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The Virtual Self: A Contemporary Sociology PDF

215 Pages·2003·1.151 MB·English
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The Virtual Self A Contemporary Sociology 21st-Century Sociology series editor:StevenSeidman,StateUniversityofNewYorkatAlbany The 21st-Century Sociology series provides instructors and students with keytextsinsociologythatspeakwithadistinctsociologicalvoiceandoffer thoughtfuland originalperspectives. Thetextsreflect currentdiscussions inandbeyondsociology,avoidingstandardtextbookdefinitionstoengage studentsincriticalthinkingandnewideas.Prominentscholarsinvarious fields of social inquiry combine theoretical perspectives with scholarly research to present accessible syntheses for students as we move into a new millennium withimplications for rapidsocialchange. Already published: 1 Cultural Theory:An Introduction,Philip Smith 2 Cultural Sociology in Practice,LauraDesfor Edles 3 Classical Social Theory:A Contemporary Approach, Kenneth H.Tucker, Jr. 4 Multiculturalism in a Global Society, Peter Kivisto 5 The World of Cities:Places in Comparative and Historical Perspective,Anthony M. Orum and Xiangming Chen 6 Encountering Nationalism, Jyoti Puri 7 The Virtual Self: A Contemporary Sociology,Ben Agger Forthcomingbooks inseries: New Technologies and Society,Douglas Kellner Race, Class, and Gender, Lynn Chancer and Beverly Watkins Queer Life, Amber Ault The Virtual Self A Contemporary Sociology Ben Agger (cid:1)2004byBenAgger 350MainStreet,Malden,MA02148-5020,USA 108CowleyRoad,OxfordOX41JF,UK 550SwanstonStreet,Carlton,Victoria3053,Australia TherightofBenAggertobeidentifiedastheAuthorofthisWorkhasbeenassertedin accordancewiththeUKCopyright,Designs,andPatentsAct1988. Allrightsreserved.Nopartofthispublicationmaybereproduced,storedinaretrieval system,ortransmitted,inanyformorbyanymeans,electronic,mechanical,photocopying, recordingorotherwise,exceptaspermittedbytheUKCopyright,Designs,andPatentsAct 1988,withoutthepriorpermissionofthepublisher. Firstpublished2004byBlackwellPublishingLtd LibraryofCongressCataloging-in-PublicationData Agger,Ben. Thevirtualself/byBenAgger. p.cm. Includesbibliographicalreferencesandindex. ISBN0-631-21648-0(hb.)–ISBN0-631-21649-9(pbk.) 1.Informationsociety.I.Title. HM851.A342003 303.48’33–dc21 2003009903 AcataloguerecordforthistitleisavailablefromtheBritishLibrary. Setin10on13pt Photina byKolamInformationServicesPvt.Ltd,Pondicherry,India PrintedandboundintheUnitedKingdom byMPGBooksLtd,Bodmin,Cornwall Forfurtherinformationon BlackwellPublishing,visitourwebsite: http://www.blackwellpublishing.com Contents Preface vi 1 Everyday Life inOur WiredWorld 1 2 Sociology’s Encyclopedia 42 3 DoesPostmodernism Make You Mad or Did You Flunk Statistics? A Chapteron Methodology 77 4 AdventuresinCapitalism 98 5 GirlTalk 124 6 Virtually, a Sociology! 145 Glossary 171 References 181 Index 187 Preface Perhapsmorethanany otherbook Ihavewritten, this essay on contem- porary sociology and society emerges from my teaching. I have lectured these ideas as I have tried to grapple with the impact of the Internet on society and culture. These are issues about which my students are more expert than Iam! Theyare the first generation ofvirtual selves. The Virtual Self is intended for use in sociology courses and in human- ities courses that makethematic issuesofself, theory, and culture.Virtu- ality,asIunderstandit,breaksdownbarriersbetweenselfandsocietyand betweendisciplines.Thishasanupsideandadownside:Institutionaland intellectual differentiation afford identity and stability; yet one increas- inglyrequiresinterdisciplinaryknowledgeinordertoaddresswhatHegel- ians used to call totality – a dirty word among postmodernists, unfortunately. In order to stay relevant, sociology needs to open its doors tointellectual influences beyond it. Increasingly, I find myself in disagreement with my colleagues about what constitutes sociology. They view it as a research method, a body of findings, grant proposals. I view sociology as the story of people’s lives, whosetellingcanbeliberating.Butitisnotsheerbiographyorautobiog- raphy; it is the conceptual work of connecting self and social structure imaginatively,understandingone’slifeintermsoflargersocialforcesthat do not fall from the sky but are continually constructed by people who work, interact, and produce discourse. An important component of dis- course today isInternetuse. I have Ken Provencher to thank for staying on my case. Blackwell is luckytohavehim.IamindebtedtoSteveSeidmanforinvitingmetojoin his Blackwell series on twenty-first-century sociology. Parts of an earlier Preface vii versionofthismanuscriptwerereadbyNormanDenzin,CharlesLemert, and Tim Luke. Anna Oxbury did a superb job ofcopy-editing. Myadorablechildren,OliverandSarah,aregreatkids.Ihavetoldthem andreadthempartsofthisbook,especiallythepartsinwhichIembarrass them.Littleismorefunthanreadingyourworktoyourkidsandhearing them groan! And Beth Anne not only plays tennis with me, but she discusses these ideas, and affords me a healthy perspective on things postmodern. B. A. C H A P T E R O N E Everyday Life in Our Wired World DoestheInternetrequirethatwerevisesociology’sandsocialtheory’scategor- ies?Haveweenteredpostmodernity?Thevirtualselfisconnectedtotheworld by information technologies that invade not only the home and office but the psyche.Thiscaneithertraporliberatepeople. This short book introduces sociology and our wired society and culture. It can be read as an introduction to the discipline, without all the facts andfigures ofthe 600-page intro books.Itcan also beread asan explor- ation of contemporary society. This society is like none before, and calls forthnewsociologicalcategories,suchasthevirtualself.By‘‘virtualself’’ Iamreferringtothepersonconnectedtotheworldandtoothersthrough electronicmeanssuchastheInternet,television,andcellphones.Virtuality istheexperienceofbeingonlineandusingcomputers;itisastateofbeing, referring to a particular way of experiencing and interacting with the world. (For a very optimistic account of the experience of virtuality see Nicholas Negroponte’s (1996)Being Digital.)Although I contendthat we areinastageofhistorycalled‘‘modernity,’’werequirepostmoderntheor- eticalcategoriesthathelpexplainhowourmediacultureandinformation technologies get inside our heads, position our bodies, and dictate our everyday lives, including working, parenting, schooling, traveling, shop- ping. This account will already sound like George Orwell’s (1981) dysto- piannovel1984inwhichBigBrothercontrolspeople’sthoughtsandthus lives.Butmineisnotatotallydismalstoryfornewinformationtechnolo- gies and our media culture afford unprecedented opportunities, largely literaryinnature,fortakingcontrolofourlives. 2 EverydayLifeinOurWiredWorld If you believe that sociology is, or should be, a science, you probably won’treadanyfurther.Truthinadvertising:Ibelievethatsociologymust give up its pretense to be a science, confessing that it is poetry or fiction, whichisnotacauseofshamebutofcelebration.Sociologyisbetterviewed as a writing style than a methodology or body of findings, as a way of arrangingcertainwordsandimagesonthepage(or,formostofus,screen). Itisawritingstylethatmakesarguments;assuch,itisrhetoric.Sociology grewoutofthenineteenth-centuryattemptbycertainclassicaltheoriststo conceptualize and then solve social problems of suffering, inequality, and alienation.Inthemeantime,sociologyhaslostitswayandlostitspublic,its readership of intelligent but not necessarily academic people who care deeply about the life and times of the self, society and culture. One of the plotlines inthestoryIamabout totellinvolveshowsociology became a profession, with its own discourse, credentials, status symbols, especially statistics and research methods. I want to de-professionalize sociology, enablingvirtualcitizenstoacquireandpromotesociologicalinsightusing theInternetastheirdatabaseandvehicleofpublication. These are the thoughts with which I begin almost every one of my classes. I decided to write this book because I wanted to summarize my ideas and make them available to students and their teachers. The series editor, Professor Steve Seidman, a noted sociological theorist at the State UniversityofNewYorkatAlbany,hadinvitedmetocontributeabookto his new series on sociology in the twenty-first century. I had already begun to think, write, and teach about the Internet’s impact on selves, especiallyasaparentofvirtualchildren!Asapersonwhodrinksdeeplyof critical theory, French postmodern theory, and the emerging inter- disciplinary project of cultural studies, I situated my thinking in these prior theoretical traditions. (For brief discussions of these perspectives, please consult the glossary.) There were already a number of excellent books on these issues, including Dyer-Witheford’s Cyber-Marx (1999), Poster’s What’s the Matter with the Internet? (2001), Luke’s Screens of Power (1989), Kellner’s Media Culture (1995) and Media Spectacle (2003), and Derrida’s Specters of Marx (1994). None of these books is standard sociological fare. All of them influenced my thoughts, which emerge in this book, on whether postmodern social changes such as the Internet require new social-science appraisals of capitalism, modernity, thefamily,popularculture.AsIseeit,littleismoreimportantandexciting than for sociologists to engage these issues as they demonstrate the relevance of our discipline for the lives of students and citizens, kids and their parents. EverydayLifeinOurWiredWorld 3 Tograpplewiththeseissues,sociologymustreachbeyonditstraditional disciplinaryboundariesforintellectualtoolswithwhichtotheorizetheself, society, and culture. This challenges traditional sociologists, those who write and adopt the typical introductory texts, who defend our discipline and its scientific method against interdisciplinary interlopers and foreign influences.AlthoughIdon’tbelievethattraditionalsociologypossessesthe theoreticalinsightsorconceptswithwhichtotheorizetheInternet,theself, andpostmodernity,thisbookisnotajeremiadagainstsociologysomuchas anargumentthatwecanfindgoodsociologyinsurprisingplaces,including the humanities and cultural disciplines. This book is a sociology, albeit one that broadens the discipline beyond its usual boundaries. I exercise selectivity where I don’t tackle issues mapped out by the long omnibus sociology texts, not because these issues aren’t important, but because Idon’twanttospendhundredsofpagesrehashingwhatotherintroductory booksdoquitewell.Mineisadifferentkindofsociology,onethataddresses virtual selves living inpostmodern worlds considerablydifferent from the worldsoftheirparentsortheirteachers. I have already used code words, such as postmodernism, that signal myapproachtosociology.Inwhatfollows,IdiscussMarxismandcritical theorymuchmorefrequentlythanIdiscussthelatesteditionofAmerican Sociological Review, which may contain empirical articles on income, family, religion, region. Terms such as postmodernism and Marxism risk becoming slogans that do our thinking for us, whether we love or hate thesetraditions.Iammuchlessinterestedinsloganeering(whatTheodor Adorno, one of my intellectual heroes, called ‘‘ticket thinking’’) than in tellingagoodstorythatprovidesthereaderwithcluesaboutwhatIread andconsidered informulating my arguments. TheolderIget, the moreI want to say things plainly, without artifice, and the less I care about hurting people’s feelings by saying what I really think about shibboleths –sacredwordsthatexciteemotions.TheolderIget,themoreIrealizethat thereisnosingle‘‘plainlanguage’’butonlyversionsthatcompeteforthe reader’s ear. For the record, I am not a postmodernist, although post- modern theory has much to say about our wired world. I am a Marxist, although I am closer to the interpretation of Marx offered by a group of theorists called western Marxists, including the Frankfurt School. People who have been exposed to these intellectual influences usually don’t essay sociology for student readers or the public, as I am doing here. But I feel it is important to speak openly about virtual selves and virtualsociology,andtobehonestaboutthelensesthroughwhichIview suchmatters.

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