A sociological agenda for the tech age
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A sociological agenda for the tech age John Torpey 1 # Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract This article outlines a sociological agenda for the era of “tech,” a period when digital technologies have come to dominate our social lives. It argues that we should break “tech” down into two parts, the production side and the consumption side. The production side concerns the ways in which these technologies are made, the social actors involved on the design, financing, and production side, and the consumption side refers to the ways in which ordinary users make use of these technologies and the ways in which their use is transforming everyday life. The article maintains that this is an area of research to which sociologists need to pay much greater attention if they are to understand the contemporary world satisfactorily. Keywords Algorithms . Attention economy . Basic income . Digital technologies . Gig work . Surveillance capitalism
Sociology has so far not yet had a great deal to say about the era of “tech” (formerly “high-tech”)—that is, of an age dominated by such “technoscientific” developments as robotics, artificial intelligence, machine learning, bioengineering, and the like. Perhaps in part this is a result of the age structure of the discipline, which does not lend itself to a high-profile focus by established scholars on the social impact of newfangled technologies that they don’t necessarily understand well. Younger people who grew up with these technologies and are presumably more familiar with them—so-called “digital natives,” although there is of course much variation in uptake even among them–are more likely to be engaged and comfortable with them than older digital nonnatives. Perhaps, however, the lack of attention is a product of doubts about the true nature and significance of the social transformation being ushered in by the new technologies: have we not seen this sort of thing before? Is it really such a big deal, given that capitalism has always fostered (and indeed depended on) technological change and “creative destruction”? Perhaps, finally, the reason is that technological
* John Torpey [email protected]
1
Graduate Center, CUNY, 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10016, USA
Theory and Society
development has never received a great deal of attention in the discipline, and the new technologies are thus thought to be nothing to get terribly excited about. Needless to say, these proclivities in the discipline do not position it well to respond to the tidal wave of social change currently underway as a result of recent technological developments. Harvard professor and former Forbes magazine writer Daniel Bell was a notable exception to this technological agnosticism. In the watershed year 1973, Bell wrote in The Coming of Post-Industrial Society about the massive shift that was already then underway in advanced economies from manufacturing to services, from factories to offices, from blue collars to white collars, from machine power to brain power, from the production of goods to the processing
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