The first chapter is available on Google Books here. Unfortunately the book is going to be expensive in print (though an eBook is available) so let me know if you have trouble accessing it and I’ll do my best to help.
Here’s the introduction to the book:
We live in a digital age. That statement can feel platitudinous, yet it expresses a defining feature of our contemporary world: an era shaped by digital technology, from smart phones and tablets to the consumer-facing internet. While the term ādigital ageā can obscure the variety of lived experience across different contexts, it also insists upon a horizon of change that exceeds immediate empirical observation. It implies a meta-process that will be difficult to characterise without oversimplifying the empirical complexity which ultimately defines it (Archer 2013). We can point to the rapid expansion of internet access across the global population, the diffusion of smart phones as primary devices, or the rise of social platforms that now dominate what āthe internetā means in everyday life. The danger in talking about a ādigital ageā is that it can obscure the fact that global internet access remains deeply uneven, with many still lacking reliable connectivity. The range of what āthe internetā means can too easily be subsumed into epochal generalisations about digital change. However, if we avoid terms like ādigital ageā we risk failing to grasp an emerging reality which surpasses any single trend. Once you insist on a certain degree of empirical robustness, it becomes difficult to keep hold of the meta-process.Ā
The starting point for this project is that such a meta-process is unfolding, which we urgently need to grasp but that doing so is an epistemically complex undertaking. These are not isolated or easily quantified phenomena, but rather a qualitative shift in the parameters of social life (Couldry 2020). There is a change in the texture of the social which is widely felt, yet difficult to pin down in a robust or comprehensive way. Nearly three decades ago, Castells (1996: 508) noted the āunseen logic of the meta-network where value is produced, cultural codes are created, and power is decideā, suggesting that this āincreasingly appears to people as meta-social disorderā. It is this āmetaā level that we evoke by talking about a ādigital ageā, imprecise as that term may be. Only at this higher level can we address how the āparameters of social life – of social interaction and even of socialisationā have begun to shift, rather than confining ourselves to discrete new forms of interaction (Couldry 2024: loc 1174). Otherwise we are left with āthe detection of empirical patternsā in which social transformation is inferred when a pattern is ābig and bold enoughā. These are by their nature perspectival claims, even when methodologically robust in their statistics, relying on āstrikingā observations which produce an intuitive sense of transformation in the analyst (Archer 2013:: loc 1232).
And this is the conclusion:
The problems with the detraditionalisation thesis arose from the grandiose poetics which left it captivated by its own pronouncements about epochal change. For this reason I believe we ought to as cautious as we can be about declaring an outcome to sociotechnical change, without dispensing with the recognition there will be an outcome. If anything the vast investment in LLMs and the data infrastructure which supports them, intersecting with a post-pandemic political economy which appears to be leaving neoliberalism behind, heralds an intensification of change rather than a diminution (Tooze 2021;, Varoufakis 2023). Itās possible this might be leading towards a perpetual polycrisis, a social order unable to stabilise itself amidst an accelerating climate catastrophe. But even this doom loop, suggested by Seymourās notion of disaster nationalism, represents a social order of sorts, even if itās an apocalyptic one.
It is difficult to incorporate this horizon of crisis into our frame of reference without subordinating our analysis of the interaction phase through which it is being generated. However by approaching platformisation through the concepts of psychobiography and personal morphogenesis, I have argued that we can avoid both grandiose (and premature) pronouncements about a ‘digital age’ and dismissive rejections of the reality of genuine change. The analysis Iāve offered of distracted people and fragile movements explores how platforms reconfigure rather than replace human agency. By examining how reflexivity operates within platformised contexts, tracing its biographical unfolding rather than proclaiming wholesale transformation, we gain a more textured understanding of contemporary social life. This has meant breaking with an account of agency premised, as Savage (2021: 191) puts it, āon this ontological temporal difference between past, enduring structures, and a contemporary contingent agency that breaks from themā. Unless we can surrender this baggage, we are left with a meta-process defined through the falling away of the past, operationalising ātraditionā as that which is experiencing a decline and thus squeezing out continuities through definitional fiat. The problem is not an epochal horizon, as much as ontological assumptions which lead to the epistemic mistakes of pronouncing epochal change in a grandiose and premature manner. A realist conception of the platform can acknowledge its emerging status as a condition of our social existence, while remaining clear that is we who must decide what to make of it.
Mark Carrigan 