Читать книгу Essential Concepts in Sociology - Anthony Giddens - Страница 8

As the examples above show, digitization facilitates a growing global connectivity that has transformed almost every aspect of life in most countries, raising serious questions as workplaces are transformed and workers see their jobs and roles digitally reshaped. Internet access has already become a necessity if people are to take advantage of the new opportunities it opens up. By 2019, some five and a half billion people had internet access, with the fastest growth rates since 2000 in Africa, the Middle East, Latin America, the Caribbean and Asia. As digitization has become embedded in social life, younger generations are the ‘digital natives’ socialized and comfortable in the era of the internet, robotics and AI.

Castells (2006, 2015) argues that we have created a networked, globalizing world which generates new forms of expression, sociability, cybercrimes, work, social movements and much more. Protests in Hong Kong in 2019 against legislative change and Extinction Rebellion’s 2019–20 direct actions on global warming made extensive use of social media, and reports of the protests were often live-streamed by activists themselves, illustrating Castells’s idea of ‘networked social movements’. Formerly discrete media forms have also become intertwined, in a merger process known as media convergence, with the internet at its centre. For instance, newspaper sales have declined, but news has moved online, while global video providers, such as Netflix, have transformed television watching with live-streaming and catch-up via smartphones and other devices.

For some, digitization also changes the character of capitalism and, with it, the world of work. A ‘gig economy’ has developed in which workers are treated as self-employed contractors, and firms operate as online platforms supplying ‘gigs’, absolving them of conventional employer responsibilities. Srnicek (2016) theorizes that we may be entering a period of ‘platform capitalism’ where data is the key resource for capitalist expansion – harvested, collated and used to improve services and products and to sell on at a profit. The danger is that this results in the erosion of privacy and confidentiality as the public–private boundary is further eroded. Zuboff (2019) theorizes the situation as one of ‘surveillance capitalism’, in which the enormous promise of the digital revolution is being lost to corporate interests. Surveillance capitalists exploit devices such as the Amazon Alexa, smart thermostats, speakers, routers and even home security devices, collecting data for analysis, predictions of consumer behaviour and, thus, increased sales. Indeed, intensified surveillance is a key theme in many studies of the digital age.