still he could commit to this behavior
➔ Has to do with power
Example: Me-too movement that started especially online → gave the thoughts that social structure
started to change → but now with Trump-situation, powerful man who SA woman etc we don’t know any
more → it takes a long time before something big like this changes
The ‘duality’ between structure and agency is an interplay that oftentimes reveals how power is
distributed and negotiated in society
WHY IS THIS ALL RELEVANT FOR THIS COURSE?
- Social structures are prescriptive: they specify a way of ‘doing things’ (Giddens, 1984) – in other
words: they make it logical to organize things repeatedly and systematically in a certain manner
➔ Structure describes how to do things
- There are also such ‘logics’ present in media technologies:
- ‘Apparatgeist: the “spirit of the machine” (Katz & Aakhus, 2002, p. 305):
- There are logics prescribed by the technology that directs human behavior – not in a
deterministic way, but rather by providing humans with both a rationality of means and constraint
upon possibilities
➔ We can say the same about technology → maybe there is something the same in here that
makes them do things they do → they also have social structures: ‘spirit of
technology/machine’ → principles that are inherited
DUALITY OF TECHNOLOGY
ORLIKOWSKI’S (1992) DUALITY OF TECHNOLOGY
, - She builds duality of technology framework that integrated technology as medium of human
action
- Two arrows between human agents and technology are also in interaction with institutional
properties
EXAMPLE: THE HISTORY OF SMS
Arrow A: insignificant byproduct of mobile telephony
humans make technology: sms invented on the brickphone (came after the pager) → the idea was that
telecom providers could send really instrumental texts to the customers/owners
Arrow B: ‘free’ communication
teenagers found out that you could send text messages to each other for free → this was free because the
developers never thought about this communication channel (they only thought calling would be the shit
not texting)
Arrow D: massive success leads to development tariff plans
Arrow C: 140 chars limit + paid-for contribute to particular practices of communication, sms-language, …
Arrow A: keyboard phone facilitates typing
Arrow B: people start sending multimedia
…
,THE STRUCTURES OF DIGITAL MEDIA: TECHNOLOGICAL AFFORDANCES
WHAT STRUCTURES ARE THERE IN TECHNOLOGY THAT MAKE IT LOGIC-AL TO DO THINGS IN A
PARTICULAR WAY?
digital media
Technologies (devices, platforms, applications) that
are connected (wired or wireless) to an underlying
technological infrastructure that supports data
transfer, and can be used to access, consume, create
and exchange information and/or communication.
Focus on the everyday life (smartphones, computers,
mobile and social media, …), and how digitization has
made it logical to do things a certain way.
HOUSTON, WE HAVE A PROBLEM (OR RATHER, THREE)
DIGITAL MEDIA LANDSCAPE CONSTANTLY WELCOMES NEW TECHNOLOGIES…
MOVING TARGET PROBLEM: TECHNOLOGIES THAT PERSIST ARE CONSTANTLY UPDATED
A TECHNOLOGY IS MORE THAN THE SUM OF ITS SEPARATE FEATURES…
Example: snapchat and Instagram: Almost the same features, but VERY different ‘Apparatgeist’
A FUNCTIONAL VIEW: TECHNOLOGICAL AFFORDANCES
Affordances are “possibilities for action”
Affordances structure: They enable and constrain potential behavioral outcomes in a particular context
! dominant affordance = apparatgeist
Example:
Snapchat: one-to-one, short-term, uglier/sillier pictures
Instagram: one-to-many, long-term, prettier pictures
➔ One affordance can have a lot of implications
, TECHNOLOGICAL AFFORDANCES
Technology structures (through its affordances)… and is structured through human agency
Affordances are:
- Relational (perceived depending on abilities/attributes of users)
- Contextual (contexts of use)
- Designed (to be readily perceived)
- Important: often misused, used as synonym of features
- !!! know the difference between a feature and an affordance
THE AFFORDANCES CHECKLIST
Criteria #1: neither the object nor a feature of the object
“the relationship between person and object means that “affordances neither belong to the environment
nor the individual, but rather to the relationship between individuals and their perceptions of
environments” (Parchoma, 2014, p. 361).
Criteria #2: not the outcome
Criteria #3: has variability: A feature is present or absent, but an affordance is gradual (technologies can
vary in the extent to which they ‘afford’ something)
Sooo: To be an affordance:
1) Affordance can’t be the feature (camera of phone is a feature, because of this feature you have
affordances such as recordability)
2) Affordance is not the outcome (affordances remain recordable: outcome = video so not the
affordance)
3) Affordance has variability (a lot of variation of recordability)
Example: scrollability
1) it’s not a feature: but there are features needed
2) it’s not the outcome: many different outcomes
3) variability:
➔ scrollability = affordance
! Affordances remains a fuzzy concept, that is often misused… you may notice this when processing
literature on digital culture (perhaps also the literature for this course)…
