Some notes on Margaret Archer’s theorising of digital technology

There are four major strands in her work where this is addressed directly:

1. A micro-sociology of technology in Archer (2000) articulated through the lens of material culture, focusing on the subject/object relations within what she termed the practical order. The focus here was technology as such rather than digital technologies as a particular subset of this, but I suggest that there is much in this analysis which can be applied within digital sociology, even if there are limitations to it as well.  
2. A micro-sociology of artificial intelligence in her later papers, explored through a speculative scenario in which a scientist works in close collaboration with an AI system as a routine part of knowledge production. These papers raised as many questions as they provided answers, identifying core issues such as identity, relationality and friendship which seem remarkably prescient given the subsequent development of conversational agents like OpenAI’s ChatGPT which can respond to natural language queries in eerily rich and sophisticated ways. 
3. A macro-sociology of technological diffusion analysing the intersection between structural and cultural factors which shape how technological developments spread through and are taken up within the social world. This was particularly significant for the situational logic of opportunity articulated in the morphogenic society project, even if the initially optimistic assumptions became more ambivalent as the project progressed.  
4. A macro-sociology of the digitalisation of the archive. The notion of the cultural system has been central to Archer’s account since the 1980s, building on Popper’s notion of World 3: the objectified products of human minds (Archer 1988). Though it was not systematically elaborated, Archer recurrently invoked the notion of the universal library of humanity with an interest in how its digitalisation contributed to that universality.

There are a number of other points in her work where Archer addressed digital technology but these tended to be more marginal and less systematic. For example social media platforms were becoming mainstream during the later stages of the fieldwork for her reflexivity trilogy, leading to it featuring recurrently as a passing empirical object in a number of works. Her instinctive scepticism towards social media tended to highlight the constraints and obscure the enablements, but underlying cultural criticism which could at times seem overstated should not obscure the meaningful recognition of the structural significance of these developments. In a couple of later papers, Archer (2021, 2022) approvingly cited my own notion of ‘distracted people’ in this respect, which was itself a straight forward attempt to consider the causal powers of social media in terms of the capacities and liabilities of the Archerian subject (Carrigan 2024). This included the parallel argument I made in Carrigan (2019) that distracted people will tend to lead to fragile movements: movements which rely primarily on the affordances of social media for assembly will tend to lack the durability which otherwise characterises collective agents who have solved the problem of coordination.

There is some rich discussion in Archer (2007) in the case of Shirin concerning the role the internet played in her development. For example Archer (2012: 259) reports on the difficult context in which Shirin found herself prior to university in which “enforced isolation threw her back on her own meagre resources and encouraged her to use whatever opportunities were available”. Her step-mother left with her three step-brothers when she was ten, leaving an abusive father who held her responsible for the departure of his wife and sons. The internet was a lifeline for Shirin through which she found the knowledge necessary to escape from these increasingly oppressive circumstances, including the university bursaries which provided her with the eventual means to escape her natal context and leave it behind. In the categories of Archer (2012) Shirin is classed as a ‘rejector’ who, understandably given these circumstances, found nothing she could endorse in this environment and sough to escape from it. The internet was a mechanism through which she could identify opportunities which were not legible to her in these circumstances. As Archer puts it, “Shirin had confronted ‘contextual incongruity’ as the clash between life in a traditionalist ethnic ghetto and the opportunities proliferating in modern Britain, knowledge of which even infiltrated her bedroom through the internet” (2012: 260-261). It provided the knowledge which enabled her to form projects such as entering the civil service through the fast track, while doing nothing to provide her with the social and cultural capital necessary to leverage this knowledge in a practical life plan. In Shirin’s case it left her aware of the Oxbridge bias of the civil service fast track, leading her to apply for a summer placement which she failed to be awarded following her performance on psychometric tests (Archer 2012: 272). 

There is certainly a sense in which Shirin was empowered by this knowledge, enabling her to formulate life projects which might not otherwise have emerged from within her context. It also raised her awareness of structural constraints on her mobility and suggested potential means through which she might circumvent them. It did nothing to support her in enacting these projects, at least in this instance. This case study illustrates how the internet emerged for Archer (2012) as a feature of empirical investigation. In this case it was a mechanism through which knowledge was diffused, with implications for the development and exercise of reflexivity and the biographical trajectory which was the outgrowth of this. It captures the importance of the internet in facilitating access to what Archer (1988) called the cultural system and which she came came to call the ‘universal library’ in later work.

It is striking from the vantage point of the mid 2020s how the empirical manifestation of these developments is categorised as ‘the internet’. There is certainly an element of under-theorisation here, in the sense that a complex object susceptible to conceptual differentiation is treated as if it is a singular thing. Particularly from the perspective of digital sociology, as well as cognate disciplines and fields, it would be expected to specify exactly what software or services are enabling the diffusion of knowledge. The internet would be, at most, the field of possibility within which we consider the specific mechanisms through which knowledge is mediated, such as social media. This reflects Archer’s relative disinterest in these questions, with her engagement a response to how it emerged within fieldwork rather than featuring in the questions which motivated that research. However the role assigned to social media in Archer’s work also needs to be understood in terms of the timing of her empirical projects. The reflexivity trilogy consisted of three interconnected empirical projects: a pilot study reported in Archer (2003), a large empirical study in Coventry reported in Archer (2007) and a longitudinal study of university students reported in Archer (2012). The first wave of social media platforms emerged during the 2000s during this period of empirical research: LinkedIn (2003), Facebook (2004), YouTube (2005), Twitter (2006). However there was a considerable interlude before these became the dominant cultural forces which we recognise them as today, being joined by a second wave of platforms and a number which looked poised for dominance before falling by the wayside. 

At the time this fieldwork was being conducted (the late 2000s and early 2010s) social media was in the process of breaking out from university campuses into wider society. It was far from the contemporary level of penetration within UK society (as the context of this research) but it was in the process of becoming the mass phenomena we confront today, in which it is difficult to understand social and cultural dynamics without accounting for the impact of these platforms. It was in the process of becoming something which impinged on the life of everyone, even if they were non-users who rarely encountered the outgrowths of these platforms. 

It figures as an explicit object more frequently in her later work, usually as an aside pointing to sociocultural decline. For example Archer (2020) drew attention to the “quest for new friends’ which drove social media, as well as the decline in social integration which drove this impulse. The role of online profiles in mediating this quest expanded the performative register of identity, creating a relationship to the idealised self who would accumulate these online friends. She linked this to the account in Archer (2012) of expressive reflexivity, in which a possibly growing array of subjects limit their temporal horizon to the present tense, relying upon gut feelings rather than reflexive deliberation to make their way through the world. This meant foregoing the challenge of “designing a course of action; one that necessarily entails future time and the (fallible) understanding of how events and action are linked”. 

Earlier in this paper Archer (2020) draws attention to the time spent watching TV, alongside factors such as declining membership of parties and unions, suggesting a broader trend towards expanding passivity. What might otherwise be collective agents, individuals coming together through various means to pursue coordinated ends, instead unfurl into the growing ranks of primary agents defined by their involuntary social placement. Even if this is a loose sketch, constituting part of a much wider macro-sociological narrative produced in what was originally a keynote speech, it illustrates how Archer saw the influence of digital media through a multifactorial lens. It was not an element which in itself could drive large scale shifts but was rather tied up in these broader patterns of social and cultural change.

It was only in the process of preparing this chapter that I noticed a curious tension in how Archer treated the digital in her later work. There was a profound pessimism about the implications of digital platforms for human agency, particularly with reference to what she termed, following Frankfurt (1988), the ‘cultural wantons of the new millennium’ (Archer 2020). There is a fundamental passivity which social platforms generate in agents at both the individual and the collective level, which chips away at the hope we might have for agentive reengagement in a run away world. The enablements of social media rarely figure in these reflections, leaving a slightly bleak picture. I would suggest that Archer was a macro-sociological pessimist about digitalisation, at least when we consider the actually existing outcomes rather than the unrealised potential. This was particularly prominent in her later work which, given the direction of travel within the UK and wider world over the last decade, should perhaps be seen as unsurprising. 

If we want to understand the role of the digital within Archer’s thought, this pessimism needs to be placed into a dialogue with a more optimistic current we can find in her thought. Alongside this recognition of how digital technologies can undercut the capacities of subjects, there was also a belief, as she puts it in Archer (2017: 116) that “culture can digitally outdo structure”. The reason for this optimism was her ontological commitment that “culture is not, in kind, a scarce resource” and that it can only “be made so by the imposition of artificial controls (such as intellectual property rights, patents and restricted access)” (Archer 2017: 104). There is a tendency in how Archer (1988) treated culture to neglect the role of infrastructure in constituting such restrictions. Carrigan (2017) explores how the digitalised archive is still mediated in ways which shape and limit access to the contents within it, leaving a challenge for agents with regards to how to realise the latent potential of access to the archive. But her broader point still stands that (a) restrictions on access are structural phenomena extrinsic to culture itself (b) digitalisation leads to a precipitous drop in the viability of these restrictions. Even if there are reasons we might despair when faced with the contemporary landscape, such as the ubiquity of ‘fake news’ and the contribution it makes to the consolidation of reactionary populist movements, there is a reason for optimism in the deep structure of the transformation which is underway. Even if it was never an explicit object of inquiry for her, Archer was alive to the technological shifts in the cultural machinery. The possibilities opened up when the universal library of humankind, the heart of  her notion of the cultural system, went digital (Archer 2007).

There is certainly an apparent tension here between her pessimism when considering the digital on one level (personal reflexivity) and her optimism when considering the digital on another level (the cultural system). It could easily lead an uncharitable reader to impute incoherence, suggesting Archer was vacillating between conflicting reactions based on impressionistic characterisations of digital change. The reality I would argue is far more sophisticated, with Archer (2015) providing the missing link with its focus on the role of the double morphogenesis, the (re)grouping of corporate agency, as the explanation for how cultural possibility can co-exist with agentive decline.