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We are inclined to assume that digital technologies have suddenly revolutionized everything – including our relationships, our forms of work and leisure, and even our democracies – in just a few years. Armin Nassehi puts forward a new theory of digital society that turns this assumption on its head. Rather than treating digital technologies as an independent causal force that is transforming social life, he asks: what problem does digitalization solve? When we pose the question in this way, we can see, argues Nassehi, that digitalization helps societies to deal with and reduce complexity by using coded numbers to process information. We can also see that modern societies had a digital structure long before computer technologies were developed – already in the nineteenth century, for example, statistical pattern recognition technologies were being used in functionally differentiated societies in order to recognize, monitor and control forms of human behaviour. Digital technologies were so successful in such a short period of time and were able to penetrate so many areas of society so quickly precisely because of a pre-existing sensitivity that prepared modern societies for digital development. This highly original book lays the foundations for a theory of the digital society that will be of value to everyone interested in the growing presence of digital technologies in our lives.

Sociology: A Brief Introduction connects essential sociological theories, research, and concepts to students'daily experiences. The program highlights the distinctive ways in which sociologists explore human social behavior—and how their research findings can be used to help students think critically about the broader principles that guide their lives. In doing so, it helps students begin to think sociologically, using what they have learned to evaluate human interactions and institutions independently. With up-to-date scholarship, examples, and photos, Dr. Schaefer's market-leading, student-friendly program features thorough integration of the latest research on race, ethnicity, and globalization.

The first major study of how the pandemic affected gig workers—a sociological exploration that reads like a novel. This is the story of what the most vulnerable wage earners—gig workers, restaurant staff, early-career creatives, and minimum-wage laborers—do when the economy suddenly collapses. In Side Hustle Safety Net, Alexandrea J. Ravenelle builds on interviews with nearly two hundred gig-based and precarious workers, conducted during the height of the pandemic, to uncover the unique challenges they faced in unprecedented times. This book looks at both the officially unemployed and the “forgotten jobless”—a digital-era demographic that turned to side hustles—and reveals how they fared. CARES Act assistance allowed some to change careers, start businesses, perhaps transform their lives. However, gig workers and those involved in “polyemployment” found themselves at the mercy of outdated unemployment systems, vulnerable to scams, and attempting dubious survival strategies. Ultimately, Side Hustle Safety Net argues that the rise of the gig economy, partnered with underemployment and economic instability, has increased worker precarity with disastrous consequences.

Das Buch hinterfragt die vermeintliche visuelle Evidenz von Kategorien menschlicher Ähnlichkeit und Differenz. Es bezieht Erkenntnisse aus den Sozial- und Kognitionswissenschaften sowie der Psychologie und Philosophie ein, um zu erklären, wie wir physische Unterschiede visuell wahrnehmen und zeigt, dass Wahrnehmung sowohl fehlbar als auch prozesshaft ist. Dazu bringen die Autorinnen Studien zur visuellen Kultur und künstlerische Forschung mit Ansätzen wie Gender, Queer und Trans Studies sowie postkolonialer Theorie miteinander ins Gespräch, um vereinfachte Vorstellungen von Identitätspolitik und kultureller Repräsentation zu verkomplizieren. Das Buch schlägt andere Sichtweisen auf Intersektionalität vor, um die Vorherrschaft von Kategorien der vermeintlich sichtbaren Differenz wie race und Geschlecht als analytische Kategorien infrage zu stellen.

A fascinating exploration of the social meaning of digital deathFrom blogs written by terminally ill authors to online notes left by those considering suicide, technology has become a medium for the dead and the dying to cope with the anxiety of death. Services like artificial intelligence chatbots, mind-uploading, and postmortem blog posts offer individuals the ability to cultivate their legacies in a bid for digital immortality. The Digital Departed explores the posthumous internet world from the perspective of both the living and the dead.Timothy Recuber traces how communication beyond death evolved over time. Historically, the methods of mourning have been characterized by unequal access to power and privilege. However, the internet offers more agency to the dead, allowing users accessibility and creativity in curating how they want to be remembered.Based on hundreds of blog posts, suicide notes, Twitter hashtags, and videos, Recuber examines the ways we die online, and the digital texts we leave behind. Combining these data with interviews, surveys, analysis of news coverage, and a historical overview of the relationship between death and communication technology going back to pre-history, The Digital Departed explains what it means to live and die on the internet today. In this thought-provoking and uniquely troubling work, Recuber shows that although we might pass away, our digital souls live on, online, in a kind of purgatory of their own.

Sociology in Modules takes a traditional approach to Introduction to Sociology—while presenting material in a flexible way that allows instructors to select and organize reading assignments in the best order for their course. When paired with Connect instructors are able to engage students in the content and encourage them to develop and apply their sociological imagination.

This unique Handbook charts shifts in the relationship between risks and inequalities over the last few decades, analysing how inequalities shape risk and how risks condition and intensify inequalities. Expert contributors examine the impacts of environmental, financial, social, urban, economic, and digital risks on inequalities, at both national and global levels.Identifying how the rise of novel risk formations is associated with changes in contemporary political economies, chapters explore new areas of research including the new urban crisis, the gendered impacts of precarious labour and social inequality in relation to agro-biotechnology. Contributing to an underdeveloped area of research, the Handbook breaks new ground to explore how tackling important issues via the prism of risk and inequality can provide novel insights, that solely focusing on only one or the other of these issues cannot.This Handbook will be critical reading for scholars and students of sociology, sociological theory, geography and political science. Its exploration of shifts in contemporary socially produced risks will also be beneficial for practitioners, economists and policy makers in these areas.

Revisualising Intersectionality offers transdisciplinary interrogations of the supposed visual evidentiality of categories of human similarity and difference. This open-access book incorporates insights from social and cognitive science as well as psychology and philosophy to explain how we visually perceive physical differences and how cognition is fallible, processual, and dependent on who is looking in a specific context. Revisualising Intersectionality also puts into conversation visual culture studies and artistic research with approaches such as gender, queer, and trans studies as well as postcolonial and decolonial theory to complicate simplified notions of identity politics and cultural representation. The book proposes a revision of intersectionality research to challenge the predominance of categories of visible difference such as race and gender as analytical lenses.

Race, Ethnicity, and Consumption: A Sociological View looks at the central concerns of consumer culture through the lens of race and ethnicity. Each chapter illustrates the connections between race, ethnicity, and consumption by focusing on a specific theme: identity, crossing cultures, marketing and advertising, neighborhoods, discrimination, and social activism. By exploring issues such as multicultural marketing, cultural appropriation, consumer racial profiling, urban food deserts, and racialized political consumerism, students, scholars, and other curious readers will gain insight on the ways that racial and ethnic boundaries shape, and are shaped by, consumption. This book goes beyond the typical treatments of race and ethnicity in introductory texts on consumption by not only providing a comprehensive overview of the major theories and concepts that sociologists use to make sense of consumption, race, and ethnicity, but also by examining these themes within distinctly contemporary contexts such as digital platforms and activism. Documenting the complexities and contradictions within consumer culture, Race, Ethnicity, and Consumption is an excellent text for sociology courses on consumers and consumption, race and ethnicity, the economy, and inequality. It will also be an informative resource for courses on consumer culture in the broader social sciences, marketing, and the humanities.

Sociology: A Brief Introduction invites students to take sociology with them in their daily lives. This successful student-friendly program includes strong coverage of race, ethnicity, and globalization. The approachable material encourages students to develop their sociological imaginations and start to think like a sociologist. Paired with McGraw Hill Connect®, a personal and adaptive learning experience, students learn to apply sociology's three theoretical frameworks to the world around them.

The Me Too movement, started by Black feminist Tarana Burke in 2006, went viral as a hashtag eleven years later after a tweet by white actor Alyssa Milano. Mainstream movements like #MeToo have often built on and co-opted the work of women of colour, while refusing to learn from them or centre their concerns. Far too often, the message is not ‘Me, Too'but ‘Me, Not You'. Alison Phipps argues that this is not just a lack of solidarity. Privileged white women also sacrifice more marginalised people to achieve their aims, or even define them as enemies when they get in the way.Me, not you argues that the mainstream movement against sexual violence expresses a political whiteness that both reflects its demographics and limits its revolutionary potential. Privileged white women use their traumatic experiences to create media outrage, while relying on state power and bureaucracy to purge ‘bad men'from elite institutions with little concern for where they might appear next. In their attacks on sex workers and trans people, the more reactionary branches of this feminist movement play into the hands of the resurgent far-right.

ARMIN NASSEHIS RADIKALE THEORIE DER DIGITALE GESELLSCHAFTWir glauben, der Siegeszug der digitalen Technik habe innerhalb weniger Jahre alles revolutioniert: unsere Beziehungen, unsere Arbeit und sogar die Funktionsweise demokratischer Wahlen. In seiner neuen Gesellschaftstheorie dreht der Soziologe Armin Nassehi den Spieß um und zeigt jenseits von Panik und Verharmlosung, dass die Digitalisierung nur eine besonders ausgefeilte technische Lösung für ein Problem ist, das sich in modernen Gesellschaften seit jeher stellt: Wie geht die Gesellschaft, wie gehen Unternehmen, Staaten, Verwaltungen, Strafverfolgungsbehörden, aber auch wir selbst mit unsichtbaren Mustern um? Schon seit dem 19. Jahrhundert werden in funktional ausdifferenzierten Gesellschaften statistische Mustererkennungstechnologien angewandt, um menschliche Verhaltensweisen zu erkennen, zu regulieren und zu kontrollieren. Oft genug wird die Digitalisierung unserer Lebenswelt heutzutage als Störung erlebt, als Herausforderung und als Infragestellung von gewohnten Routinen. Im vorliegenden Buch unternimmt Armin Nassehi den Versuch, die Digitaltechnik in der Struktur der modernen Gesellschaft selbst zu fundieren. Er entwickelt die These, dass bestimmte gesellschaftliche Regelmäßigkeiten, Strukturen und Muster das Material bilden, aus dem die Digitalisierung erst ihr ökonomisches, politisches und wissenschaftliches Kontroll- und Steuerungspotential schöpft. Infolge der Digitalisierung wird die Gesellschaft heute also regelrecht neu entdeckt. Der Bestseller als Taschenbuch Einer der bekanntesten deutschen Soziologen legt seine Gesellschaftstheorie vor Eine völlig neue, unerwartete Perspektive auf die Digitalisierung

This is the first book to connect digital media technologies in digital sociology to traditional sociological and offers a much needed overview of it. It includes problems of the digital age in relation to inequality and identity, making it suitable for use for a global audience on a variety of courses.